Allegra Lab

From Despair To Where? Anthropology, critique, political practice and the case for radical optimism

An audio essay by Ian M. Cook with anthropologists who have gone beyond critique for critique's sake. Anthropologists who have creatively intervened in the world in ways that blur the scholar/activist categories and centre anthropology's tentative, non-absolutist mode of knowledge creation. The essay argues that the attempts at political practice by anthropologists, combined with the work of those who critique the international organisations and social movements that actively seek to intervene in the world, so that their their interventions might be more effective in achieving social justice, can help create and structure the conditions for critical radical optimism to emerge. Transcript: https://allegralaboratory.net/from-despair-to-where-anthropology-critique-political-practice-and-the-case-for-radical-optimism/ Featuring (in order of a-hear-ance) Agathe Mora Julie Billaud Jane Cowan Noah Walker-Crawford Matthew C. Canfield Lieselotte Viaene Rafael Carrano Lelis Samuel Shapiro Pedro Silva Rocha Lima

Building Bodies For Thought

Allegra Editor Ian podcasts together with Thread guest editors Aja Smith & Anne Line Dalsgård as they explore 'Building Bodies For Thought' a thread in which theorising and thinking is undertaken by bodies that are more receptive, more sentient, more response-able. https://allegralaboratory.net/category/thematic-threads/building-bodies-for-thought/ In the podcast you will hear hundreds written and read in the following order by: Ida Appel Vardinghus-Nielsen Vanessa Graf Fine Brendtner Katrine Frank Jørgensen Clara Fuglsbjerg Ebberup Mark Tatlow Joseph Dumit Mona Nicolaysen Stine Simonsen Puri Ida Sofie Matzen Mona Nicolaysen

Encountering Precarities

Allegra Editor Ian sits down with Thread guest editors Viola Castellano & Olivia Casagrande to discuss 'Encountering precarities: ethnography, spurious solidarity and neoliberal academia.' The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and their interlocutors in and beyond the field. https://allegralaboratory.net/encountering-precarities-ethnography-spurious-solidarity-and-neoliberal-academia/

ResonanceCast 2: Incitement And Coups

ResonanceCast is a new multimodal series that seeks to tease out timely shared concerns. After their articles have been published on Allegra Lab, we invite two authors to come together to discuss each other’s texts and the wider-ranging issues both speak to. Their conversation is moderated by someone from the Allegra Lab editorial collective. We hope to continue this emergent, generative and dialectic format into the future! This episode features Jastinder Kaur and Daniel White talking about their articles 'Towards an Anthropology of Coups' and 'Incitement! Incremental Theory for an Imminent Fascism'

ResonanceCast #1 Vulnerability

Welcome to ResonanceCast from Allegra Lab (https://allegralaboratory.net). In this podcast series we discuss articles publish by Allegra that resonate with one another. We invite the authors to read each other’s papers and then come together to talk with someone from the Allegra Lab editorial collective. This episode features Pascale Schild and Sandhya Fuchs talking about their articles 'Reciprocal vulnerability in the face of patriarchal violence' and 'Strange Bedfellows: On Trauma and Ethnographic Vulnerability' https://allegralaboratory.net Music by Acoustic Doodles https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc87wStXegiakg95Dgetkw