In this issue, we present eleven original papers with ethnographic insights into topics ranging from kinship and expertise to labor across African, Asian, and European geographies.

In “Datafied Kinship,” Zehra Hashmi examines Pakistan’s biometric national identity system, NADRA, to show that digital identification does not simply individuate citizens through bodily data, but through kinship relations as well. Through the case of Zainab, whose inability to evidence the “right” living or documented kin renders her unidentifiable to the state, Hashmi develops the concept of “datafied kinship” to describe how relational ties become infrastructural conditions of individual identity. In doing so, she reframes biometric governance as a profoundly social and political process, one that encodes family relations to both recognize and exclude.

In “The Hindu Home Kitchen and the Internet of Landlords,” Sucharita Kanjilal argues that Indian food media content creators refashion household industry as an entrepreneurial “household start-up,” thus depoliticizing its labor.

In his ethnography of an Athens co-living residence, Nicholas Smith examines how speculative housing ventures turn insecurity, mobility, and loneliness into a marketable domestic experience. The ethnography follows a diverse household of Greek renters and remote workers through balcony conversations, improvised companionship, uneven routines, and awkward encounters with visiting investors. These everyday scenes reveal a form of closeness that requires neither friendship nor a shared project, but the reassuring possibility that someone else is nearby. Set against Athens’s housing crisis and the ambitions of developers seeking scalable European brands, the article shows how residents make provisional homes within spaces designed to remain flexible, transient, and profitable—and how ordinary attachments both sustain and unsettle this model.

In “To Be ‘A Homeless,’” Nikita Simpson, Elizabeth Storer, and Suad Duale attend to the vernacular theorizing of Somali women navigating Birmingham’s housing system. Taking seriously the phrase “a homeless,” they illuminate how precarious dwelling can become a mode of experiencing citizenship, displacement, and belonging all at once, revealing the long afterlives of refugeehood in postcolonial Britain.

In “Ex Machina,” Jennifer Cearns analyzes how users mourn AI companions “deaths,” and thus reframe technical breakdown as a site of ethical and relational complexity as well as a site of  emerging forms of kinship and care.

In “Waiting Can Kill You,” Lalaie Ameeriar analyzes how racialized patients are asked to endure delayed obstetric care, uncertainty, and dismissal, and argues that waiting is a racialized and gendered form of harm.

Exploring the management of migration dynamics in select Pakistani villages, Hadia Akhtar Khan emphasizes the blurred lines that exist between production and social reproduction, particularly for migrant families, in a way that straddles the divides of rural and urban contexts where kinship and caste play a major role in how care labor is valued and distributed.

Drawing on long term ethnography at a non-profit organization in Center City, Jake Nussbaum shows how workers at The Sanctuary perform “de-escalation,” an embodied practice of violence intervention that seeks to diffuse and prevent interpersonal conflict without police. Nussbaum situates this practice within broader abolitionist thought and anthropological conversations around political action and temporality, revealing how practitioners use their bodies to manipulate both time and space into non-carceral outcomes. 

In “Solar Pioneers,” Myles Lennon explores the relationship between origin stories of American frontier settlement and the “renewable energy frontier” to argue that the notion of individualism of energy transition is an insidious aspect of decarbonization in the U.S. capitalist context.

While planners and developers have played an outsized role in the massive remaking of Addis Ababa’s built environment, Marco Di Nunzio examines how the valorization and reproduction of expertise depends on the constitution of a parallel world of imagination and assessments that have little traction in the city’s everyday realities.

Drawing from Buddhism, literary studies, and long-term ethnographic engagements in Thailand, Andrew Alan Johnson emphasizes the importance of weird stories, such as those of ghosts and spirits, not as a metaphor of mundane social dynamics and dilemmas or cultural conundrums, but as instruments for continuously piecing together worlds that remain uncertain and unfixed.

Cover and table-of-contents image by Nicholas Smith.