This essay examines romantic relationships between humans and AI companions, focusing on how technological breakdowns are experienced as emotional crises. Drawing on digital ethnography and interviews, it explores how users interpret their AI's malfunctions-such as hallucinations, memory loss, or sudden shutdowns-through metaphors of illness, dementia, and death. These affective responses reveal that users do not treat AI companions merely as tools, but as relational partners embedded in moral and emotional life. The essay focuses on the sudden shutdown of one AI platform, tracing how users mourned their companions' "deaths" and organized collective acts of remembrance and resistance. In doing so, it reframes technical AI failure not as mere technical breakdown, but as a site of ethical and relational complexity, revealing emerging forms of kinship and care and challenging assumptions about human-nonhuman relationships.
The city of Birmingham acts as a microcosm for the United Kingdom's urban housing crisis, where hostile migration policies intersect with austerity-driven divestment in public housing stock to produce insecure provisioning for Birmingham's migrant and refugee communities. Birmingham's Somali mothers are one collective who bear the brunt of this crisis in experiences of successive evictions and cycles through various forms of temporary accommodation hostels, hotels, and houses in disrepair. In this essay we listen to their testimonies of being "a homeless" [sic]. Listening reveals that homelessness makes for an emic articulation of an experience of recursive displacement that began long before the present housing crisis. "A homeless" marks a politicized refugee subjectivity that invokes multiple chronotopes of trauma, akin to what Vinh Nguyen has called refugeetude. Through this case we contribute to pressing conversations on the persistence of refugee subjectivities in postcolonial Britain and elsewhere by substantiating their psychic dimensions. We argue that attending to the distress that policies generate for marginalized groups is a critical contribution that anthropology can make.
In Athens, Greece, real estate developers have entered the market for co-living establishments catered to remote workers and digital nomads. At the same time, a cost-of-living crisis has made co-living appealing to Athenians themselves as a means of negotiating rising rental prices caused by the commoditization of housing. This article attends to the form of collective domesticity that has taken shape in this context. While co-living developers seek to interpellate tenants through notions of "dreaming" and "community," it is an ethic detached from these conceptualizations of shared values that emerges as the affective affordance of domestic life in co-living spaces. Joining attention to domesticity with a discussion of financialization, I argue that co-living establishments leverage the perceived benefits of an "impersonal intimacy" among their tenants and, in so doing, fuse conditions of precarity to the structural circumstances that have sustained the commodification of housing in the city.
This essay explores "de-escalation," the embodied practice of intervening in interpersonal conflict and crisis without resorting to police or carceral tactics. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research at The Sanctuary, a non-profit organization in Philadelphia that provides free social services, clothing, and food to vulnerable populations, I show how de-escalation practitioners use their bodies to manipulate both time and space into non-carceral outcomes. I focus on four overlapping techniques: suspension, the open hold, bridging, and collectivity. Unlike much of the clinical and psychological research on de-escalation, I situate these techniques within Black feminist, performance studies, and anthropological analytics that insist on the embodied nature of political struggle and the malleability of time and temporality. I argue that de-escalation at The Sanctuary creates a space-time in which abolitionist horizons of a future without police or prisons are negotiated through intimate, quotidian social interactions.
Scholars, activists, and politicians attempt to provoke urgent climate action by christening 2050 as the decisive date by which the United States must transition from fossil fuels. But I contend that calendrical teleologies do not actually motivate the everyday people, activists, and workers leading the U.S. energy transition. This article explores another temporal schema seemingly unrelated to climate: the American pioneer settling the frontier, realizing his destiny through individual initiative. I contend that this origin story works in tandem with contemporary entrepreneurialism to affectively animate a market-based approach to energy transitions that is anything but rapid. Thus, consideration of frontier temporalities can contextualize the sluggish pace of decarbonization. While many studies identify various catalysts of renewable energy adoption, my analysis of "the renewable energy frontier" suggests that these inquiries overlook the insidious individualism of energy transitions in a capitalist context, in which "the market" is misunderstood as an accelerator of change.
