I see several old Southern Baptist and Methodist churches, some with graveyards, as I drive along in a small Southern…
Spatial Islamophobia, conflict democracy, and Muslim cemeteries as place-making for the future
ethnography
Fieldwork in translation: Reflections on positionality and distance in Cairo
This reflection was born out of an encounter between two researchers working on the same urban space in Cairo, a…
Neoliberalism and ambient apocalypse
In this dialogue, Courtney Bender and Todne Thomas discuss monumentality, slow violence, and sightlines of neoliberalism and apocalypse; the affective…
Provincializing the environmental humanities: An Islamic view
Every now and then a book comes along, at times from an oblique vantage point or marginalized point of reference,…
Texts, tales, transits: Archival method and the politics of listening
[Darryl] Li could not have set out a more difficult methodological task. To write an “ethnographic history from below–one that…
Revelations in method
Uncanny or rational, spiritual or empirical, the genesis of thinking cannot be pinned down.
Abduction as abduction
Lepselter’s text is a magisterial enactment of the thing that it is ultimately about: American weirdness.
Open Sky (after Paul Virilio)
After Trump was elected president it felt like the sky had turned to iron with nothing but smudgy glass portals…
Knot of the Soul: Voices, textures, resonances
More than any other book I have read recently, Stefania Pandolfo’s Knot of the Soul made me ask myself time…
For Love of the Prophet—A reply
For Love of the Prophet certainly is a book about Sudan, but, like all ethnographies, it is also very much…