Abstract This paper analyses the film and literary works of Paris‐based actor and author Shobasakthi, the pen name of Antonythasan Jesuthasan, as ethnographic texts in dialogue with anthropological scholarship on asylum and European migration. Shobasakthi, himself a Sri Lankan Tamil political refugee in France, is one of the leading contemporary Tamil literary figures worldwide. I focus particularly on Shobasakthi's literature in English and French translation, and on the 2015 Palme d'Or winning film Dheepan , to examine the experiences of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees. I argue that through Shobasakthi's fictional depictions of the asylum process, a space for truth‐telling is opened, which challenges the dominant framing of contemporary European asylum regimes: that a small group of “real refugees,” who are morally pure, but voiceless and devoid of agency, is to be winnowed from a mass of “false refugees” whose appeal to humanitarian conscience is seen as a cynical ruse and a threat to refugee‐receiving nations. While the figure of the “false refugee” permits a disavowal of the exclusionary framework of European migration regimes, Shobasakthi's work depicts the complex humanity of his Sri Lankan Tamil refugee characters, as well as the psychological and sometimes physical violence of the asylum process itself.
Abstract The prompt invites noticing minor, easily overlooked fieldwork moments that linger. It is inspired by an artistic devising practice, Affect Theater that blends anthropology and theater. Collaborative devising uses theatrical elements and non‐theatrical materials to slow thinking, decenter text, and create affective, sensory ethnographic translations through performance, writing, and creative processes.
Abstract Drawing on my experience with songwriting and Theodore Roethke's process for composing poetry, I suggest using a notebook as a place to gather ideas. Having an everyday physical notebook to visually record unstructured inspiration encourages a creative attunement to the world around us, now, and as we return to it for future writing projects. These lessons can serve anthropologists to write in ways that reflect both the flashes of inspiration and the careful tracking of them over time.
Abstract This eclectic piece centers ethnographic practice within networks of feelings that co‐delineate an anthropologist's encounter with imaginative, world‐shaping forces—by carving into peer‐to‐peer repositories for self‐reflexivity. Incidents of madness can thus offer a deliberate resonance and clarity not only to insiders but also to the wider community, affectively linked.
Abstract This short essay examines epistemic injustice within contemporary hierarchies of knowledge, and it argues for more insightful, sensuous, and grassroots forms of knowledge production “from the edges” to shine a light on the persistent inequality between ways of knowing and ways of (de)valuing different epistemologies. It introduces ten contributions to the special “Ukrainian Section” that emerged from the workshop “Writing from the Edge(s). Writer. Editor. Reader.” The essays gathered here demonstrate how knowledge produced under conditions of interruption and violence in Ukraine can generate valuable testimony as well as theoretical and ethical insights that speak beyond the Ukrainian context that originally inspired the essays. In doing so, the section argues for the importance of situated, emotionally engaged, and ethically reflexive forms of knowledge that challenge dominant hierarchies between “global theory” and supposedly “local” experience.
Abstract The bicycle is a multisensory human‐powered machine that allows the anthropologist to take in flashes of everyday life. This article discusses in brief the accidental insights a cycling practice can offer an ethnographer's writing practice as a bodily and sensory pathway to reigniting the humanity in what we do, one pedal (and eventual key) stroke at a time.
Abstract This poetic reflection explores the emotional and moral tensions experienced in a world increasingly shaped by global conflicts and collective uncertainty. Through the imagery of a classroom observing a troubled world, the poem invites readers to contemplate how education can become a space for nurturing empathy, critical reflection, and the ethical imagination necessary for sustaining peace. Rather than portraying peace merely as the absence of violence, the poem presents it as an ongoing human practice learned through listening, dialogue, and recognition of shared vulnerability. By situating global conflict within the pedagogical setting of a classroom, the work highlights the role of education in cultivating awareness of interconnected human experiences and in encouraging future generations to engage with the world responsibly. The poem reflects on how the circulation of news about wars and geopolitical tensions influences the emotional landscape of learners, while also suggesting that educational spaces can offer alternative narratives grounded in compassion and intercultural understanding. In doing so, the piece contributes to conversations in peace education by demonstrating how poetic expression can function as a reflective medium that fosters deeper awareness of humanity's collective longing for peace and the ethical responsibilities involved in imagining more just and non‐violent futures.
Abstract This essay examines erasure art as an anthropological practice through Doctoring Dobbs , a multimodal project responding to the US Supreme Court's overturning of federal abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization . In creative practice, erasure removes material from an existing source to reveal something new. Drawing on autoethnographic notes from the process of “doctoring” Dobbs , I show how erasure art makes core anthropological commitments of reflexivity, accountability, multiplicity, and citation visible on the page. I further argue that erasure art extends anthropological craft by modeling knowledge‐making as connective, able to hold multiple interpretations at once, and collaborative. Situating these claims within feminist scholarship, multimodal anthropology, and reproductive justice advocacy, the essay argues that erasure art reflects anthropological method as well as intervenes in abortion politics by challenging the authority of legal language and bringing reproductive justice visions into view.
