Created in 2012, Theorizing the Contemporary seeks to extend the horizon of social analysis in new directions, including challenges to what constitutes "theory" in the first place. Theorizing the Contemporary series are reviewed by the editors of Cultural Anthropology; series editors must be current members of the SCA.
Time of Monsters
In her contribution to the 2016 Hot Spots series on liberalism’s contemporary crisis, Andrea Muehlebach aptly and beautifully rendered our current political s... More
The Naturalization of Work
The naturalization of work usually refers to social processes that make a life underpinned by labor seem unquestionable, inevitable, and even desirable. This ki... More
Speaking Volumes
Having engaged with the recent volumetric turn in architecture and political geography, anthropologists are increasingly concerned with realms such as air, oc... More
Keywords for Ethnography and Design
This series of short essays explores issues facing ethnographers working on or in collaboration with design as a field. It begins from the proposition that the ... More
Our Lives with Electric Things
Our lives with electric things are positively charged with meaning. Our bodies pulse with electrical activity. The electric appliances, devices, and technologie... More
Collaborative Analytics
This Theorizing the Contemporary series on collaborative analytics emerged from a workshop held at the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, I... More
Evil Infrastructures
Can an infrastructure be evil? The short pieces in this Theorizing the Contemporary series, which were originally commissioned for the 2016 Society for Social S... More
Digital Ontology
It might be argued that anthropology has come late to the question of whether there is an ontology to the digital. Although scholars in software and media studi... More
Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen
The idea of an Anthropocene has spread with astonishing speed, dislodging familiar terms like nature and environment from their customary preeminence as signs o... More
The Infrastructure Toolbox
Why an infrastructure toolbox? Infrastructure has long been a central conceptual tool—a productive metaphor—for critical theory and the analysis of social life ... More
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