This series explores policy through anthropological methodologies to better understand how policies work as instruments of political intervention and social change. What new kinds of actors, subjects, and social spaces do policies create, and how are they used to manage populations? Can policy analysis shed light on wider transformations of governance and power? How can ethnography capture critical dimensions of policymaking, and the cultural worlds of policymakers themselves? For more on the series, click below.
The Anthropology of Policy Noémi Lendvai-Bainton and Paul Stubbs, February 2024 The anthropology of policy as a field emerged in the 1990s in recognition of the need to understand and critically interrogate policies as important sites of classification, disciplining,...
Transforming School Food Politics around the World Edited by Jennifer E. Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert Foreword by Silvia Federici How to successfully challenge and transform public school-food programs to emphasize care, justice, and sustainability, with insights from...
Unruly Domestication: Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru Kristin Skrabut, May 2024 How the international war on poverty shapes identities, relationships, politics, and urban space in Peru. Unruly Domestication investigates how Peru’s ongoing,...
Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World Cris Shore and Susan Wright, February 2024 All aspects of our work and private lives are increasingly measured and managed. But how has this 'audit culture' arisen and what kind of a world is it...
Towards a Global Social Policy Otherwise: Decoloniality, socialist worldmaking and an ethics of translation Noémi Lendvai-Bainton and Paul Stubbs, November 2022 In this text, we argue for critical reflexivity regarding ‘global social policy studies’, focusing on the...
The cultural politics of dental humanitarianism (Chapter of Culture of Oral Health) Sarah E. Raskin, 2022 Multiple sociopolitical trends underlie US residents’ unmet oral care needs, including lack of public spending on adult dental coverage, Medicaid reimbursement...
Fast Childcare in Public Preschools Renita Thedvall, 2019 Fast Childcare in Public Preschools presents an ethnographic examination of the implementation of fast-policy management models and the efforts of teachers to use these to improve their work organization, and...
Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention Tess Lea, July 2020 Can there be good social policy? This book describes what happens to Indigenous policy when it targets the supposedly 'wild people' of regional and remote Australia. Tess Lea explores...
Sustaining Life: AIDS Activism in South Africa Theodore Powers, March 2020 An ethnographic account of the South African AIDS movement and activists From the historical roots of AIDS activism in the struggle for African liberation to the everyday work of community...
Implementing Inequality: The Invisible Labor of International Development Rebecca Warne Peters, January 2017 Implementing Inequality argues that the international development industry’s internal dynamics—between international and national staff, and among policy...
Meeting Ethnography: Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance Jen Sandler, Renita Thedvall, December 2019 This volume asks and addresses elusive ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions about meetings. What...
Discreet Power: How the World Economic Forum Shapes Market Agendas Christina Garsten and Adrienne Sörbom, July 2018 In Discreet Power, Christina Garsten and Adrienne Sörbom undertake an ethnographic study of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Accessing one of the primary...
Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market Janine R. Wedel, November 2019 It can feel like we’re swimming in a sea of corruption. It’s unclear who exactly is in charge and what role they play. The same...