•  1
    A Heterotopology of Urban Margins: Publicness in the Space of the City
    with Yvonne Wallace
    City and Society 2 (34): 1-25. 2022.
    Through publicness we offer a reconceptualization of marginality in the city, one that makes apparent the “inherent porosity” of the boundaries that organize urban life (Harvey 2006, 19). Our analysis attends to moments of publicness during fieldwork spent in various spaces within the city of Ottawa, Ontario, with individuals who use drugs and/or panhandle. Much of this research took place in central neighborhoods of Ottawa, which serve as the public image of the nation’s capital: Lowertown to t…Read more
  •  11
    Careful Practices: Ethics and the Anethical in Canadian Addiction Trajectories
    with Yvonne Wallace
    Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 40 (5): 417-431. 2021.
    A drug overdose epidemic in North America has sped the expansion of harm reduction services. Drawing on fieldwork in Ottawa, Ontario, we examine forms of care among people offering and accessing these resources. Notably, our interlocutors do not always characterize harm reduction as caring for oneself. Thus, we differentiate between the ethics of care through which one enters desired subject positions, and anethical careful practices. Harm reduction is sometimes anethical, enacted through minor …Read more
  •  234
    Internet Techniques for an Untimely Anthropology
    In Julie Laplante, Willow Scobie & Ari Gandsman (eds.), Searching After Method: Live Anthropology, Berghahn Book. pp. 102-107. 2020.
    Making “the familiar strange and the strange familiar” is what anthropology has long claimed as its expertise. The Internet and its broader technological problem space pose methodological challenges, however, for a discipline that has traditionally drawn on the authority of “being there” to ground its claims to knowledge.
  •  41
    You Can’t Kill Marielle
    with Erika Robb Larkins
    Metropolitics 29 (5): 1-3. 2018.
    Marielle Franco was part of a new generation of progressive activists in Brazilian politics. She was assassinated point-blank on March 14, 2018 by an elite shooter. In this piece, Meg Stalcup and Erika Robb Larkins examine how Marielle’s death is revealing of the issues that she fought for in her life. They also ask how she continues to be present in and beyond the unfolding investigation into who killed her.
  •  28
    All ethnographies, perhaps, contain some mystery: of how humans understand each other, or the way that words and glances, observations and encounters are turned into insights about what it means to be human at a given moment in history. But Sareeta Amrute’s Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin begins with a proper mystery, a person who has disappeared, and this literally missing body adroitly stages the subsequent exploration of IT workers’ missing bodies in scholarship on …Read more
  •  464
    Mothers and Children: Designing research toward integrated care for both
    with Stéphane Verguet
    Health, Culture and Society 3 (1): 160-171. 2012.
    The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) set time-bound targets that are powerful shapers of how and for whom health is pursued. In this paper we examine some ramifications of both the temporal limitation, and maternal-child health targeting of MDG 4 and 5. The 2015 end date may encourage increasing the number of mass campaigns to meet the specific MDG objectives, potentially to the detriment of a more comprehensive approach to health. We discuss some ethical, political, and pragmatic ramification…Read more
  •  1022
    Anthropology of Security and Security in Anthropology: Cases of Counterterrorism in the United States
    with Limor Samimian-Darash
    Anthropological Theory 1 (17): 60-87. 2017.
    In our study of U.S. counterterrorism programs, we found that anthropology needs a mode of analysis that considers security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the very heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. This article first presents a genealogy for the anthropology of security, and identifies four main approaches: violence and State terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as “security analytics…Read more
  •  381
    Humphry Osmond wrote to Aldous Huxley in 1956 proposing the term “psychedelic,” coined from two Greek words to mean “mind manifesting.” The scholars, one a psychiatrist and the other a celebrated novelist and philosopher, were exuberant about the potential of drugs for accessing the mind. Huxley favored a phrase from William Blake: -/- If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. -/- He postulated that psychedelics disturbed the “cerebral reducing v…Read more
  •  37
    How We Train Our Cops To Fear Islam
    with Joshua Craze
    Washington Monthly 1. 2011.
    Though the federal government covers much of the cost of counterterrorism instruction, it has surprisingly little control over who is chosen to conduct the training. Structural problems abound. There is no unified system of expert evaluation or regulatory authority to impose quality control. The Tenth Amendment, which states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” has been…Read more
  •  8249
    Plantas de uso medicinal ou ritual numa feira livre no Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
    with Meg Stalcup
    Dissertation, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. 2000.
    Este trabalho procura documentar as espécies e os usos de plantas vendidas por ervatários numa feira semanal do bairro da Tijuca na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Foi realizado entre os meses de agosto/98 e agosto/99, e participaram da pesquisa quatro vendedores, com média de 15 anos de experiência no mercado, fornecendo as plantas e informações sobre seus nomes vulgares, usos e o preparo dos remédios. A feira foi visitada regularmente e os espécimes encontrados foram coletados, fotografados, herbori…Read more
  •  5157
    Cops, Cameras and the Policing of Ethics
    with Charles Hahn
    Theoretical Criminology 20 (4): 482-501. 2016.
