Editors’ Forum

These Fieldsights sections feature series of ten or more short-form essays, which bring together scholars across institutions and career stages to weigh in on a shared topic. These pieces are reviewed by the editors of Cultural Anthropology.

How to Submit

View the submission guidelines. Please email [email protected] with any questions.

Final Writing with Light Series

Writing with Light

Final Writing with Light Series

The Writing with Light collective was a SCA/SVA joint initiative which provided editors and authors the opportunity to focus closely on the photo-essay as a dis... More

Borderwaters: Conversing with Fluidity at the Dominican Border

Writing with Light

Borderwaters: Conversing with Fluidity at the Dominican Border

Wind tugging at my sleeve feet sinking into the sand I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean where the two overlap a gentle coming together at other ... More

Connotative Memories

Writing with Light

Connotative Memories

Recent events of violence in São Paulo, Brazil targeting Palestinian, Syrian, as well as Angolan, Nigerian, and Congolese bystanders during a protest against th... More

“This is about racism and greed”: Photographs of Philadelphia’s Mass School Closures

Writing with Light

“This is about racism and greed”: Photographs of Philadelphia’s Mass School Closures

After months of community opposition and protest, on March 7, 2013, the School District of Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission (SRC) voted to close twenty-t... More

Experiments in the Field

Writing with Light

Experiments in the Field

Farmers are either disappearing or rock stars (Weiler, Otero, and Wittman 2016; Phillipov and Goodman 2017). If a farm is not reaching economies of scale then i... More

Camps and Ruins: Notes from Greece on the Visual Representation of the 2015 “Refugee Crisis”

Writing with Light

Camps and Ruins: Notes from Greece on the Visual Representation of the 2015 “Refugee Crisis”

My grandmother had very few photographs from her childhood; I believe there were only two.1 The first photo was one taken in an unknown studio, depicting her en... More

Debris n-1: Visualizing a Bullerman Erotics

Writing with Light

Debris n-1: Visualizing a Bullerman Erotics

In this photo essay I hope to extend the contemplative space of what Bruno Latour (1993, 144) calls a “parliament of things” through the juxtaposition and relat... More

Europe in the Balance

Hot Spots

Europe in the Balance

Europe seems to be plunging into crises of demographic and economic displacements, heightened nationalism, and general unrest. Wealthy countries that have enjoy... More

Topology as Method

Theorizing the Contemporary

Topology as Method

Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies spaces that remain continuously invariant through distortion. In doing so, it offers tools for the study of the... More

An Otherwise Anthropology

Theorizing the Contemporary

An Otherwise Anthropology

In recent years, the concept of the otherwise has been tracking across anthropology to frame political potentialities that are emerging, often drawing on phenom... More