Eliza Jane Darling

Dear AAA: Sink or Swim?

This statement, written by Ryan Anderson, Jason Antrosio, Sarah Kendzior and myself, is a response to a post on the American Anthropological Association blog that discusses our recent writings about adjuncts, anthropology, and academia. We are gratified that the American Anthropological Association has taken note of our critical commentary on the vagaries of the academic […]

by Eliza Jane Darling

Less Than Zero Anthropology

“Sometimes,” remarked a wise colleague of mine many years ago, “It seems all I know how to do is critique.” We were postgraduate students, I in anthropology, she in sociology, but our paths crossed several times in the classes of a VFM whose task it was to bathe us in the critical light of dialectics. […]

by Eliza Jane Darling

White Lies

As that hallowed expanse of country adjoining California to the New York Island broils beneath the candescent sky of an Olympian heat, still one place in America remains too cool to melt butter: the mouth of the banker. So smooth these operators that one need hardly scratch the thief to find the liar, for the […]

by Eliza Jane Darling

Invisible Freedoms

It is the singular affliction of whiteness to suffer the slings and arrows of righteous indignation on the rare occasion its privileges are infringed by the power structures meant to secure them. High on the list of stuff white people don’t like is surveillance, at least when its traditional contours are involuted, the lidless eye […]

by Eliza Jane Darling

The Ties That Bind

On Friday morning, intoned the President of the United States, “…we woke up to news of a tragedy that reminds us all of the ways we are united as one American family.” Having arisen to the announcement that one American had gunned down scores of his compatriots in a Colorado theatre, I was compelled to […]

by Eliza Jane Darling

Sixteen Shares

Violins at the ready. Bernie Madoff has wailed in a weepy confessional to New York Magazine that he’s not such a bad egg after all. “I’m not the kind of person I’m being portrayed as,” he told Steve Fishman. “I’m a good person.” Bernie is one of a bold band of browbeaten brigadiers who have […]

by Eliza Jane Darling

The Song of the Nonaligned Nile

The United States, whose hallowed creation myth styles America as the quintessential child of revolution, has for decades navigated the insupportable irony of denying others their own political parturition through the ideological conflation of freedom with stability. From Nicaragua to Iran, this deployment has served as a discursive validation for a host of violent counterinsurgency […]

by Eliza Jane Darling

The Big Society Bites Back

“Move along folks, you’re blocking a cash point.” This pithy synopsis of the neoliberal logic driving the policing of student protest was delivered unironically by one of London Met’s Finest to the milling crowd at a recent demonstration at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, whose inmates gazed down apprehensively from their glass cubicles […]

by Eliza Jane Darling

Deepwater Uni

The evangelical neoliberalism which erupted in the US House of Representatives in 2008 and spread like the mange to the UK House of Commons is coming soon to an English university near you. The free market rapture comes courtesy of a man so dreadfully incompetent he couldn’t even be trusted to run BP: Edmund John […]