ABSTRACT This article explores how local narratives of depression in Seattle are a form of affective mapping that provide a vernacular theory of neoliberal transformation in the city. Seattle depression narratives allegorized a structure of feeling characterizing racially‐inflected capitalist transformations and the recomposition of racial subjectivity, entitlements, and expectations of whiteness under postwar racial capitalism. I address three key depressive plots I discovered during fieldwork, including tales of authentic local character, anxieties regarding a “Suicide Bridge,” and intensified vigilance regarding youthful depression in order to demonstrate how, despite differences, these stories converged in addressing the disturbance of racialized spaces and identities by forms of neoliberal abandonment. I show how depression managed and naturalized downward mobility, disrupted life‐trajectories, new disciplines of workplace intensification and labor insecurity, and a generalized scarcity and withdrawal of middle‐class futurity and the postwar social compact. While depression narratives tracked the affects of neoliberalism, its critical thrust was limited or contained by the tacit ableist assumptions and a melancholic attachment to a possessive investment in postwar whiteness. As such, I suggest that depression is an inadequate concept for our contemporary conjuncture and ongoing mental health crisis, one that naturalizes and obscures both the racial and neoliberal assumptions animating current understandings of mental health and well‐being.
ABSTRACT In New York City, the lack of affordable housing opportunities is frequently described by politicians and other institutional leaders as an affordable housing crisis, and they claim that simply building more housing units will remedy the crisis. However, using the Morningside Heights neighborhood and Columbia University as a case‐study, I argue that the affordable housing crisis is built upon decades of disinvestment in predominantly lower‐income Black and Latinx communities and ongoing land grabbing practices while denying the public housing services allegedly available to them. Instead of focusing on the lack of housing, this paper argues that there should be a greater focus placed upon the real estate practices of powerful anchor institutions such as universities, as well as state and city governments, that intentionally withhold resources to house people while continuing to promote land grabbing practices under the guise of serving the public interest. I show how urban housing is treated as a tool of control over people's use of space through its commodification and hyper securitization. I find that public‐private partnerships between university and city leaders reduce housing stock to raw material in order to reproduce certain kinds of racialized and classed workers into the urban environment while naturalizing the negative effects of such practices on lower income households as a crisis. I conclude that the result is a revamping of racialized and classed geographies whereby city land is continually repurposed as an exclusive product for the benefit of predominantly wealthy, white young people.
ABSTRACT This paper examines the escalating entanglement between American universities and what the authors term the tech‐industrial complex—a political‐economic nexus linking the state and private technology industries through infrastructures of data, surveillance, and digital governance. Building upon historical precedents from McCarthyism and COINTELPRO to the Trump administrations, the paper argues that contemporary academic repression differs from earlier eras not merely in ideology but in infrastructure: a digital ecosystem of participatory surveillance, anticipatory obedience, and neoliberal efficiency. Using case studies from recent U.S. higher education—including institutional compliance with federal executive orders, social media surveillance, and the rise of platforms such as Indiana's Eyes on Education portal—the authors trace how universities have become both subjects and agents of this expanding technopolitical order. The analysis situates this development within a broader genealogy of American state power, neoliberalism, and digital capitalism, highlighting the complicity of academic institutions in sustaining systems of control. In response, the authors advocate for renewed anthropological and humanistic engagement that resists resignation, promotes open access, and reclaims critical inquiry within and beyond the academy. Ultimately, the paper contends that understanding and contesting the tech‐industrial complex is essential for reimagining intellectual labor and sustaining democratic life in an age of pervasive digital surveillance.
This article investigates the operations of United States immigration courts ethnographically, examining how law, politics, and bureaucracy converge in the everyday production of immigration adjudication. Based on over 500 h of observation in 36 courtrooms across 11 immigration courts, we document how life‐altering deportation decisions—often in absentia and lasting only minutes—are rendered through routinized procedures that obscure judicial ambivalence, the politicization of immigration, and bureaucratic pressures. While legal scholarship has emphasized patterns in judicial outcomes, and anthropology has traced how law shapes immigrants' lives beyond the courtroom, few studies ethnographically analyze the affective arrangements inside immigration court. We develop a novel, multi‐sited methodology by mobilizing a national network of undergraduate students trained and supervised by faculty to conduct ethnographic court‐watching. This approach produces rich qualitative data on tone, demeanor, and “off‐the‐record” exchanges, while also democratizing research through pedagogical innovation. We argue that immigration courts are best understood not only as legal institutions but as affective arrangements: spaces where judges, attorneys, clerks, interpreters, federal agents, and respondents are entangled in performances of authority, credibility, and fairness under conditions of bureaucratic and political constraint. We conclude by reflecting on the risks of conducting ethnography under escalating authoritarianism. Surveillance, suppression of dissent, and the targeting of students and scholars render research itself precarious. What does it mean to observe and analyze courts when the very act of knowledge production is marked with vulnerability and threat?
