Collected Work

“Developing an Instrument to Measure Autonomy: Urban Middle-Class Women in Delhi”

This article develops an instrument to measure women’s autonomy in India, specifically focusing on urban women from households that have access to economic resources. It points toward the importance of understanding and measuring the autonomy of women among India’s rapidly growing middle classes. The article develops two kinds of measures based on a primary survey of women in Delhi. First, a Relative Autonomy Index (RAI), which is an adaptation of the RAI developed by Ana Vaz et al. (2013, “Measuring Autonomy: Evidence from Bangladesh.” OPHI Working Papers 38a. Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Oxford University) that asks questions designed to understand specific characteristics and circumstances of life for middle-class women in North India. The second is an ambient measure that indexes important aspects of family, peer group, and resource use. The adapted RAI is then examined in relation to the ambient measure, as well as to measures of psychological well-being and self-efficacy, in addition to being tested for validity and reliability.

“Combined and Uneven Catastrophe”

A conversation with Joshua Craze on the shift in the Palestinian Authority’s politics away from an emphasis on acquiring sovereignty toward a focus on making markets and building up state-like institutions in the absence of statehood, examining how the current assault on Gaza and the intensification of violence in the West Bank is affecting about the combined and uneven spaces of Israeli colonization.

Periscope: Red Natural History

What if we understand natural history not simply as the study of nature, ecosystems, or premodern cultural traditions, but as a site of struggle between two incommensurate relations to the world—one governed by a logic of extraction and enclosure and another that relates to the world as a world in common that cannot be enclosed? Edited by Not An Alternative as part of the collective’s ongoing project The Natural History Museum, this Social Text dossier features texts by Indigenous historians, theorists, and ethnobotanists, as well as critical geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists.

“Futures on Dry Ground: Anthropology and Coastal Planning”

Around the world, governments, industry, and other actors are creating plans to save coasts from environmental crisis. Louisiana is one prominent example: levees and other measures protect oil and gas infrastructure from inundation as the wetlands buffer rapidly erodes—in large part due to that same industry. This article reviews emerging literature and frames an anthropology of coastal planning around (1) novel orientations toward time and space, (2) the reproduction of power and capital in the name of protection and restoration, and (3) the elision of other forms of land loss and defense by reductive above-ground/underwater planning paradigms.

“Crisis and the Everyday: Global Connections, Resistance, and Solidarity”

This essay introduces a collection of articles that reflect the tension between the truncated globality of the COVID-19 pandemic and the contradictions and conflicts that are immanent within capitalism. The authors discuss the differentiated impact of the pandemic on workers. In doing that, they remind us that it is important to reflect on our own position as teacher-workers and researcher-workers even as we write about workers who may belong in a different world of work. Often exposed to far greater levels of precarity, danger, and exploitation, the experiences of migrant, factory, or agricultural laborers in the workplace are not equivalent to that of many teachers and researchers in academia. Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether there are threads that connect workers across these different worlds of work. The experience of withdrawing from the panel in solidarity with teacher workers of UK academia has taught us that these threads exist- the lives of adjuncts and tenured professors are interconnected as much as the lives of domestic workers and working women are connected or the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and workers in the fashion world in the US are connected. As Rogaly and Schling (2022) remind us when they quote David Featherstone, solidarity emerges through collective activity – by doing things together. This collection of short essays is the record of a moment of solidarity, of striking together in the world of work called academia.

“New York’s Housing Justice Movement: Facing the COVID Eviction Cliff Edge”

The coronavirus pandemic highlighted the deep-rooted links between poor housing and poor health, particularly for working class communities of colour, for whom the right to the city is systemically undermined by unaffordable, precarious and sub-standard housing. This paper examines these issues against the background of a grassroots movement against evictions in New York during 2021. It describes and discusses the organisation, tactics and strategies of that movement as it attempted to challenge the dominance and norms of the real estate industry. It suggests that the pandemic engendered a radical shift in the demands of tenant and housing justice organisations, which led to New York being virtually eviction free for 22 months.

“Coming Out the Other Side: Notes on an Eight-Year Expedition into Natural History”

Not An Alternative is working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists, historians, ethnobotanists, geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists to define and organize around a counter-tradition of natural history, a Red Natural History, which sees the world not as a wealth of natural resources available for possession or profit, but as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. This first text situates this inquiry within NAA’s history of practice, telling the story of how we came to believe it is necessary to name and organize around an alternate tradition of natural history. The second delves into the question at hand, sketching out our collective’s provisional definition of Red Natural History.

“Afrofuturism: Race, Erasure, and COVID”

An introduction to an issue of Radical Teacher co-edited by Belinda Deneen Wallace and Jesse Schwartz on teaching Afrofuturism during a global pandemic. It serves in part as an acknowledgement of the radical transformations taking place within distinct kinds of classrooms, not simply those located within the walls of academia.

“Touch and Tech: Labor and the Work of the Pandemic”

The pandemic has changed the meaning of both touch and tech. It has drawn a line across occupations, work processes, and industries. It is a specific moment where production is separated not into the production of services and goods, but ones that are touch-based and tech-based.

“Beneath the Museum, the Specter” 

This chapter discusses the political theory for institutional liberation in the terminal crisis of climate change. Museums are in crisis, facing escalating pressure to drop fossil fuel sponsors, remove robber barons and war criminals from their boards, repatriate stolen objects, and topple racist monuments, dioramas, and displays. Ecology offers a framework to interpret relations between capitalism and nature, allowing us to make sense of climate change as a project of capital. The problem is that while ecology can picture the capitalist world, it also participates in the active repression of the gap. Toscano’s account of the dialectic of extinction and resurrection latent in the labor process presents a key for thinking about what it might mean to conjure the specter that haunts the natural history museum. The museum is constituted through the same dialectics of extinction and resurrection as is the commodity.

The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan

This book tells the story of Pakistan through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the global rise of militant Islam. Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly defined ‘political’ realm, Toor examines cultural politics to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.