Juneteenth (19 June) is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. In the spirit of this day, we are featuring an excerpt from “The triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe”: The COVID-19 pandemic, enslavement, and agro-industrial capitalism” by Don Nonini (published in Focaal, Vol. 2021: Issue 89).
Catherine A. Nichols Exchanging Objects and my broader research agenda considers how and why certain objects left museums, institutions so often associated with preservation, archiving, and keeping. It can be an odd thing, to go to a museum to intentionally study things that aren’t there. When the idea for this research was suggested to me […]
Love-locking, the attachment of a padlock to a public structure, is the forte of the traveler. Although not exclusively a tourist custom, it is a popular practice for people visiting a new place and wanting to leave their mark on it. The love-lock has become the inverted souvenir: left behind rather than taken away, but […]
Courtney Work is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnology, National Chengchi University (Taiwan). She studied at Cornell University, and has published multiple papers on the intersections of religion, traditional practices, and the politics of land, global development, and climate change. She is the author of the forthcoming title Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, and Environment […]
Michael Meng and Adam R. Seipp The writing of German history since 1945 has often, if not excessively, been shaped by critical and negative attitudes; or, as Baruch Spinoza would put it, by excessive fear and sadness in the face of human suffering. Ruination, mourning, absence, destruction, and failure are the leitmotifs of postwar German historiography. Amid […]