As we wrote a year ago: The sense that workers are being made more replaceable by AI has empowered the most reactionary impulses of Silicon Valley. We can only push back through collective action, glad to see Google folks doing that! Thanks for reporting in this, Brian!

At Google, speech critical of ICE is censored from the company's internal platform, employees who speak out are served with warnings, and leadership refuses to acknowledge a petition that's now gotten 1,200 employee signatures. Inside the worker-led push to get ICE out of Google:

In a new blog post for the Political Ecology Network, I reflect on how my fieldwork in Madagascar’s Central Highlands led me to rethink the category of “essential work” pollenpoliticalecology.network/essential-oi... @pollenetwork.bsky.social @politicalecology.bsky.social

A new podcast interview by @ilarimakela.bsky.social with Richard B. Lee about Man the Hunter! Should be fascinating. onhumans.substack.com/p/the-origin...

What does it *feel like* to build worker power? Season two of Haymarket Originals is bringing you inside one of the most dynamic and inspiring organizing drives in the labor movement today. Heat The Ground Up is an oral history of Starbucks Workers United, voiced by the baristas who built it.

Reading Marx and drinking Guinness

Delighted to host Omar Jabary Salamanca on Thursday for this super important talk on the 1979 strike by Palestinian workers at the Jerusalem Electricity Company. All welcome!

Type of guy who has never heard of the enclosure movement but styles himself an expert in the industrial revolution...

The social function of AI:

To disrupt and organise against the genocidal war machine, it is necessary to understand the internal mechanisms of Israeli violence, which span historic Palestine, and are intertwined with the global capitalist system.

"This separation has facilitated the positioning of graduate labor at the end of value-creation inside academia—that is, as a more efficient way for the university to extract teaching and research labor while pay and benefits are considerably lower."

My book is now available for pre-order!

"[D]oes China have an LGBTQ+ movement that also foregrounds economic justice?" At @madeinchinajournal.com, @ianliujiatian.bsky.social shares their ethnographic research among LGBTQ+ migrant workers in southern China.

Join us on Feb 18 for a conversation with ISSI alums Jennifer Chun & Judy Han! Learn more & register: bit.ly/AgainstAbandonment Sponsors: ISSI, Center for Korean Studies Cosponsors:@ucbgeography.bsky.social, Sociology, Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies Program, Center for Ethnographic Research

🚨NEW INQUIRY! - Behind the Face of AI🚨 In this short comic, two data workers describe their work impersonating an “AI” chatbot for a major social media platform. Sleepless nights, penalties for sounding “too human,” and emotional drain are just a few of the job hazards. ➡️ data-workers.org/france

I have a new article in Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social It looks at shopkeepers in Istanbul who donate recyclable waste to certain irregular migrant workers in their neighbourhoods. I analyse this as a novel form of hospitable giving. journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

And our much longer final report on our 2023-2024 research with migrant care workers living in limbo and labour precarity: www.policyalternatives.ca/news-researc... #careworkers #immigration

I've just published "You can't see the workers from above”: The Myth of European “Formality” and the Fight for Essential Informal Workers' Legalization in Spain. From the Series: Where Have All the Workers Gone? #anthropology #antropología #informality #regularization www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Learn more about the 2026 SEA 46th Annual Meeting - April 9–11, 2026 in Fort Collins, CO - at econanthro.org/meet/... #anthropology

“The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.” -English poet, activist, and historian E. P. Thompson, born on this day in 1924. His writing remains influential, partly because it still takes a stand. #Writer #Historian #History #BOTD

Fiona McCormack’s essay, “Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship,” engages with climate, capitalism, and decolonial critique, examining how marine spaces materialize global inequalities through regimes of extraction, governance, and labor.

63. The Anthropology Professor in an Amazon Warehouse To learn what conditions are really like for Amazon workers, an anthropologist has joined their ranks #TabClosed2026 #AnthroSky

Just seeing this article… here to boost our AI workers inquiry tool and AI implementation bingo as a starting point for collectively contesting genAI in your workplace: www.workersdecide.tech

On my reading list for early 2026: The International Sociological Association's magazine just published a special issue on Michael Burawoy globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/uploads/imge...

Cultural anthropology latest Hot Spots Series, “Where have all the workers gone?” is both "an empirical question that ethnographers often encounter in the field" and "an epistemological reflection on where anthropologists today locate labor, work(ers), and their struggles"

2. Christopher Lingelbach's review of Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia, by Marina Welker anthrowork.org/book-reviews...

