We present seven original papers in this issue.

In “Waste Donations,” Kevin Yildirim explores how interdependencies are forged within precarious urban conditions through the auspices of charitable giving. Such hospitality helps forge moral authority as a cohesive substance and invites shopkeepers to rethink the grounds of their own security.

In “Morally Immunizing Debts,” Ferda Nur Demirci explores how underground mineworkers in Soma, a lignite-coal basin in Turkey’s North Aegean region, forge new approaches to self and intimate other through readily available consumer loans and ongoing financial obligations.

Lyle Fearnley and Chen Sun's “Green Involution” takes on China's Green Revolution through ethnographic analysis of young rice scientists caught between fast-paced academic careers and the slow cycle of agricultural research. These scientists experience neijuan (involution): intensifying work with diminishing returns, creating exhausting “green involution” spirals as they push for productivity gains at rice plants’ biological limits.

In “Touched by Deep Time,” Lachlan Summers examines residents of Mexico City who were made sick by the city’s 2017 earthquake. An environmental illness that emerges in the space between earthly motion and political slipperiness, the article traces the fears that people in Mexico City have of slowly falling buildings, illustrating how, as they say, the 2017 earthquake has not yet ended.

Police reformers have long argued that investing in “improved training” methods and facilities will reduce police violence. Jessica Katzenstein’s ethnography of police training in Maryland shows, however, that reformist methodologies such as role-playing and virtual scenario training inevitably frame threats as omnipresent and prioritize officer survival. Moreover, in so doing, they stage a form of radical presentism that elides the historical and structural conditions of violence.

How does exile inflect or reorganize geographies of postcolonial nationhood? In her contribution to this issue, Natacha Nsabimana follows the life trajectories of Muzehe and Claude, Rwandan and Burundian exiles respectively, whose cyclical and repetitive experiences of flight and displacement declinate and fragment the political experience of belonging in the postcolonial world.

How is the labor, identity, and resistance of artisanal fishermen shaped by histories of urban segregation and environmental harm? In “Do They Do Our Thozhil?” Rishabh Raghavan examines how artisanal fishermen in Ennore, Chennai, use acts of refusal, both individual and collective, to cope with and contest the toxic effects of industrial pollution.

Cover and table-of-contents image by Rishabh Raghavan.