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During the Iraq War, thousands of young Baghdadis worked as interpreters for US troops, becoming the front line of the so-called War on Terror. Deployed by the military as linguistic as well as cultural interpreters-translating the \"human terrain\" of Iraq-members of this network urgently honed identification strategies amid suspicion from US forces, fellow Iraqis, and, not least of all, one another. In Interpreters of Occupation, Campbell traces the experiences of twelve individuals from their young adulthood as members of the last Ba'thist generation, to their work as interpreters, through their navigation of the US immigration pipeline, and finally to their resettlement in the United States. Throughout, Campbell considers how these men and women grappled with issues of belonging and betrayal, both on the battlefield in Iraq and in the US-based diaspora.A nuanced and richly detailed ethnography, Interpreters of Occupation gives voice to a generation of US allies through their diverse and vividly rendered life histories. In the face of what some considered a national betrayal in Iraq and their experiences of otherness within the United States, interpreters negotiate what it means to belong to a diasporic community in flux.

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, \"legal\"/\"illegal,\" and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.    

The notion of 'place' is a powerful one: the place where we are from; the place where we live; the place where we would like to be. It raises issues of identity and belonging (or lack of it), and about roots and connections (or lack of them). In a world that is more uncertain, more liquid, less known, place matters. This engaging and accessible book is the first of its kind to look at the role of place in schools and in the lives of young people today. Drawing on original research from the US, UK and South Africa, Kathryn Riley poses some tough questions to the practitioners who lead our schools, and to the politicians who decide the fate of our schools: ·Can schools create a space for young people to be safe and confident in who they are? ·Can they help them find their place in the world and understand how to shape it?

Even as they see their wages go down and their buying power decrease, many parents are still putting their kids' material desires first. These parents struggle with how to handle children's consumer wants, which continue unabated despite the economic downturn. And, indeed, parents and other adults continue to spend billions of dollars on children every year. Why do children seem to desire so much, so often, so soon, and why do parents capitulate so readily? To determine what forces lie behind the onslaught of Nintendo Wiis and Bratz dolls, Allison J. Pugh spent three years observing and interviewing children and their families. In Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Pugh teases out the complex factors that contribute to how we buy, from lunchroom conversations about Game Boys to the stark inequalities facing American children. Pugh finds that children's desires stem less from striving for status or falling victim to advertising than from their yearning to join the conversation at school or in the neighborhood. Most parents respond to children's need to belong by buying the particular goods and experiences that act as passports in children's social worlds, because they sympathize with their children's fear of being different from their peers. Even under financial constraints, families prioritize children \"feeling normal\". Pugh masterfully illuminates the surprising similarities in the fears and hopes of parents and children from vastly different social contexts, showing that while corporate marketing and materialism play a part in the commodification of childhood, at the heart of the matter is the desire to belong.

Based on years of careful ethnographic fieldwork in Hanoi, Haunting Images offers a frank and compassionate account of the moral quandaries that accompany innovations in biomedical technology. At the center of the book are case studies of thirty pregnant women whose fetuses were labeled “abnormal” after an ultrasound examination. By following these women and their relatives through painful processes of reproductive decision making, Tine M. Gammeltoft offers intimate ethnographic insights into everyday life in contemporary Vietnam and a sophisticated theoretical exploration of how subjectivities are forged in the face of moral assessments and demands. Across the globe, ultrasonography and other technologies for prenatal screening offer prospective parents new information and present them with agonizing decisions never faced in the past. For anthropologists, this diagnostic capability raises important questions about individuality and collectivity, responsibility and choice. Arguing for more sustained anthropological attention to human quests for belonging, Haunting Images addresses existential questions of love and loss that concern us all.

Extremist narratives combine two relational dynamics: the in-group is portrayed as both socially superior and simultaneously victimized by an antagonistic out-group, which legitimizes hostility or defensive solutions. Despite their relevance, such narratives remain comparatively understudied. To date, little research has examined how extremist narratives are represented through memes, and particularly how humour operates within memetic forms. This article develops and tests a three-layered analytical framework for examining humour in extremist digital cultures. The framework integrates insights from narrative studies, multimodal discourse analysis, and humour theory to capture how memes condense antagonisms, stabilize symbolic contrasts, and calibrate affective positioning. The Virgin vs. Chad meme format is used as a case study due to its binary archetypal structure and recurrent circulation in Spanish far-right meme ecologies. The study draws on 1225 posts on X (May–August 2024), from which 17 memes employing the format were selected for in-depth qualitative analysis. The findings show that the format performs symbolic compression by staging binary oppositions between in-group and out-group identities, typically valorizing figures associated with nationalism, masculinity, and epistemic certainty while delegitimizing those linked to progressivism, pluralism, or emotional expressiveness. These meanings are stabilized through repeated visual and typographic conventions, including character archetypes, split-panel layouts, and indexical stylization. Humour arises through devices such as irony, reversal, exaggeration, and incongruity, which render these oppositions as recognizable contrasts. By integrating insights from humour theory, narrative framing, and multimodal discourse analysis, the article contributes a methodological model for examining how memes condense and circulate antagonistic distinctions in online political ecologies.