Time as Capital, Time as Cosmos: Kalighat and the Politics of Waiting

Last December, we walked through the red-brick corridors of the Alipore Jail Museum and entered an exhibition titled The Babu and the Bazaar: Art from 19th and Early 20th-Century Bengal. At first glance, it appeared to be a familiar archive of colonial Calcutta. It’s babus, courtesans, deities, print cultures, and bazaar economies. But in the …

KAREL’S LAST TAPE

An academic’s office. A chair and a desk with a colourful scarf as table cloth. On the desk, a laptop, reading lamp, and a few books. Hanging on the back of the chair, a black shawl. In the corner, a cardboard box of notebooks.

Once Were Vikings: Danish Soldiers on the Pride in (Lost) Glory

This blog post is part of the Seminar Reconceptualizing Warfare and Its Experience, April 10, 2025, funded by the WARFUN project. I love the Norse mythology. I really do, and the idea is just fucking great that when we die, we go to the Great Hall [of Odin] to drink and fight, right? I think that’s …

Lost Prediction IV

This blog post is a response to LOST PREDICTIONS by Fiona Murphy and Eva van Roekel, LOST PREDICTIONS II by Maruška Svašek, and LOST PREDICTIONS III by Sweta Tiwari. It was produced using ChatGPT and Google Gemini, though the responses are carved as per the requirement. Karel came into the classroom without his usual scowl. He wasn’t staging his …

An Ordinary Humanitarian Society: Trust and Solidarity in Contexts of Confrontation

Growing public outrage with the political responses to conflicts and complex emergencies have led to increasing calls for solidarity with affected populations that identify a shared humanity. Disenchantment with political authority makes it more important than ever for the humanitarian sector to engage with the political discussion, rather than distancing from it in the quest …

Identity Politics: Reflections from Turkey

When Frantz Fanon (1961) framed the legitimacy of anti-colonial armed struggle in The Wretched of the Earth, he likely did not imagine that his arguments would resonate, some seventeen years later, with a movement: Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK—Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), which would adopt armed resistance in the context of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey. Important scholars …

The Legal Aftermath of Emigration Control: A View from Senegalese Courts

Since the mid-2000s, Senegal has been applying an anti-trafficking law to prosecute emigration attempts and activities that relate to facilitating passage out of the country. Implemented following Senegal’s ratification of the Palermo Convention and its Protocols, this law ushered in a new legal practice of making some forms of movement illegal, or at the very …

LOST PREDICTIONS III

This blog post is a response to LOST PREDICTIONS by Fiona Murphy and Eva van Roekel, and LOST PREDICTIONS II by Maruška Svašek, with and without ChatGPT (depending on who you’re more afraid of). Any emotions expressed here are entirely fictional, except empathy, which stubbornly insisted on staying. The old lamp buzzed faintly, like a …