CURRENT ISSUE
After Failure: Temporalities and Traces
April 2023 | Volume 29, Issue S1 | Guest Editor: Catherine Alexander
Written during troubled times when failure seems to hang in the air, this volume follows failure out into the world, examining how it unfurls in diverse ethnographic settings ranging from post-welfare to postsocialist and postcolonial regimes, from multinational experimental collaborations to finance markets and domestic care… Where ‘failure’ suggests a once-and-for-all judgement, what emerges from investigating its aftermaths is something that resists containment and a singular way of knowing.
Find the full issue here.
Contents
Preface
Simon Coleman
Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics, and traces
Catherine Alexander
On the double social life of failure
Madeleine Reeves
Failure and moral distinction in a Ukrainian marketplace of ideas
Taras Fedirko
Routine failure in Macedonia: a critique of the Global Financial Crisis from the periphery
Fabio Mattioli
Make me a test and I will save the world: towards an anthropology of the possible in global health
Alice Street
Suspending failure: temporalities, ontologies, and gigantism in fusion energy development
Catherine Alexander
The pragmatism of continual failure: environmental policy as experimentation in China
Charlotte Bruckermann
After Grenfell: accumulation, debris, and forming failure in London
Constance Smith
A failing anthropology of colonial failure: following a driver’s uniform found at Amani research station, Tanzania
P. Wenzel Geissler
Afterword: Failed projects
Catherine Fennell
Competition Details
The JRAI runs a yearly competition for Special Issues. For details of the current competition, please click here.
To submit proposals and articles for the Special Issues, please email Jessica Turner, the RAI’s Publications Officer, at jturner@therai.org.uk.
Previous Special Issues
ON IRRECONCILIATION
Volume 28, Issue S1
April 2022
TOWARDS AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF DATA
Volume 27, Issue S1
April 2021
MIND AND SPIRIT: A COMPARATIVE THEORY
Volume 26, Issue S1
April 2020
ENERGY AND ETHICS?
Volume 25, Issue S1
April 2019
Dislocating Labour: Anthropological Reconfigurations
Volume 24, Issue S1
April 2018
Meetings: Ethnographies of Organizational Process, Bureaucracy, and Assembly
Volume 23, Issue S1
April 2017
Environmental Futures
Volume 22, Issue S1
April 2016
The Power of Example: Anthropological Explorations in Persuasion, Evocation, and Imitation
Volume 21, Issue S1
May 2015
Doubt, Conflict, Mediation: The Anthropology of Modern Time
Volume 20, Issue S1
April 2014
Blood will out: essays on liquid transfers and flows
Volume 19, Issue S1
May 2013
The return to hospitality: strangers, guests, and ambiguous encounters
Volume 18, Issue S1
June 2012
The aesthetics of nations: anthropological and historical approaches
Volume 17, Issue S1
May 2011
Making Knowledge
Volume 16, Issue S1
May 2010
Islam, politics, anthropology
Volume 15, Issue S1
May 2009
The objects of evidence: anthropological approaches to the production of knowledge
Volume 14, Issue S1
April 2008