ABSTRACT When operating under the authoritarian gaze, the relationship between ethnographers and their collaborators becomes a profound partnership underpinned by care. In this article, I analyze three in‐depth interviews to examine how collaborators develop and utilize subversive strategies of care embedded in feminist ethics to secure their survival and that of their research community partners under the Daniel Ortega‐Rosario Murillo dictatorship in Nicaragua. I argue that under a regime of political violence, care becomes a central tenet for ethnographic relationships. This form of care becomes an essential strategy and an ethic for survival that both enables research to exist and redefines the nature of collaborative research. The acts of care that emerge from the collaborators' narratives detail a form of resistance that challenges authoritarian control and reframes the ethnographic process as one concerned with safety and protection. This article's primary contribution lies in establishing care as a foundational methodological framework for ethnographers—care provides a critical entry point for reimagining methodological and collaborative engagements, centering the imperatives of mutual safety and survival. Under authoritarianism in Nicaragua, acts of care have become an ethical and subversive necessity used by collaborators and researchers as they pursue survival, research, and the dissemination of knowledge. The current rise of authoritarianism in the United States hauntingly mirrors the political context in Nicaragua, particularly since 2018. As a result, anthropologists working with populations currently under threat in the United States can learn valuable lessons from the strategies of care that have been deployed in Nicaragua to navigate political repression.
This article investigates the operations of United States immigration courts ethnographically, examining how law, politics, and bureaucracy converge in the everyday production of immigration adjudication. Based on over 500 h of observation in 36 courtrooms across 11 immigration courts, we document how life-altering deportation decisions—often in absentia and lasting only minutes—are rendered through routinized procedures that obscure judicial ambivalence, the politicization of immigration, and bureaucratic pressures. While legal scholarship has emphasized patterns in judicial outcomes, and anthropology has traced how law shapes immigrants' lives beyond the courtroom, few studies ethnographically analyze the affective arrangements inside immigration court. We develop a novel, multi-sited methodology by mobilizing a national network of undergraduate students trained and supervised by faculty to conduct ethnographic court-watching. This approach produces rich qualitative data on tone, demeanor, and “off-the-record” exchanges, while also democratizing research through pedagogical innovation. We argue that immigration courts are best understood not only as legal institutions but as affective arrangements: spaces where judges, attorneys, clerks, interpreters, federal agents, and respondents are entangled in performances of authority, credibility, and fairness under conditions of bureaucratic and political constraint. We conclude by reflecting on the risks of conducting ethnography under escalating authoritarianism. Surveillance, suppression of dissent, and the targeting of students and scholars render research itself precarious. What does it mean to observe and analyze courts when the very act of knowledge production is marked with vulnerability and threat?
Boxing styles typify interrelated sets of fighting techniques and combative characters. Because boxers acquire a style through bodily practice and styles in the United States are often tied to racialized social groups, an ethnography of the acquisition of boxing styles presents an opportunity to examine how youth, in conjunction with other social actors in the boxing world, reorient their bodies within racial imaginaries. Bridging experiential and psychoanalytic approaches, this framework sheds light on the intersectional nature of race, gender, nationality, class, and other embodied social differences. Theorizing bodily reorientations within racial imaginaries invites us to reconsider the relationship between embodied difference, culture, and race. More than a social construct, racial experience can be a meaningful source for people to reimagine themselves in constructive ways against societies where racialized bodies are stigmatized and devalued.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, white rural Americans have suffered multiple forms of loss. Cycles of economic decline, population loss, and out-migration on one side, and in-migration, gentrification, and development on the other, have transformed the cultural, economic, and political landscapes of many rural communities. Amid this context, Evangelical Christian churches, especially non-denominational and charismatic congregations, have emerged as critical meaning-making institutions, enabling congregants to lament these grievances, interpret their losses, and envision an alternative future beyond governmental reach. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research conducted across Oregon between 2020–2022, this article underscores how the COVID-19 pandemic inflamed feelings of loss and dispossession among white rural communities in the United States. Due to the perception of heightened governmental incursion through public health mandates, the pandemic hardened an already embedded “us” vs. “them” mentality among white rural populations in Oregon, whereby long-time white residents perceived governmental and public health officials as menacing outsiders aiming to eliminate their autonomy and self-determination. This environment of simmering distrust cemented the entrenched role of Evangelical Christianity as the medium through which residents simultaneously expressed their sense of governmental betrayal and advanced an alternative Christian-based vision of health, authority, knowledge, and the future.