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 …
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Airmail for the Revolution
written after a research visit to the Linen Hall Library with a team of researchers to examine Northern Irish civil rights activist records
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 Account of Intimate Interest
This poem is an account of materiality through time-tracking and place-making, viewed from within the contours of home while wearing the ethnographer’s lens.
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
LOST PREDICTIONS II
This blog post is a reply to LOST PREDICTIONS by Fiona Murphy and Eva van Roekel Maruška Svašek without ChatGPT Karel entered the museum with a visceral urge to be surrounded by artefacts. To be sucked in by the collection and erase himself. The trip to Berlin had shaken him to the core. On top …
The Politics of Bad Writing
Let’s be honest. Anthropology is plagued by dull, pretentious, and sometimes even meaningless prose: language that is at best imprecise and at worst incomprehensible. Now and then, examples of clear and evocative writing emerge from the literature like flowers from the weeds. Yet many anthropologists will privately acknowledge that the general state of the discipline’s …
LOST PREDICTIONS
Professor Karel Mulder sat at his desk, wreathed in the noble decay of academia—a kingdom of paper that had long since declared independence from any attempts at order.
An invitation: Lost Predictions as novella, syllabus and glitch in the machine of academic publishing
What happens when the prediction fails, but the system marches on as if it hadn’t? When the algorithm forgets what the body remembers?
The Laughing Perpetrator
In photo and video material of violent conflict, a phenomenon regularly occurs that needs interpretation: perpetrators of violence who appear to enjoy their actions, or bystanders laughing or smiling while others commit violence.
International Joking Relationships
What can soldier humour tell us about international relations? To begin with, humour is a universal social practice …