The Covid-19 pandemic lockdown had a profound impact on British young adults' drug using lives. Overnight, participants found themselves unable to access the protective mechanisms, specifically peer groups and routines on which they had come to rely to control and maintain pleasure with their drug use. The resulting analysis from online semi-structured qualitative interviews with 14 young people exposes a trend in drug use patterns. Substances that are easily intertwined in their daily lives and the conditions of lockdown, such as cannabis, alcohol, and cocaine were used more frequently and more habitually. Despite a perception of low risk due to prevalent use, these substances pose a heightened risk of dependency. In this article, I argue that because they were socially isolated and without protective mechanisms, such as peer support or daily routines, participants incorporated these drugs into their work-from-home regimes. This gave rise to a potential lack of control of their use. This insight contributes to enhancing a nuanced understanding of (un)controlled drug use among young people and the factors that influence this.

The federal historic preservation program of the United States guided by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and its ensuing regulations is built on a framework that privileges Western epistemologies of time and space and perceives historic properties as inanimate remains that are valuable for their scientific potential and their capacity for representing significant historic contexts (Dongoske, Pasqual, and King 2015).The concept of historic preservation is far more personal for the Zuni people, however.Zunis see their historical sites as "memory pieces" where culture and history are recalled and discussed, and where ancestral spirits live on and offer power and strength to today's generations (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2006).Zunis believe that any disturbance of these places has negative and lasting effects on the Zuni people and the world as a whole.Zunis thus define historic preservation as the maintenance and continuity of Zuni culture through the protection, commemoration, and continued respectful interaction with their historical sites and ancestors.In this article, we explore Zuni perspectives on historic preservation and provide recommendations on how adverse effects on historic properties can be mitigated to benefit the Zuni people. IMPLICATIONSFor the National Historic Preservation Act to truly accommodate Native American perspectives and values, U.S. federal agencies must provide inclusive and comprehensive consideration to places of cultural significance identified by Native Americans during the law's implementation.Heritage practitioners need to shift away from prevailing practices that reinforce the Western power structure in heritage production and embrace a willingness to recognize, respect, and value the expertise of traditional communities.

In Flint, Michigan (USA), an ongoing anthropogenic water crisis exposed residents to lead and other drinking water contaminants. The neoliberal policies that created this water crisis made Flint residents responsible for their own safe drinking water. In this article, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 among older adults in Flint to argue that the water crisis has deepened forms of responsibilized citizenship by making residents responsible for ameliorating harms of the state. Older residents’ narratives of previous experiences of racialized structural violence shaped the emotional qualities of their present experiences with contaminated water. By exploring these responses and situating them within narratives of the past, we show that contemporary water governance can operate according to a necropolitical logic, in which citizens are responsibilized not towards an optimized future but rather in response to harms caused by the neoliberal state. Necropolitical logic reinforces the racial and economic inequalities that characterize majority-Black postindustrial American cities, thus limiting the potential for equitable resource distribution. By foregrounding older adults’ experientially grounded knowledge of the sociopolitical life of water, we underline the need for a holistic approach to justice that addresses the harms of both the present and the past and the relational nature of these harms. This approach could work towards remedying the racially disproportionate experiences of water insecurity in the United States.

Researchers of environmental change in island communities increasingly reimagine resilience. Critical theorists ask whether this trend is a net positive for different populations and non-human natures in these fragile spaces. Engaging these critiques in Utila, Bay Islands, Honduras, a place known for marine-based tourism, in this article, we consider whether it is possible to talk about resilience given the constraints placed on conservation NGOs by neoliberal capitalism. We draw on lessons learned from a conservation NGO/anthropology collaboration to produce environmental education programming. This aims to explicitly incorporate local experiences, memories, and knowledge to consider the possibilities offered by documenting, elevating, and celebrating local knowledge in order to offer ways of rethinking resilience conceptually and in practice.

This special issue shows that the intersection of software and human systems is necessarily academic and applied. The collected articles make clear that software needs anthropological analyses while demonstrating that understanding the impact of software requires technological expertise. Software and human systems meet in specific programs, institutions, and histories. For anthropologists, this intersection requires confronting the software “as data” dilemma—we gain analytical purchase by treating software as another type of data, yet this approach can also mean losing sight of the algorithmic work that software accomplishes in our everyday lives. Software is not mere data but has a variety to it akin to the diversity that anthropology has long interrogated. This introduction advocates for an approach based in “Human-Computer Assembled Networks”—recognizing how software and human systems work through specific interfaces, assemble technologies and resources and human actors, and function through networks both human and algorithmic. Overall, the collected articles demonstrate an array of ways to do applied anthropology, ranging from ethnographic work on specific projects, the development of specific software informed by anthropology, and critical engagements with histories of software and technology. Finally, this special issue advocates for a translational approach that is specifically positioned to mediate between academic and applied approaches.

Kenya lies in the FGM/C belt stretching across Africa, and the Maasai are frequent practitioners. FGM/C has been declining in Kenya over time but not among the Maasai. The Kenyan government, many outside agencies, and the Maasai council of elders are all working to eradicate this practice, yet it persists among the Maasai. Eradication efforts tend to be either idealist or materialist but not both. We studied three primary schools surrounding Maasai Mara National Reserve to investigate what is being done at the school level to fight this practice. We discovered that FGM/C among the Maasai is always associated with girls’ early school dropouts and early marriage (the “triad of trouble”), so the measurement of one is a proxy for the measurement of the others. We also verified that school dropout rates (and associated factors in the triad) are sharply lower in these schools than in the general Maasai population and still declining. This is being accomplished through a complex interplay of eradication efforts—both idealist and materialist—such as education, persuasion, coordination of enforcement, legal prosecution, and rescue centers for sheltering girls at risk of FGM/C. Community attitudes are shifting against FGM/C as a result of these Maasai-led initiatives.

The trees at the heart of this paper are not an isolated story but contribute to the machinery of the settler colonial present, feeding off indigenous dispossession of the Arkansas Ozarks. In this paper, I explore “trail trees,” a form of culturally-modified tree used to sustain and perpetuate replacement narratives romanticizing a lost Native American past and constructing a pure, modern, scientific “reality” of White settler possession of the region. My critique is directed at the settler colonial worldview and the systems through which it is constructed, legitimated, and spread. I ask: What is at stake for advocates for the existence of “trail trees”? What can disrupt and dismantle the “trail tree” discourse and the replacement narrative that it functions within? What work can we do to create an opening for anti-colonial praxis? The answers to these questions involve direct engagement with conservation and conservationists and the narratives of replacement that suffuse their work.