Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology

FocaalBlog is associated with Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. It aims to accelerate and intensify anthropological conversations beyond what a regular academic journal can do, and to make them more widely, globally, and swiftly available.

Recent Forum Topics

• Isak Niehaus—Anthropology at the dawn of apartheid: Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski’s South African engagements, 1919–1934
• Katharina Bodirsky—From the “state-idea” to “politically organized subjection”: Revisiting Abrams in times of crisis in Turkey and EU-Europe
• Edward Simpson—Is anthropology legal? Earthquakes, blitzkrieg, and ethical futures
• Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer—Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia: Anthropological reflections
• Maria Theresia Starzmann—Global privatized power: Heritage politics and private military contractors in Iraq

Conversations on the Left

• David Bozzini: Gabriella Coleman on the ethnography of digital politics – part 2

  David Bozzini is a research fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is researching on Eritrean deserters movements and on the resistance to digital surveillance. He co-edits Tsantsa, the journal of the Swiss Ethnological Society. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist and holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University in… more...

• David Bozzini: Gabriella Coleman on the ethnography of digital politics – part 1

  David Bozzini is a research fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is researching on Eritrean deserters movements and on the resistance to digital surveillance. He co-edits Tsantsa, the journal of the Swiss Ethnological Society. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist and holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University in… more...

• Zoltán Glück: Of politics and crowds: A conversation with Susan Buck-Morss

  This interview with Susan Buck-Morss took place at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center on May 12 2015. Buck-Morss is Distinguished Professor of Political Philosophy at the Graduate Center and has been a towering figure in continental theory since her publication of The Origin of Negative Dialectics in 1977. Her books include… more...

• Ida Susser: From the underground resistance under Franco to Podemos, with Vicente Navarro

  Vicente Navarro is a leading analyst of the history and origins of the financial crisis in Spain (and Europe in general) and an economic adviser to Podemos. His book There Are Alternatives (Hay Alternativas: Propuestas para Crear Empleo y Bienestar Social en España), written with economists Juan Torres and Alberto Garzón, became an inspiration to… more...

• Zoltán Glück: Archive of a Radical Geographer: Neil Smith’s Papers—An Interview with Don Mitchell

  In 2014, Don Mitchell was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Advanced Research Collaborative, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). His primary project during this time was to sort through the large collection of papers, files, clippings, and correspondences left behind by Neil Smith after his untimely death in… more...

• Zoltán Glück: Focaal Interview with David Harvey – Part 2

  The Conversations on the Left project by Focaal opens its series with an interview with David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. David Harvey’s works have had a profound impact on the direction of leftist social science over the past four decades. A few months before this interview, in May 2013, an impressive… more...

• Zoltán Glück: Focaal Interview with David Harvey – Part 1

  The Conversations on the Left project by Focaal opens its series with an interview with David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. David Harvey’s works have had a profound impact on the direction of leftist social science over the past four decades. A few months before this interview, in… more...