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Kilitl: Living with a Green Part of the World. Edible Greens, Language, Knowledge, and Territory

 Aldo Federico Palafox Hernández  September 9, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

In Mexico, quelites refers to uncultivated edible plants. The word has a Nahuatl origin derived from kilitl, a term referring to these edible weeds. The earliest dictionaries of colonial Mexico translated kilitl as “vegetable”, an equivalence that obscured the fact that they were collected (not cultivated), and interpreted them as any other green crop. There is an ongoing trend to revaluate quelites as a way to counter their gradual disappearance from national diets. These efforts involve universities, governmental and private institutions, civil associations, and organized communities. (read more...)

Reclaiming the Future of Work: Series Introduction

 Lucy Pei, Joy Ming, Kim Fernandes, Rosemary Steup  September 7, 2026

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Debates about the future of work often center around adapting the workforce to fit capitalist proposals of what work should look like. Pre-digital examples include scientific management, just-in-time production, and de-skilling of industrial labor in favor of more mechanized and automated processes. Recently, capitalist proposals of arrangements of work have centered on digital platforms, algorithmic management, pervasive surveillance, and the deskilling of white-collar work through aggressive adoption of large language models (generative AI). In the face of these changes, workers are expected to accept their new, typically more controlled, unstable, exploitative work arrangements, re-train and re-skill to find employment in different or new types of work or face un- and under-employment with whatever safety net might be available. Underlying these changes to work arrangements is a drive for efficiency and profit. (read more...)

Venture Capital’s Due Diligence, or Ethnography’s Adversarial Twin?

 Al Lim  September 4, 2026

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On a crypto builders’ night in late September 2023, I lingered in the crowd after the event. It was hosted in a crypto company’s newly renovated office in the center of Bangkok. Skipping the cold pizza (mostly due to my lactose intolerance), I made my way towards a friend who worked in that company, one of the only people I knew in the packed room. He made a few introductions before disappearing back into the crowd, leaving me beside a local Thai founder in his early 30s, Noon (a pseudonym), building a decentralized finance (DeFi) product for futures and margin trading. (read more...)

Silt, Sea and Coastal Engineering

 Sridhar Raghavan  September 2, 2026

இந்த உள்ளடக்கம் தமிழிலும் கிடைக்கிறது.

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This picture from Vellapallam on the Bay of Bengal coast tells a story. While the obvious one is a story on the invisible gendered labour aspects of fishery, this essay will focus on another observation from the picture – Why does the fish end up needing so much cleaning in the first place? The fish, the net on the yellow tarpaulin, the fisherman’s shirt, all seen covered with clayey silt. What is the story of this tiny silt and its role in making the coasts? (read more...)

A Horse in the Archive: Notes on Incompleteness in Biometric Infrastructures

 kayah  August 31, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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A few months ago, I underwent four surgeries to remove two wisdom teeth. Long and painful, they took from me solid parts with strange shapes — a friend, on seeing one of the pieces, said it looked like a shark’s tooth! It was a slow, drawn-out experience: after each surgery, I had to recover before starting the next stage of the same process. During each one, I heard the dentist and her assistants discussing how stubbornly that tooth was attached to my skull. (read more...)

“Can You Hear Me Now?”: Listening in China’s Romance Simulation Games

 Naijia Liu  August 28, 2026

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I was clicking through a game studio’s website when an image caught my eye. In a warm, cozy office, several people sit in front of their laptops, heads slightly tilted, listening carefully through headsets and taking notes. In the background, cartoonish banners on the walls display the phrases “Leave a comment” and “After hearing the players’ voices, what are your thoughts?” in large font. People gather to stick their notes onto the wall or read the ones written by others. The accompanying text reads: “Through all the challenges, it is the support and companionship of our customers that has fueled our pursuit of dreams… Our team sat in the player experience hall, where we carefully listened to the voices of our players.” (read more...)

Dispatch from Seoul: Reflections on the Science, Technology & Human Values Science and Technology Studies School, June 2026

 Lachlan Hensey  August 24, 2026

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It is the third of our four days at the 2026 ST&HV Science and Technology Studies (STS) School. We file past laboratories populated by white-coated researchers and take our seats in a classroom in Seoul National University’s (SNU) College of Natural Sciences. “Look – real scientists!” someone jokes as we sit down. (read more...)

In the Pensive Pause of Supervision: A Footnote on Citing Santos

 Tanu Biswas  August 20, 2026

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Author’s editorial prelude: In what follows, I open up insight into a micro-moment of everyday scholarly life which shows itself through the body; like that slightly deeper breath which follows while one is thinking through a problem that occupies the mind. Such fleeting moments pass unnoticed, yet they are part of the labour and effort of what counts as teaching and supervision ‘work’. I believe there is value in turning attention to and staying with such moments as they quietly shape how one thinks, reads, judges, writes, teaches, supervises and such. My request to the reader is to stay present with the moment, the internal self-talk, and recalls that I describe in this piece. A request that places a demand on the reader to perform the sometimes-tedious task of curbing the desire to go beyond the moment that is the subject of analytical attention. (read more...)