Abstract This paper reflects on the methodological and political implications of conducting ethnographic research on vulvar pain as a pain-free, heterosexual woman, mother and medical anthropologist. Based on a qualitative study in Italy, it explores how reflexivity, privilege, and parenting intersect with the research process, shaping not only interactions with participants, but also the design of educational workshops and public engagement projects. By unfolding the blurred boundaries between fieldwork, dissemination, and activism, the paper argues that cultural paucity around vulvar pain reinforces stigma and health inequalities. Challenging binary notions such as insider/outsider and neutral/militant, it proposes an embodied and co-constructed ethnographic practice that centers care, political responsibility, and health justice. Anthropology, here, is positioned as a tool not only for analysis but also for transformation, especially when working with silenced suffering and invisible bodies.
Abstract The essay reflects on militancy as an ethnographic and relational anthropological dispositif. It explores the connection between the processual and relational character of anthropological knowledge production, ethnographic positioning and the researcher’s status with the aim of understanding the consequences of militancy for anthropological work. The nexus of militancy and research is at the center of extensive debate in anthropology. In most cases, however, militancy is investigated as an individual or collective identity, a closed category, or a self-declared attribute on the part of the researcher. Through the analysis of two ethnographic experiences in which I was (or was not) attributed the role of militant researcher and the consequences this had on positioning, constructing the research field, producing knowledge and public engagement, this paper sustains that militancy is, most of all, a relationship.
Abstract This article examines the ethical and methodological tensions of militant research in forced displacement studies, focusing on how scholarly work navigates complicity, public engagement, and institutional constraint. Drawing on research and creative collaborations in Northern Ireland, Turkey, Ireland, and Australia, it explores how militancy is shaped unevenly across political and institutional contexts, and how it is mediated through policy work, impact agendas, and public-facing scholarship. Rather than treating complicity as a moral failure, the article approaches it as a structural condition of working within neoliberal academic institutions that both enable and constrain critical inquiry. Through reflections on policy ethnography, creative practice, and activist collaboration, it argues for remaining within the “grey” spaces of research where activism and scholarship intersect without resolution. Attending to failure, opacity, and endurance as methodological resources, the article suggests that militant research is less a stable position than an ongoing practice of negotiation, refusal, and fugitivity. In doing so, it contributes to debates in public anthropology by foregrounding the limits of impact, the politics of visibility, and the ethical labour of staying with contradiction.
Abstract This paper explores ethnographic research conducted from within transnational activist networks linking European radical left collectives and Zapatista communities in Chiapas, examining how political commitment reshapes researcher positioning and redefines the conditions of public engagement. Militant ethnography, which encourages active involvement in the movements being studied, strives to challenge the traditional divide between scholar and activist, advocating for immersive, collaborative research. Through direct participation in initiatives and actions, this approach provides access to insider knowledge and helps co-produce understandings of how activists conceptualize and enact global solidarity. However, militant ethnography also entails crucial ethical and methodological challenges. Building on multiple fieldwork experiences in Europe and Chiapas conducted between 2015 and 2025, this paper critically examines the interactions between personal militancy and scholarly positioning, addressing how these dynamics simultaneously enrich and complicate the research process. Contrary to the recurrent suspicion that active involvement compromises scientific rigor, being embedded in political struggle often intensifies rather than undermining the possibilities for critique, exposing researchers to demanding and fragile relational balances. In contexts where ideological commitment is constitutive, militant ethnography does not claim to reconcile nor to resolve the tensions it inhabits. It renders them analytically productive, making visible how contested and uneven experiences of dissent are articulated across both activist and academic fields. Without presuming coherence or transformative effects, the paper shows how such immersion can instead reconfigure the conditions and stakes under which reflexivity is produced.
Abstract The essay explores the experiences of direct engagement with the demands of the Mebengokré people in the Amazon rainforest and their potential to shape academic practices. For nearly a decade, the Mebengokré have been confronting the socioenvironmental impacts of the construction of the Belo Monte hydro dam on their land, explicitly urging anthropologists and other academics to develop collaborative research initiatives to support their struggles. These include publishing papers, carrying out research projects, and co-curating exhibitions. This paper investigates how engaging with the Mebengokré’s demands and epistemologies affects the creation and dissemination of anthropological knowledge and the researcher’s positionality. Moreover, it proposes that even when anthropologists engage politically with their interlocutors over an extended period, the growing emergence of claims for connections between epistemologies and politics, as expressed by the Indigenous people in the Amazon, challenges existing models of academic production.
