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Sculpting in time -- Filial piety and existential dilemmas -- Youth and the party-state -- Between parents, party and peers -- The double-binds of "education for quality" -- Success, well-being and the question of suicide

This article examines the ways in which parenting practices of refugee parents are the object of concern for the Danish welfare state. Emphasis is placed on how interventions of daycare institutions and other welfare professionals have been experienced by refugee families who live in a context of radical uncertainty since they hold temporary residence permits in Denmark. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with families spanning several years, I analyze the experiences of a number of refugee families from Syria and Iran. Drawing on what has been called "the spectral turn" or "hauntology" in anthropology, I argue that welfare state belonging causes ambiguity for families who appreciate protection and sometimes family-like care from state agents but also fear its repercussions. As a result, I argue that relationships between refugee parents and agents of the welfare state are characterized not only by "fear of proximity" but also by "intimate distance", since refugee parents experience "the system" as being nowhere in particular but potentially everywhere.

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among what Lian Si (2009) has called China's 'ant tribe', referring to the millions of unemployed Chinese college graduates who live in the outskirts of Beijing and to some extent share the predicament of China's migrant workers. Education has been the main route to social mobility for centuries in China, but today college graduates are outnumbering jobs in China's large cities. I focus on the relationship between the fantasy of education as a route to social mobility and the actuality. By narrating the biographies of two university graduates, Jing Jing and Bai Gang, who attempted but partly failed to transcend the boundary between rural and urban China, I show how their quests for social mobility and a more fulfilling life were tied to economic, legal and cultural constraints. I argue that the quest for a better life through educational migration may lead to physical mobility, but that existential mobility is lacking and this sometimes leads to instances of suicide, just as is the case for Chinese migrant workers who feel trapped in appalling working conditions.

Vi lever længere og længere. Ifølge Danmarks Statistik er middellevetiden for danskere i 2019 på 81 år (79 år for mænd og 82, 9 år for kvinder) (DST 2019). Det er en fremgang på mere end fire år i danskernes middellevetid siden årtusindeskiftet (ibid.), hvilket vidner om, at livets længde er foranderlig. Hver dag udvikles der nye medicinske teknologier, og velfærdssamfundet byder ind med nye sociale teknologier, der ligeledes søger at forbedre og forlænge livet. Alene derfor er livet som ældre med andre ord ikke, hvad det plejede at være. Faktisk ved vi dårligt nok, hvem vi skal opfatte som "de ældre". I en tid hvor aldringslandskaber både i Danmark og globalt er under stærk forandring, hvordan skal vi da anskue aldring – som kronologisk, social, biologisk, fænomenologisk, funktionel eller institutionel aldring (Kertzer and Keith 1984, Beall 1984, Fortes 1984, Kaufman 1987, Katz 2006, Grøn og Olesen 2017)? Mange spørgsmål trænger sig på. Har vi erstattet en entydigt negativ fortælling om aldring som forfald med en entydigt positiv fortælling om sund, aktiv og vellykket aldring? Hvordan influerer det i så fald på forholdet mellem pædagogiske tiltag og pleje og omsorg for ældre?

As critical voices question the quality, authenticity, and value of people, goods, and words in post-Mao China, accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning, substance, and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography, this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China: In the ostensibly meritocratic exam system and the rhetoric of officials, in underground churches, housing bubbles, and nationalist fantasies, in bodies possessed by spirits and evaluations of jade, there is a pervasive concern with states of lack and emptiness and the contributions suggest that this play of emptiness and fullness is crucial to ongoing constructions of quality, value, and subjectivity in China

Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey, by Salih Can Açıksöz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 272 pp. 19 illus. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-5203-0530-4.
For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq, by Ayça Çubukçu. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 240 pp. 7 illus. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-8122-5050-3.
Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics, by Ilana Feldman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. 320 pp. 20 illus. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-520-29963-4.
Peaceful Selves: Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda, by Laura Eramian. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. 202 pp. 3 illus. Paperback. ISBN: 978-1-78920-493-3.
Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right, by Walden Bello. Blackpoint: Fernwood Publishing, 2019. 196 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 978-1-77363-221-6.
Critique of Identity Thinking, by Michael Jackson. New York: Berghahn Books., 2019. 207 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-78920-282-3.