There are signs of a Goffmanian turn in political economy, alongside renewed interest in the biographical trajectory of Goffman himself. What are, or could be, the hallmarks of a Goffmanian political economy? How did political economy concerns and questions figure in Goffman’s work and thought? What might the systematic incorporation into political economy scholarship (broadly defined) of Goffmanian concepts and sensibilities look like? What distinctive insights does the existing Goffman-influenced political economy scholarship offer?
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2026 (page 2 of 2)
Sonali Thakkar
The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought
Stanford University Press
288 pages, notes, bibliography, index
As a title, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Racism in Postcolonial Thought is refreshing, in that it identifies as a keyword not a supposed religion (“Judaism”) nor yet an ascription to a certain set of humans (“Jews”), but rather a powerful cultural construction that is the shared product of those who identify with “Jewishness” and those who do not. Thakkar’s study is grounded in a critical study of UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race. As she documents, that statement and the anthropological and other scholarly discourses connected with it understood race as “plastic,” meaning that the apparent inferiority of certain races—immigrant Jews were an example for Franz Boas—was largely the effect of environmental factors and was therefore subject to amelioration under the right conditions. The further assertion was that anti-racist education was the best response to racism and its then recent genocidal consequences. The postcolonial critique of such a position is, in essence, that these interventions left in place structures of racism and the forms of domination that emerged from them.
Continue readingThis workshop, timed to follow the Economic History Society conference, aims to bring together scholars who have engaged with the Murdock Atlas in their research, and who are interested in an open, cross-disciplinary, and forward-looking conversation on the merits, limitations, and pitfalls of using the Atlas in social science research.
Continue readingPanel P083 “Beyond Polarised Histories of Anthropologies: Female Ethnographers and Folklorists between the Mid-19th and Early 20th Centuries [History of Anthropology Network (HOAN)]” will be held in hybrid format at the EASA2026 Conference “Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World”, Poznań, Poland, 21-24 July 2026.
Coordinated by Fabiana Dimpflmeier (Gabriele d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara), Maria Beatrice Di Brizio (Centro di Ricerca MODI – Università di Bologna), and Elena Emma Sottilotta (University of Cambridge) the panel aims to overcome polarised histories of anthropologies, exploring the multiple roles of female scholars in the development of the emerging disciplines of ethnography and folklore between the mid-19th and the early 20th centuries.
The Call for Papers closes on 26 January 2026. Further details are available on the webpage for Panel 083.
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