Following normalization with Israel, an increasing number of academic institutions and civil society organizations in Morocco have adopted a neoliberal approach to pluralism that divorces research and related projects on Moroccan multicultural history, particularly Jewish and Amazigh topics, from an anti-colonial praxis. Since October 2023, silence from these groups on Palestine demonstrates that much work on cultural patrimony in Morocco conflates Zionism with neoliberal multiculturalism against Palestinian human rights. Simultaneously, Moroccan civil society has repeatedly demonstrated solidarity with Palestine through demonstrations and projects like bds Maroc, despite continued censorship. Contrary to the current landscape, post-independence Morocco was characterized by Jewish and Amazigh heritage movements in solidarity with Palestine, a legacy that has been overshadowed recently to justify normalization. As doctoral students and having worked on heritage preservation in Morocco, we believe that speaking up against the ongoing Nakba is imperative for collective liberation and to protect pluralistic Morocco from Zionist cooptation.
This article critically examines the portrayal of Arabs, particularly Palestinians, in German media and public discourse. It highlights the complicity of German media and the failure of Middle East studies in Germany to take a critical position amidst Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It discusses how Germany’s pro-Israeli policies and public positioning lead to the direct exclusion of Arabs and their histories and experiences from society. The article reflects on my own experience as an Arab-German, having grown up as a refugee from Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. It discusses the “toleration” ( Duldung ) status imposed on many Palestinians and Lebanese who arrived in Germany in the 1980s, exacerbating their marginalization. It addresses how Germany’s criminalization of protests and support for Israel’s crimes deepens Arab alienation. It furthermore reflects on my role as a scholar working on the Middle East and the moral obligation to speak out despite the lack of institutional support.
The European Association of Social Anthropologists was the first anthropological association to speak out against the genocide taking place in Gaza. On the 25th of October 2023, the Executive Committee published a statement unequivocally condemning the violence perpetrated by the state of Israel against Gazans. Following the publication of the statement, easa received a number of reactions, both positive and negative. In this text, I reflect on what the statement and some of the negative reactions to it revealed about empire anthropology within the context of the association. I dwell on one reaction, formulated by a group of former members of easa ’s past executive committees, which stated that easa should not express political stances, and conceptualize it as a form of empire anthropology. I explore what is at stake (and for whom) in speaking out and conclude with a reflection on the kinds of public anthropology that can emerge from the current moment.
In November 2020, as part of Operation Luxor, the home of Austrian Islamophobia scholar Farid Hafez was raided. In December 2023, I was made to withdraw from an almost-complete hiring process at the University of Vienna due to implicit antisemitism accusations. This article compares the two cases to highlight Austria’s uneven landscapes of censorship. In the German-speaking world and beyond, equalizing “anti-racism” or “anti-discrimination” frameworks can obscure crucial power differentials. Whereas an incitement to discourse propels forward antisemitism accusations (especially since October 7), mechanisms of silencing and repression constrain talk of Islamophobia. Simply put, one can easily lose one’s job over accusations of antisemitism but is far less likely to lose one’s job over the accusation of being Islamophobic. What is parallel to antisemitism and fought with equal vigor (and with equal or even more state and institutional support) is not Islamophobia but “Islamism.”
In this essay, I offer close readings of the film shorts in two critically acclaimed film anthologies: 11”09’01 , alternatively titled September 11 , (2003) and From Ground Zero (2025). I argue that these two omnibus films can be understood as visual anthropology texts. Both films demonstrate the power of ruptured cinema and experimental film techniques to represent political violence and trauma. By drawing on visual and sound techniques that condense and expand time and space, including the use of found footage and audio, these films depart from familiar memorialization narratives and visibility traps; they marshal experimental techniques in ways that are politically instructive and pedagogically useful. I also situate the film shorts in terms of a particular decolonial tradition of Palestinian found footage films that film scholar Samirah Alkassim describes as counter-ethnography.
In reflecting on what anthropologists can contribute to public education about the genocide in Gaza, the co-editors of this special issue recognize the limitations of our tools (facts, words, narratives), audiences (students and teachers of a humanities discipline), and impacts. But, along with the contributors to this issue, we assert the importance of continuing our efforts to witness and denounce, to analyze and explain, to encourage boycott and to unionize. Bringing together people from across lines of difference and ignorance into shared refusal of human destruction is a moral act in these immoral times. It is an act of solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians, and with each other, a means to enhancing our efforts at building a more just world, because none of us is free until Palestinians are free.
