We present eight original papers in this issue.

In “Heads in the Stars, Feet on the Ground,” Hanna Nieber and Davide Chinigò demonstrate how scale operates as both an ontological and epistemological concept, closely tied to the ground, through the evolution of radio astronomy in South Africa and Madagascar.

In “Debt and the American Dream,” Ina Zharkevich draws upon research with irregular migrants from Nepal who borrow up to $60,000 to reach the United States, exploring what Zharkevich calls the invisible slow violence of debt.

Fiona McCormack’s essay, “Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship,” engages with climate, capitalism, and decolonial critique, examining how marine spaces materialize global inequalities through regimes of extraction, governance, and labor. By drawing on the “blue economy” and oceanic anthropology, McCormack argues that the sea is not a frontier of sustainability, but a site of colonial continuity and ecological precarity. 

In her essay, “Fugitive Kinships,” Suma Ikeuchi explores the performance of kinships by resourceful Filipino migrants in Japan. In conforming to the official standards of family in the presence of the state while privately engaging in potentially subversive acts of alternative kin-making, new manifestations of kinship form in what Ikeuchi conceptualizes as fugitive kinships. 

Based on fieldwork in London, interviews with global activists, and analysis of corporate materials, Sohini Kar’s essay, “The Financial Activist,” draws on Lauren Berlant’s theory of inconvenience to show how activists learn to live with and inconvenience financial systems, while simultaneously working to undo or lessen some of the harms caused by extractive industries. 

Drawing on ethnographic work with Burmese revolutionaries, Elliott Prasse-Freeman’s “The Revolutionary’s Two Temporalities?” explores how activists navigate failure by oscillating between temporal strategies: embedding in perpetual struggles that blur ends and means, or embracing contingency to remain adaptive. These shifts create openness to multiple futures and challenge ethnography’s narrative closure, urging us to write unfinished struggles and their haunting possibilities.

In “My Neighbor the Gringo,” Alessandro M. Angelini and Gareth A. Jones explore the different meanings of convivência in Rio de Janeiro’s self-built communities transformed into tourist accommodations over recent decades. They examine how residents navigate their changing roles as perceived outsiders at the same time as foreign operators become hosts of communities that are not their own, creating tensions around race, class, and belonging.

Following the Villatina disaster, soil became contested evidence where city officials used risk classifications to justify forced removals, and residents deployed counter-forensic arguments claiming the same soil revealed state-led displacement and disappearances. Meghan L. Morris studies how these competing narratives, framed through transitional justice, challenged official claims that Medellín had moved beyond its violent past, showing how inhabitants stake territorial claims through their engagements with soil.

Cover and table-of-contents image by Ina Zharkevich.