How did the Covid-19 pandemic lay bare and exacerbate changes in work and labor? Our latest Hot Spots series is a global look at how labor has changed as a social form and object of study.

In Elana Resnick's research on race and waste in Bulgaria, "containability is a fantasy of material and social boundedness—that people who collect waste, racialized as nonwhite, can be sequestered out of white purview." www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Join Capacitor Collective as they celebrate the release of NOTES TOWARD A DIGITAL WORKERS' INQUIRY, "an exemplary demonstration of how inquiry can function simultaneously as a mode of collective action and a form of critical theory." 2/12/26 in Toronto and 2/13/26 Montreal. Save the dates!

Proshant Chakraborty @proshant.bsky.social reviews Jathan Sadowski's @jathansadowski.com 'The Mechanic and the Luddite' over on the @saw-anthroofwork.bsky.social Exertions site

"History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots." -Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Check out Avdhesh Kumar's review of The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office, by Ilana Gershon anthrowork.org/book-reviews...

Hi Everyone! If you want an intro to immigration control in the US, how sanctuary policies actually reinforce ICE/CBP efforts, and my take on the siege of Minneapolis, listen to my conversation with Gene Demby on today’s episode of Code Switch on @npr.org podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

PoLAR DEF Anna Kirstine Schirrer's research with CARICOM appeared in the PoLAR this year. And her edited series on reparations is free to read on PoLAR Online: polarjournal.org/2020/07/31/s...

In 2024, we convened a group of 25 workers and organizers across the transportation supply chain. They traveled over 3 days and 600+ miles across Nevada to tour the frontlines of new lithium mining in the US. Watch our new documentary that follows their journey. climateandcommunity.org/nvfilm

Sanctuary policies, praised for safeguarding immigrants, paradoxically expand ICE's influence. Anthropologist Peter Mancina shares insights from his book "On the Side of ICE" and his experience with New Jersey police force. Hear him on today's episode of NPR's Code Switch:

In this interview, anthropologist Rishabh Raghavan reflects on the role of refusal not only in his work theorizing labor and toxicity in southern India, but also in his interactions with his interlocutors - fishermen who refused certain lines of inquiry. www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Port of Oakland longshoremen sent the Ever Macro to the Port of Tacoma with a memorial message for Renee Good www.reddit.com/r/Tacoma/com...

New book on labor precarity in China, Japan, and France

Irene Vega wrote a new book called Bordering on Indifference that’s an ethnography of ICE and CBP agents! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Some extracts from "The King of Bangkok", a graphic ethnography exploring urban migration, long-distance family relationships, and the uneven, sometimes damaging consequences of economic development for workers in Thailand. #anthropology #ethnography #graphicnovel #Thailand

5. There's something so evocative about Alex Blanchette's use of language in Porkopolis. I find myself repeatedly returning to his use of storytelling and his characterization of farm animals as historical subjects over and over again.

Out now! I've edited a special issue of New Political Economy on 'Centring exploitation in global political economy'. Link to the intro: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Other articles (all brilliant!) and a short summary 👇 1/

Call for Late Breaking Sessions @ the AES Spring Conference in Victoria, BC! Late-breaking sessions address urgent global, political, environmental, and disciplinary developments shaping anthropological research and practice today. Read more here: americanethnologist.org/news/call-fo...

"ghost jobs" -- positions companies advertise that they never plan to fill, just to harvest your data, make themselves look like they're growing, etc. columbialawreview.org/content/ghos...

Ooooooh I LOVE this column from Caitrin - “An Anthropologist’s Guide to Better Automation.” This is exactly the kind of juicy human stuff that makes robotics so fascinating to me. cacm.acm.org/opinion/an-a...

In this new think piece for the JHI Blog Forum on Political Economy, Vishal Verma studies the historical linkages between labor and caste through the intellectual debates underpinning the origins and evolution of the theorization of caste across time and space. web.sas.upenn.edu/jhiblog/2025...

Limn 12 Spotlight Series Sarah Besky and Yojak Tamang deconstruct local consequences of homestay tourism. Limn 12 - Climate's Interiors Out now. limn.press/article/esca...

New book out!!🎉💫 How do border regimes restructure life and labour for migrant workers? How do migrantized workers struggle for a better life against all odds - and in doing so, shape the world? @gabriellaalberti.bsky.social @elgarpublishing.bsky.social www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/mig...