Anthropology

Long-term cruisers spend years living and travelling on small or medium-sized sailboats. They balance individualized, flexible lives with ongoing responsibilities to their boat, crew, and a fluid cruising community. They defy mainstream ideals linked to biomedicine, self-help, and economic productivity. While cruisers sometimes mobilize neoliberal discourse, they do not adhere to its undergirding values. Their subjectivity is centered on willful unbelonging; cruisers' choice of living away from mainstream society is a willfulness expressed by enjoying novelty and freedom that challenges the normative North American lifestyle. Enacting and reproducing the cruising identity is thus emblematic of willful unbelonging, a positive process of self-"marginalization". This research illuminates the possibility that unbelonging, and by extension belonging, is not a condition or state of being, but rather an active process embodied in mundane behaviours and experiences, such as sleep, listening, and multi-sensory engagement with (non-human) sounds understood as discourse, voice and bodily sensation.

The collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 stands out as both unique and exemplary among the possible cases in which a dramatic and rapid regime change engenders a prolonged construction and reconstruction of what had unexpectedly become the official past into a living memory and revised history. With the fall of the communist regimes, the hegemonic political order of East-Central Europe and the Soviet Union disintegrated into republics with geopolitical borders that marked a distinct culturalhistorical claim on self-determination. The process was characterized by a breaking apart that was, in several cases, bloody, even genocidal. In contrast, East Germany was "absorbed" into West Germany in a unilateral act of reunification, claiming a return to a former, historical entity that was, of course, covered in the blood of World War II and the Holocaust. What happens to memory on the way to history (or its dustbin)? How do the mundane and everyday, once disrupted, manage to reassert themselves as valid and valuable, as the initial desire to "go West" clashes with the reality of failed promises and the feeling of having become the "lesserthan" immigrant in your own country? Jonathan Bach's What Remains offers a remarkable in-depth discussion of "what happens when the state vanishes, leaving behind a material legacy that both resists and demands a response from ordinary people" (p. 1). Based on extensive research in what had been East Germany, and spanning the initial decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this study in material culture succeeds in walking us through, at times literally, what reads like a magical landscape in which the trash, desiderata, and fragments of yesteryear are moved, both physically and symbolically, in order to become visual feasts and official memories that are finally reinserted into the everyday as fetishes of nostalgia. The author unpacks a series of meaning-making processes across a whole range of cases that would otherwise

The collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 stands out as both unique and exemplary among the possible cases in which a dramatic and rapid regime change engenders a prolonged construction and reconstruction of what had unexpectedly become the official past into a living memory and revised history. With the fall of the communist regimes, the hegemonic political order of East-Central Europe and the Soviet Union disintegrated into republics with geopolitical borders that marked a distinct culturalhistorical claim on self-determination. The process was characterized by a breaking apart that was, in several cases, bloody, even genocidal. In contrast, East Germany was "absorbed" into West Germany in a unilateral act of reunification, claiming a return to a former, historical entity that was, of course, covered in the blood of World War II and the Holocaust. What happens to memory on the way to history (or its dustbin)? How do the mundane and everyday, once disrupted, manage to reassert themselves as valid and valuable, as the initial desire to "go West" clashes with the reality of failed promises and the feeling of having become the "lesserthan" immigrant in your own country? Jonathan Bach's What Remains offers a remarkable in-depth discussion of "what happens when the state vanishes, leaving behind a material legacy that both resists and demands a response from ordinary people" (p. 1). Based on extensive research in what had been East Germany, and spanning the initial decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this study in material culture succeeds in walking us through, at times literally, what reads like a magical landscape in which the trash, desiderata, and fragments of yesteryear are moved, both physically and symbolically, in order to become visual feasts and official memories that are finally reinserted into the everyday as fetishes of nostalgia. The author unpacks a series of meaning-making processes across a whole range of cases that would otherwise

Latin American communication research has a long history of considering communication as a participatory and horizontal process. However, this research is not necessarily widely known in the West. This paper analyzes the work of some of the main foundational and contemporary communication scholars from Latin America, and the contributions and limitations of this body of work in relation to global communication. This paper draws mainly from the work of foundational and contemporary scholars from Latin America. To a lesser extent, it draws from the work of scholars from other countries from the West and the Global South that can inform the understanding of communication research in Latin America. An exploration of the main work and thought of some of the foundational Latin American communication scholars indicates that most of this literature has focused on empirical contributions, assessing, questioning, re-contextualizing and adapting the theories from the West to the local settings...

Migrant women engaged in precarious employment, such as sex work, frequently face pronounced social isolation alongside other barriers to health and human rights. Although peer support has been identified as a critical HIV and violence prevention intervention for sex workers, little is known about access to peer support or its role in shaping health and social outcomes for migrant sex workers. This article analyses the role of peer support in shaping vulnerability and resilience related to HIV/STI prevention and violence among international migrant sex workers at the Mexico-Guatemala border. This qualitative study is based on 31 semi-structured interviews conducted with international migrant sex workers in the Mexico-Guatemala border communities of Tapachula, Mexico and Tecún Umán and Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Peer support was found to be critical for reducing social isolation; improving access to HIV/STI knowledge, prevention and resources; and mitigating workplace violence, parti...

What kinds of spaces do intentional communities create? How do everyday practices and interactions shape the lives of intentional community members? What can their participation in diverse economic practices tell us about contemporary avenues for resisting or subverting capitalist norms? What kinds of subjectivities are formed in such communities? These questions are inspired by theoretical works from scholars such as Ernst Bloch, J.K. Gibson-Graham, Kathi Weeks, and Donna Haraway, but also the everyday practices of becoming in which activists and community builders engage. In this thesis, I explore Mirkwood House members’ experiences “becoming-with” as a community, engaging in diverse economic practices, and building utopian projects. I argue that these experiences reflect those of seriously playful subjects capable of long-term, enduring, dynamic experimentation and creation of other worlds, ones that make utopian projects not only possible, but pleasurable.