Abstract Penetrating the everyday and mundane, social media has become an important political battleground for hybrid warfare and far-right claims. In this visual analysis of the Special Operations Unit of Rio de Janeiro's Military Police Instagram feed, we examine how Rio's favelas are aesthetically produced as warzones, and their inhabitants as enemies to be eliminated and transformed. We argue that the images shared draw on a repertoire of right-wing moralism and cosmology as well as a vernacular influenced by social media logics of engagement that contribute to the algorithmic militarization of everything, everywhere.

Abstract Departing from the temptation of treating the concept of hegemony as a singular, essentialized regime, or as a term synonymous with domination, the article invites attention to its dynamic and multilayered meaning. A more nuanced treatment of the concept brings forward its plural and contested connotations. In the analysis presented here I foreground the benefits of using the concept in processual terms, as well as the internal differentiation between Gramscian-inspired appr oaches. I consider the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, as representative of a distinctively British reading of Gramsci. To the degree that a narrow and singularized use of hegemony can lead to flat and unexciting conceptualization of power, Gramscian-inspired uses capture the fluidity, complexity, and materiality of power articulations and our proximity to them.

Abstract Milan is an increasingly safe city. Despite this, the insecurity perceived by citizens is growing. Particularly in social housing districts, squatting is considered by institutions, public opinion, but also by most regular residents, as one of the principle causes of urban insecurity. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Milan between 2015 and 2017, this article proposes an anthropological analysis of policies, norms, practices, and narratives related to the governance of housing illegality, showing how these representations contribute to producing a stigmatized, morally connoted, and criminalized image of squatters. In broader terms, starting with the ethnographic case of squatting, the article explores the anthropopoietic dynamics of social class construction and the centrality of moral categories in the production of urban inequality.

Abstract As part of a process of non-performing loan crisis, Hungary has been experiencing a protracted foreign currency loans crisis since 2008. The crisis and the household management of problem debts were commonly discussed in popular tabloids, which play an important role in framing economic events for lay audiences. For this study, I selected relevant articles from the most popular Hungarian tabloid, Blikk, and used discourse analysis to understand how the crisis was narrated. The tabloid stories portray borrowers through metaphors and personal gossip stories of both celebrities and ordinary people. Debtors are usually portrayed in the media as financially illiterate or undisciplined subjects of lifestyle defaulters; however, the gossip stories in this Hungarian tabloid presented borrowers as financially struggling hardship defaulters and victims of creditors.

Abstract This article examines the endurance of traditional class labels among precarious workers in post-recession Dublin. It argues that tensions remain between creatives and non-creatives due to: (1) divergent class concepts, (2) a lack of social engagement, and (3) unequal access to economic, social, and cultural capital, which creatives mobilize to protect some highly vocational artistic labor. It is thus not a shared experience of the same kind of precarious exploitation that unites the precariat but a trap held in common, whereby self-actualization through labor is construed as a route to freedom. Drawing on Karl Marx's theory of emancipation, I suggest that attempts to redress precarization should focus on undermining this encroachment of work into life, which I argue results in exploitation and alienation for all precarious workers.

Abstract The “commons” have become a rallying point of social mobilization against privatization and a linchpin of collective civic empowerment and democratic renewal in several countries. What singles out the Italian “laboratory” of urban commons in recent years is the coalescence of pro-commons lawyers with activists, movements, and grassroots collectives. The central role played by law in the Italian commons network must be read in the light of the distinctive forms that regulations and rules assume in specific contexts. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2018 and 2019, this article focuses on the case of Naples and the reinvention of the legal tradition of “civic use.” Our account of the daily practices pursued by a Neapolitan community of commoners—L'Asilo—delves into the role played by the law and its representatives in a political context that has always been the subject of stigmatization.

Abstract As that which troubles simplistic binaries, ruins provide an entry point for scholars to conceptualize time, space, and identity as multiple, fragmented, and mutable. This article contributes to these studies by interrogating Australian settler-colonial time-space narratives (chronotopes) of White dominance through engagement with counter-narratives of mutable materialities and identities. Through ethnography of a commemorative event in a rural Australian town, I show how peoples of mixed Aboriginal and Asian descent negotiated racialized ruins to reassert narrative agency. I argue narratives of identity—when re-remembered through spatial understandings of multiple community membership, re-lived through embodied experiences, and re-collected through affective engagement with ruins—create a mutable space to disrupt settler-colonial chronotopes, revealing narratives of hybrid, polyethnic, and polyracial belongings in Australia.

Abstract “Backway” is the Gambian term for the outflow of people, mostly via the Mediterranean and oceanic routes that during the 2010s turned the country into one of the highest per capita origin points for sub-Saharan migrants in Europe. From the standpoint of Kerewan, a Gambian rural community proud of its migratory legacy, a mobility rules perspective uncovers the specificity of the “backway” in sensible arenas of village life: household and family networks, intergenerational relationships, and development. Since 2017, initiatives linked to the Euro-African mobility regime to immobilize young Gambians meet the practical rationality on the ground of communities like Kerewan engaged in a moral conversation about what family, village, intergenerational and transnational solidarity, and development should and do mean in the current predicament.

Abstract The shift in China's national economy from industrial manufacturing to technology and IT has placed constraints on the lives of rural-to-urban male migrant workers from the lower social strata. As the pace of out-migration in China slows, male rural returnees are harnessing self-reliant masculinities to reclaim status and heighten a sense of collective pride in and affiliation with their natal village. Centering on two ethnographic case studies of Dong ethnic minority male rural returnees in the autonomous district of Guizhou Province, the analysis in this article contributes to critique on the recent unfolding of the state-led “crisis of masculinity” to highlight the wider socioeconomic conditions that continue to deepen the inequalities and felt anxieties of male rural returnees.

Abstract Post-Soviet deindustrialization and the economic collapse of the 1990s led to a decline in the significance of the Donbas coal-mining region both economically and symbolically, while the start of the Russian war in Ukraine in 2014 aggravated the sense of isolation and fragmentation. The combined effects of these two forms of violence led to technocratic governance, in part promoted and encouraged by the international humanitarian organizations that entered the region after 2014. Where war and neoliberalism narrowed horizons for good life, fragmented technocratic governance limited horizons for political engagement. It also ignored and neglected the potential strengths of inherited socialist state infrastructure that could offer a safety net and a point of reference for citizens’ engagement with the world and each other.