Modi, Trump, Bolsonaro: three avatars of a moment marked by the rise of a far-right populism, what many commentators have even described as a revitalized fascism. As I watched the courage of protestors who rallied against the racist Citizenship Amendment Act in India, and the sycophancy of elected officials in the United States who failed to remove a racist president …
Tag Archives: Politics
Book Forum: Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay
Introduction
Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (2018) is a masterful undertaking on the anthropology of disaster and its everydayness. An ethnographic portrayal that is prismatic in its attention, the book combines numerous elements––place, civic performance, history, political economy––to bear on the lead poisoning epidemic in Montevideo, Uruguay at the turn of the 21st…
Book Forum: Saida Hodžić’s The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life After NGOs
This article is part of the series: Book forum
Saida Hodžić’s The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs (University of California Press, 2017) illuminates the myriad state and non-state actors collaborating on campaigns against “Female Genital Mutilation” (FGM) in Ghana, where genital cutting was already on the decline. From a uniquely multi-scalar perspective, Hodžić reveals how cutting emerged as a problem to be shared by African …
Integration
This article is part of the series: Disability from the South: Toward a Lexicon
In one of several letters he wrote to me during my fieldwork, Serge addressed what he considered to be the problems of integration for disabled people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Writing this letter in November 2013, he reflected on the upcoming International Day of Persons with Disabilities on the 3rdof December. “Across the world,” he wrote, …
Web Roundup: Who Counts? Who’s Counting?
In March 2018, the Pew Research Center reported that the Justice department intended to include a new citizenship question on the 2020 US Census. This past November, a New York court took on the legality of the citizenship question following a suit by a number of plaintiffs, including 18 states. Plaintiffs argued that asking “are you a citizen?” would …
Melinda Cooper’s Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
MIT Press, 2017, 416 pages.
Neoliberal policy in the United States sometimes seems internally contradictory. Why oppose the estate tax if you support a meritocracy based on how the market values individuals? Why oppose universal health coverage or public education if you want everyone to have an equal …