This article examines the emic comparisons drawn by Syrian revolutionaries with Palestinians and the situation of oppression and destruction in their own country, particularly with reference to Gaza. It describes the central place of Palestine in my Syrian interlocutors’ framing of becoming revolutionaries, and the forms of solidarity that developed in their praxis before, during and after the 2011 revolution. It thus aims to present a counter-history of the logics of political solidarity in the region, and to bring to the fore some erased and un -visible subjects: Syrian revolutionaries who support Gaza and Palestine while opposing the Assad regime.
This article argues that “collective guilt” about the Holocaust operates as an emotional complex, largely inscribed within experiences of Austrianness and Germanness, which affects public opinion and policy about Palestine and Palestinians. Israel’s mobilization of this emotional complex is a key component of its realpolitik strategy, serving as legitimization to inflict “collective punishment” on the Palestinian population and to remain uncensored. Besides, the article shows how collective guilt informed a compromise after ww 2 that created a new European subject, which informed international institutions claiming to act for humanity. The article concludes that “collective guilt” is at the root of the denial of Palestinian suffering in the German-speaking context, and the exponential criminalization and repression of pro-Palestinian expressions that especially target political activists and academics. The article also concludes that an efficient praxis to re-inscribe Palestinians (and others) within European notions of humanity needs to focus on both realpolitik and affect.
This article critically assesses anthropological responses to the Gaza massacre following the October 7, 2023, attacks. I warn against the dangers of a single, reductive narrative and highlight the harmful effects of discourse policing. While terms like “genocide” convey the gravity of the massacre and mobilize support, they also reinforce false binaries, reify distinctions between Palestine and Israel, and disconnect Gaza from the broader Palestinian context—obscuring the realities of military occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid. I argue that the current onslaught should also be recognized as the inevitable lethal outcome of the global reemergence of ethnonationalism. The insistence on a singular narrative, terminology, or form of action does not benefit the struggle for Palestinian freedom and justice. This article poses a sharp critique, but is ultimately a plea for the creation of spaces for resistances—plural—and for anthropologists to play our role in the human rights struggle of our time.
Based on decades of research conducted through life history narratives collected among Syrians, the article outlines the history of recent changes in male homosexual imaginaries and practices, identifying two historical-epistemological configurations: the first, in Syria, between 1970 and 2000, based on ‘fluid’ homoerotic practices, enacted in private and not categorized into homonormative frameworks; the second, in the diaspora in Turkey, shaped under the influence of Western homonormative discourse from 2000 to 2024. Only apparently opposed and similarly alienating for Arab-Muslim subjects, the models of privacy and coming out are shown to be both hybridized in concrete experience and potentially emancipatory, provided we abandon the dichotomous Orientalist view and evolutionary vision of lgbt human rights history ethnocentrically focused on secularization and individualism. Indeed, informants eschew the incommensurability of the two epistemologies and the vicious circles of the homocolonialist dialectic, instead maintaining “fluid spaces” in their everyday lives.
This essay explores the transformative impact of digital media on social dynamics through an analysis of John Postill’s The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars . It situates the work within the broader disciplines of media studies and internet activism, emphasizing its relevance for understanding the complexities of modern digital behaviours. By examining formative media effects, the book challenges enduring misconceptions about media causation, offering valuable insights into the interplay between digital practices and societal change. Through an analysis of critical events, the book examines the rise of the anti-woke movement and its evolution within dynamic media landscapes. It highlights how the anti-woke movement uses digital tools to create online personas, frame events and contest narratives, often in opposition to the social justice or “woke” movements. Through this lens, the author invites media scholars to reconsider traditional media effects and embrace more complex understandings of media causality in the digital era.
This article examines humour as a unique reflection of and on social life, focusing on military humour as a reflection of the experiences of soldiers working in the armed forces. Soldiers are witnesses, victims, and perpetrators of harm, and instruments of the state tasked with “dirty work” scrutinised by society. Drawing on thick descriptions of military humour, this article explores how the military’s high-impact ambiguities and paradoxes results in a military culture infused with what can be termed “murky” humour, characterised by black humour, self-deprecation and humorous understatement. Functionalist, structuralist and phenomenological analyses uncover different functions and meanings, including emotional relief, social bonding, criticism and subversion, acknowledging absurdity and existential reflection. Murky humour deliberately leaves tensions and incongruities unresolved. By doing so, it acknowledges the interpretive difficulties of the military’s social reality, and helps to navigate these challenges, in a way that serious discourse often cannot achieve.
