We present seven original papers in this issue.

In “Reactive Regulation,” Indivar Jonnalagadda provokes us to imagine new ways to see urban development through an account of the micro-scale bureaucratic processes of property record-keeping, registration, and regularization in the emerging global real estate hub of Hyderabad, India.

What does everyday life feel like in military barracks tasked with overseeing borderland security and territorial surveillance? In “Borderlands as Barracks,” an ethnography of a Border Security Force deployment across India’s border with Bangladesh, Sahana Ghosh describes the ambiguous and complex tension involved in sustaining the timespaces of war-preparedness between carework and standardization. Ghosh’s ethnography demonstrates how national geographies of security are held in place as much by the production of violence as by the labor of reproduction.

In “Spectacle,” Jane Saffitz offers a relational approach to how symbols of lightness, analyzed as qualisigns, shape the way violence against people with albinism is understood and portrayed in Tanzania. Saffitz examines how these symbolic meanings contribute to public spectacles that influence both local and global narratives about albinism-related violence.

In “Discarded Candidates,” Tanya Jakimow challenges the taken-for-granted nature of Australian local elections to seek new possibilities in reimagining electoral processes and their afterlives.

In “Getting Your Ducks in a Row,” Siobhan Magee draws on fieldwork in the Virginia city of Charlottesville to argue that protection is a key idiom through which to understand marriage and kinship in the United States.

In “Delivering the State,” Janet E. Perkins draws on ethnographic fieldwork in maternal health settings in Kushtia District, Bangladesh, to nuance conceptualizations of care in government health settings. These encounters, in turn, are situated within broader imaginaries of the state and one’s relationship to it.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in oil fields of West Texas, the United States, Cameron Hu argues that fracking is a well-nigh inevitable project to adjust, direct, and accelerate geological processes on the premise that the Earth, now burdened with the imperial-modern compulsion to historicize, is somehow too slow.

Cover and table-of-contents image by Sahana Ghosh.