Decay as Care: Companioning Things through Death

Garden of Death by Hugo Simberg. A photograph of the original watercolor painting. Public Domain.

Marisa Karyl Franz shares how she became attuned to decay, rot, and ruin, subjects of her recent CSSH essay.

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Thinking about Flogging

Emir of Zazzau, Malam Aliyu Dan Sidi (1903-1920). Nigerian Public Domain.

Steven Pierce shares how reconsidering previously-analyzed subjects led to more profound insights.

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Firearms, Magic, and Memory

Sean McEnroe recalls his childhood experiences with firearms, and explains how these memories, both troubling and nostalgic, inform his research on magical practices and military technology on colonial frontiers.

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Folding and Collaborating

Robert P. Weller and Keping Wu describe their collaborative research and writing process, sharing how they came to folding as an analytic framework and envisioning how it might be further applied.

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From Thrift to Austerity 

Catherine Alexander shares the initial fieldwork breakthroughs and subsequent scholarly pursuits that led to the nuanced understanding of thrift she presents in her CSSH essay, “The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate.”

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Better late than never – and winding up better

Barbara Metcalf describes the frustrations and breakthroughs over nearly forty years that brought her to the conclusions in her 2022 CSSH article, “A Sovereign and Virtuous Body: The Competent Muslim Woman’s Guide to Health in Thanawi’s Bihishtī Zēwar(1905).”

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