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, white rural Americans have suffered multiple forms of loss. Cycles of economic decline, population loss, and out‐migration on one side, and in‐migration, gentrification, and development on the other, have transformed the cultural, economic, and political landscapes of many rural communities. Amid this context, Evangelical Christian churches, especially non‐denominational and charismatic congregations, have emerged as critical meaning‐making institutions, enabling congregants to lament these grievances, interpret their losses, and envision an alternative future beyond governmental reach. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research conducted across Oregon between 2020–2022, this article underscores how the COVID‐19 pandemic inflamed feelings of loss and dispossession among white rural communities in the United States. Due to the perception of heightened governmental incursion through public health mandates, the pandemic hardened an already embedded “us” vs. “them” mentality among white rural populations in Oregon, whereby long‐time white residents perceived governmental and public health officials as menacing outsiders aiming to eliminate their autonomy and self‐determination. This environment of simmering distrust cemented the entrenched role of Evangelical Christianity as the medium through which residents simultaneously expressed their sense of governmental betrayal and advanced an alternative Christian‐based vision of health, authority, knowledge, and the future.
In the coalfields of Appalachia, coal production and employment have steadily decreased over the last two decades, yet political discussions in every recent election cycle continue to focus on coal or fossil fuels as the answer to the region's economic woes. Based on 18 months of fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013, I investigate the ways that coalfield residents experienced the intersections of political discourse with everyday material realities. Following David Ruccio's concept of everyday economic representations, I explore the ways residents directly and indirectly contest the dominant narratives in electoral politics that suggest coal is the only means to fix the depressed coalfield economy. I further argue that votes cast in each election cycle do not provide an adequate picture of the region or the reasons people go, or do not go, to the polls at all. I finally offer some insights into more recent election cycles and the economic futures of the coalfields as residents creatively work toward a just transition.
This article examines the symbol placed on a US spy satellite, National Reconnaissance Office Launch–39 (NROL‐39). In 2013, NROL‐39 was launched into space, the payload vehicle and mission patch emblazoned with a gigantic octopus, its tentacles surrounding the globe, and the words “Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach” written below the globe. Spy satellites are not new, but what is new here is the explicit use of a known symbol of threat and domination by a United States intelligence agency and the stories it crafts around fear and domination. NROL‐39 is an insight into how a US intelligence organization pictures itself, its role, and its targets. NROL‐39 gives us a glimpse behind the mask of the security state and what this tells us about the worldview and political imaginaries of the people behind it. The use of a symbol traditionally associated with political repression and threat gives us insight into how security officials think about satellites, intelligence collection, security, domination, and enemies. It is an opening into the militarized imaginary of satellite intelligence, technological capabilities, propaganda and psychological operations, and the further militarization and politicization of space.
A small elite liberal arts college in the northeastern United States provides a context for the promotion and proliferation of a discourse of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article considers projects emergent from a summer research fellowship offered to groups of faculty members and students. We compare the ways in which the group of students led by us and the group of students led by another set of faculty developed questions and explored aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We show that the other group began their efforts by foregrounding work on the production of inequality but ended up with a rather neoliberal subjectivity focused on the exploration of the self and one's feelings. Our group managed to avoid such an outcome, but, unlike the other group, our work got passed over for promotion on the College's website. Our insights seek to provide a context for the transformation of calls to “do something” in the academic institution in which we work into depoliticized representations of difference ripe for institutional display and promotion.
This project is a rehearsal in language and its capacity to refuse comprehensibility. In this experimental process, we will be exploring the boundaries of legibility through a tracing of the shards and fragments embodied in the minor detail. With our sight fixed toward Palestine, we will explore how detail holds radical potential, be it in classical texts in the canon of Palestinian literature, or in the oral testimonies that have emerged from Gaza over the past 6 months. The focus on illegibility and language that defies comprehension exists in the shadow of genocide, where language fails to capture the immensity of the moment. Broken and sharp, it turns inward into a sense closer to emotion than to logic. In that sense, this project is also a rehearsal in utilizing language as matter, as material, as tangible touch.
