To me, one of the most important lessons offered by Tu is the point that to think with and through skin is to think intimately and in an embodied way about, with and through the world.

It is only now, after reading the responses in this forum, that I can see that a “geographical unconscious” lurked in this book. I was searching for the histories hidden on our surfaces, but this, I’ve come to recognize, requires both temporal and spatial excavation.

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nairobi between 2017 and 2018, Tessa Diphoorn analyses how police officers differentiate themselves from other police officers along (moral) ideas of reform and how this occurs in two divergent, yet interconnected, directions.

"Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam" unmasks neat epistemic divides between war and beauty, harm and care. Thuy Linh Tu asks how skin and practices of caring for skin are sites of racialized war-making and knowledge-making, of violent histories and ambivalent futures.

“The Licit Life of Capitalism” offers an intimate and eclectic portrait of the oil industry’s attempt to disentangle itself from a small country on - and off - Africa’s Atlantic coast. But beyond these empirics, how might Appel’s portrait push scholars to examine the effects of our centuries-old, critical concept of “Capitalism”?

In "Digging for the Disappeared", Adam Rosenblatt examines the work of forensic anthropology teams in the context of criminal and humanitarian investigations of mass killings. His stated goal is to relate and scrutinize the politics and ethics of the forensic investigation of mass graves.

Historians usually write about the institutions they study as static entities, but what would it look like to write a history that captured their dynamism? This essay offers one idea, using the Catholic Church, the ultimate in unchanging institutions, as its example.

In this paper, I will critique this separation between wage work at FIFO mine sites and subsistence activities by exploring the multiple temporalities that exist for FIFO workers, their families, and communities focusing on three local temporalities: industrial time, shared social times, and caribou/more-than-human time.

Red Tape is extraordinary. For me it is particularly so in the very granular way that Gupta uses the banal enactments of bureaucrats—including the routinized things they say, their mundane and predictable practices, and the ordinary objects they employ such as paper and pen—to expose the ways they entrain the “legitimation of violence” against poor people in India.

In 2016, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched a visual campaign about its disputed borders. A poster, entitled “Do you know the shape of Japan?” [日本のカタチ知っていますか], highlights three points of tension—the Northern Territories, Takeshima, and Senkaku Islands, disputed with Russia, Korea, and China respectively.