Name and Draw: An Exploration of Communicating Traditional Knowledge in the Work of Abel Rodríguez

Indigenous peoples possess a close and complex relationship with their surroundings and have gathered from their traditions and life experiences invaluable and extensive knowledge of a wide range of academic research areas.

What Water Teaches: Wissenschaft in the Age of Sea Level Rise

Does the sense of urgency occasioned by global warming and sea level rise have the power to reshape the humanities? Insofar as sea level rise will affect thousands of institutions of education and culture in coastal cities, the answer is yes.

“Still It Makes Me Laugh, No Time to Die”: Methodological Reflections on Oxford Street

Ato Quayson

In responding to several commentaries on his book, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, the author calls upon autobiographical memories and probes their relation to fieldwork and translational transactions between various languages, pointing out that there are no easy or single sources for entextualized anecdotes or slogans.

Más Arte Más Acción: Utopia’s 500th

This essay presents the work of Más Arte Más Acción, a UK–Colombian non-profit cultural foundation set up in 2009 by visual artist Fernando Arias and cultural manager Jonathan Colin.

Comic by Craig Klugman

The Health Humanities and the Future of Publishing

This paper discusses the evolution of the field of Health Humanities and examines the effects that changes in publishing may hold for its continued development, including open access, pre-print servers, textbooks, ebooks, blogs, and other innovations that might presage a non-print—and even post-text—future.

Los intelectuales africanos ante el fenómeno de las dictaduras

A menudo me preguntan para qué sirve la literatura en las sociedades africanas. Desde fuera, resultan incomprensibles tantas horas de…

Zhuangzi Dreaming of a Butterfly, Ming dynasty, mid-16th century, ink on silk.

Cosmographic Experiments: Thinking, Doing, and Being with Classical Chinese Medicine

Mei Zhan

In questioning the status of materialist theory and the process of theorization in traditional Chinese medicine, and in postsocialist life more broadly speaking, classical Chinese medicine advocates imagine nondialectical materialisms as immanent ways of thinking, doing, and being in the world.

Pume Bylex's Tourist City

"Illuminating the Hole": Kinshasa’s Makeovers Between Dream and Reality

I examine the history of modern urban planning ideas and makeover models in the capital city of Kinshasa, Congo, with specific reference to the career of Pume Bylex. These proposed and attempted makeovers are looked at in the historical, cultural, and social context of Kinshasa itself, specifically regarding its colonial past, its prevailing mysticism, and its residents’ collective yearning for a dream city and a utopia that removes them from the reality of the actual city and nation they inhabit.

Man Collecting a blood sample from a Tibetan subject

Genetic Origami in Asian Experiments

Aihwa Ong

How can the humanities and social sciences can be blended in a contemporary inquiry into the flow of bioscience to sites in Asia?

Lebanese women wave their national flag and hold placards as they take part in a protest in Beirut

Environmental Activism in the Middle East: Prospects and Challenges

Environmental activism has intensified across the Middle East and North Africa over the past few decades, focusing primarily on environmental issues that affect public health, livelihoods, and essential services.