    In this article, we explore some of the roles of cameras in policing in the United States. We outline the trajectory of key new media technologies, arguing that cameras and social media together generate the ambient surveillance through which graphic violence is now routinely captured and circulated. Drawing on Michel Foucault, we suggest that there are important intersections between this video footage and police subjectivity, and propose to look at two: recruit training at the Washington state…Read more
  •  365
  •  4388
    This chapter examines global policing as it takes shape through the work of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization. Global policing emerges in the legal, political and technological amalgam through which transnational police cooperation is carried out, and includes the police practices inflected and made possible by this phenomenon. Interpol’s role is predominantly in the circulation of information, through which it enters into relationships and provides services that affect as…Read more
  •  138
    Mediated Experiences: 1-7 (review)
    with Bradley Dunseith, Sean Miller, and Antoine Przybylak-Brouillard
    Somatosphere 2016. 2016.
    We take this book forum as an opportunity to reflect on Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary through our experiences, exploring how these texts served as our tools, and to what end. We discuss a research methods seminar in which we traced one possible variation on the “genealogical line” and “pedagogical legacy” (p. 33) to which this reader is extended as an invitation. The spirit of that invitation is, in our understanding, not to a canon that would repla…Read more
  •  238
    Patrimônio etnobotânico no Brasil: a feira livre
    Revista Cadernos Do CEOM 26 (38): 131-153. 2013.
    O trabalho analisa o patrimônio etnobotânico da feira livre, com base em um estudo feito no bairro da Tijuca, na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Durante dois anos de trabalho de campo com quatro ervatários, que tinham média de 15 anos de experiência, foram coletados plantas e dados sobre nomes vulgares, usos e o preparo dos remédios. A coleta resultou em 151 espécies distribuídas em 59 famílias, de procedência diversa: comprada de terceiros, cultivada nos jardins particulares dos vendedores, ruderal, …Read more
  •  37
    Connecting the Dots. Intelligence and Law Enforcement since 9/11
    with Meg Stalcup
    Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. 2009.
    This work examines how the conceptualization of knowledge as both problem and solution reconfigured intelligence and law enforcement after 9/11. The idea was that more information should be collected, and better analyzed. If the intelligence that resulted was shared, then terrorists could be identified, their acts predicted, and ultimately prevented. Law enforcement entered into this scenario in the United States, and internationally. "Policing terrorism" refers to the engagement of state and lo…Read more
  •  1120
    The Aesthetic Politics of Unfinished Media: New Media Activism in Brazil
    Visual Anthropology Review 32 (2): 144-156. 2016.
    This article analyzes the role of key visual technologies in contemporary media activism in Brazil. Drawing on a range of media formats and sources, it examines how the aesthetic politics of activists in protests that took place in 2013 opened the way for wider sociopolitical change. The forms and practices of the media activists, it is argued, aimed explicitly at producing transformative politics. New media technologies were remediated as a kind of equipment that could generate new relationship…Read more
  •  288
    What are the actual practices of intellectual co-laboring? In the spring of 2006, we began an experiment in collaborative anthropology. There was a dual impetus to our efforts: a desire to deal head-on with inadequacies in our academic environment; and a strong feeling that the classic norms of qualitative inquiry needed to become contemporary. Collaboration struck us as potentially key to both. We drew a parallel to laboratory experiments. In the textbook version, one begins with a question, fo…Read more
  •  415
    A estética política do ativismo através de novas mídias
    In Marinyze Prates de Oliveira & Jonathan Warren (eds.), Miradas sobre o Brasil: cultura, arte e poder, Editora Da Universidade Federal Da Bahia. pp. 13-33. 2016.
    Neste capítulo, analisa-se a documentação visual dos protestos de 2013, contrastando a cobertura da grande mídia em São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro com a de ativistas usando as tecnologias de nova mídia. Os temas centrais são a forma como o exercício do poder político é mediado através de novas tecnologias de mídia e a racionalidade política que anima os ativistas. Dito de outro modo, pergunta-se: por que os atores criaram imagens da forma que o fizeram e que objetivos políticos estavam em jogo? No q…Read more
  •  996
    Policing Uncertainty: On Suspicious Activity Reporting
    In Rabinow Simimian-Darash (ed.), Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases, University of Chicago. pp. 69-87. 2015.
    A number of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. They were pulled over by police officers for speeding or caught by random inspection without a driver’s license. For United States government commissions and the press, these brushes with the law were missed opportunities. For some police officers though, they were of personal and professional significance. These officers replayed the incidents of contact with the 19 men, which lay bare the uncerta…Read more
  •  501
    Global Health and the Demands of the Day
    with Stéphane Verguet
    Health, Culture and Society 1 (1): 28-44. 2011.
    We have two goals in this paper: first, to provide a diagnosis of global health and underline some of its blockages; second, to offer an alternative interpretation of what the demands for those in global health may be. The assumption that health is a good that requires no further explanation, and that per se it can serve as an actual modus operandi, lays the foundations of the problem. Related blockages ensue and are described using HIV prevention with a focus on vaginal microbicides as a case s…Read more
  •  353
    This article explores the process of “re-imagined scenarios,” through which the moments of contact with the 9/11 hijackers were developed into scenarios that came to play a central role in U.S. counterterrorism training and policy. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with trainers, government officials, and police officers, it is argued that these scenarios do not recreate previous encounters, or conjure up possible futures, but instead rely on “the elasticity of the almost” to reactivate the pa…Read more