Abstract When I started a research project on stray cat care in the United Arab Emirates and moved here with my three cats soon after, I did not expect my experiences to create a moral conflict around animal welfare practices and being a pet parent. Here, I explore—through my experiences of participating in TNR (Trap, Neuter, and Return) and adopting cats from my university campus—how both animal welfare and pet ownership are infused with violence and inequality, even as they are sites of care and love. My experiences conducting this more‐than‐human ethnography have thoroughly challenged my ethics and my understanding of what constitutes “humane” relationships with nonhumans.
Abstract This creative ethnographic essay emerges from an ongoing comparative and collaborative research project being conducted with two culturally Tibetan regions of highland Nepal and those from these regions living in urban Nepal and the greater New York City area. Although the broader project is engaging Himalayan elders as well as their families, communities, and caregivers through methods that include demographic surveys, interviews, life histories, and participant‐observation, this essay emerges from a process of traveling with a group of Himalayan elders on pilgrimage. Here, the rite of passage that is pilgrimage works both as a method and an ethic for attending to the experiences of an older generation who is bearing witness to profound transformations in their lifeworlds. Traveling with elders becomes both a form of embodied ethnographic knowing and an expression of care. Told as a series of short ethnographic evocations interspersed with expository analysis of similar length along with still photographs, this essay aims to illuminate dynamics of suffering and resilience, loneliness and community, tradition and adaptation, absence and presence that structure Himalayan elder lives.
Abstract Nos Vemos and Amphibian City are two poems born from a decade of ethnographic engagement in Medellín, Colombia, where poetic expression became a method of inquiry and relation. These poems reflect a practice of listening‐with the city, its waters, memories, communities, and more‐than‐human rhythms, offering a situated, affective account of place and co‐becoming. Drawing from decolonial and feminist frameworks, they resist extractivist modes of representation and instead flow with lived experience, memory, and collective care. Nos Vemos speaks to the temporalities of parting and return in long‐term fieldwork, weaving together stories of solidarity, trauma, and hope. Amphibian City traces the submerged and resurfacing presences of River Medellín and the nearby Santa Elena creek within the city's social, ecological, and political life. These poems emerge from practices of co‐labor and Buen Vivir as lived and adapted by Medellín's communities, without claiming to appropriate their cosmologies. Through poetic ethnography, the work seeks to create space for relational knowledge that is unfinished, plural, and transformative. The poems invite readers to listen, to feel, and to imagine otherwise through water, memory, and rhythm as paths toward collective healing and more just, amphibian futures.
Abstract Producing academic work under conditions of persistent anxiety, fragmented attention, and moral doubt is a practice suffused with tension. This essay explores academic writing as an embodied practice shaped by uncertainty, anxiety, and Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. As a Ukrainian scholar writing in more than one foreign language while living abroad, I examine how writing unfolds across languages and uneven positionalities—between proximity and distance to war, between privilege and responsibility. The essay engages with embodied writing as one facet of an unfolding living condition, not as a methodological choice. I explore how affective and sensory experiences—tensions, hesitation, and interruption—directly shape the writing process. I also critically reflect on the academic demand for experimental forms, highlighting the gap between calls for experiments and the lack of possibilities and infrastructures to support such work. By situating writing within the rhythms of mobility, precarity, and war, I argue that we should understand academic writing as a situated, embodied, and uneven practice, rather than a stable, “purely” research activity.
Abstract On Friday, October 3, 2025, the state produced a war zone with militarized technology and the deployment of armed police officers, who attacked a group of protesters outside Broadview Detention Center, Illinois. Interactions between the police and two d/Disabled protesters reveal the embodied vulnerability of disability, as well as the potential of disability to disrupt police protocol and state power.
Abstract This poem is a personal response to Romany culture and history, including consideration of the legacy of the holocaust or Porraijmos (devouring) and the socioeconomic diversity of contemporary Roma classes. It does, however, draw on anthropological and sociological theory that supports the significance of the lyric approach to the representation of affect in culture and its virtues over the typical narrative approach. It is set at the annual horse fair of Appleby‐in‐Westmorland in the North‐West of England, between the Pennine Hills and the Cumbrian Lake District. Drawing on two decades of fieldwork and archive research using primary and secondary data, and extensive conversations with key informants, it unfolds over the course of a single day, beginning and ending in a vardo, the iconic “bow‐top” caravan, and teases the metaphor of the journey which is core to Roma culture. It is partly written in Romany language, or cant, to convey the importance of rhythm and music in the culture, its style inspired by Tony Gatlif's 1993 film Latcho Drom (Safe Journey) which implies that the historical Roma journey, though often joyful, has been and remains anything but safe.
Abstract The Greyhound bus synthesizes mobility and stuckedness. In the play of travel and breakdown, I find a way to understand how the mobility of capital meets the stuckedness of people. In the process of being gutted by venture capitalists, the Greyhound company is an increasingly fragile place for travelers with few options to make their way through the United States. At the same time, the instability of this travel option makes it a voyeuristic portal into wandering souls. I draw from my experiences riding the Greyhound to understand how a soul wanders and waits, searching for home and finding itself free and alone.
