Sian Lazar

  • Article out: A Kinship Anthropology of Politics?

    A ‘kinship anthropology of politics’? Interest, the collective self, and kinship in Argentine unions, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute The article from my Malinowski lecture (2016) has now been published by JRAI – it’s available on Early View and here. This should be a ‘read-only’ version if your institution does not have a subscription to…

  • The Social Life of Politics. Book out

    My book The Social Life of Politics. Ethics, Kinship and Union Activism is now out, published by Stanford University Press. It’s the culmination of my research over the last 8 years or so into Argentine trade unionism. Here’s the blurb: A central motor of Argentine historical and political development since the early twentieth century, unions…

  • Conference: Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity

    April 21-22, Cambridge Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity is a workshop organised with CRASSH. This is going to be brilliant, we have some excellent papers and are going to discuss different forms of labour politics across the world. The programme, with abstracts, can be found here. Registration is open; and there will be…

  • Where are the Unions? Book out

    Where are the Unions? is the book that resulted from the Bread and Freedom conference that Anne Alexander and I co-organised a few years ago. It has now been published by Zed books. I am enormously proud of this collection; it is genuinely interdisciplinary, combines an activist perspective with academic rigour and addresses a really…

  • GDAT 2015 available online

    A transcript of the 2015 GDAT debate is now available on Critique of Anthropology’s OnlineFirst site. We debated the motion ‘Attention to Infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political’. Laura Bear and AbdouMaliq Simone proposed the motion, Laura Rival and I opposed. Penny Harvey has written an introduction, and Soumhya Venkatesan…

  • JLACA article available

    My article ‘Notions of Work, Patrimony, and Production in the Life of the Colón Opera House’ was published in the July 2016 issue of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. It’s available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/plar.12111/full for those with access.  Open access version is here. Here’s the abstract: This article discusses a conflict that took place among the…

  • Podcast: Sounds of Protest

    Now available: In this episode of Camthropod, I discuss two sounds of different kinds of street mobilisation in Argentina: the bombos, or drums, which are associated with organised social forces, and the cacerolazo, or pots and pans demo, associated with the ‘middle classes’. She relates these different political soundscapes to the politics of the ‘Pink…

  • Malinowski lecture (podcast available)

    The podcast of the lecture is available here . Malinowski Memorial Lecture: Politics beyond ‘interest’.  Ethics, kinship and the collective self in Argentine labour unions Dr Sian Lazar, Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge Date: Thursday, 19 May 2016 at 6.00pm Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building, Houghton Street, LSE, WC2A 2AE In Crime and Custom in Savage…

  • Article on FocaalBlog about the elections in Argentina

    I’ve written a short piece about the change of regime in Argentina, available on the Focaal Blog site. It’s called: ‘The happiness revolution’: Argentina and the end of postneoliberalism?   The situation in Argentina is changing rapidly at the moment, and it’s not always easy to find out what is going on from a distance.…

  • Discipline and Anarchy: PoLAR article available

    My article ‘Of Autocracy and Democracy, Or Discipline and Anarchy: When Organizational Structure Meets Political Ideology in Argentine Public Sector Trade Unions’ has been published in the November 2015 issue of PoLAR. It’s available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/plar.12111/full for those with access.  Open access version link will follow as soon as I have it. Here’s the abstract: This…