Yet, if the crisis is behind us, what are we to make of the estimated 10.5 million or more children globally (as of May 2022) now orphans — most in Africa and Southeast Asia (24.3% and 40.6% respectively) and over 240,000 children in the US as of March 2023 — as a consequence of SARS-COV-2’s impact on the adult population, especially given that little is seemingly being done to address this sheer devastation?⁴ And what are we to make of the life expectancy of American Indian and Alaska Native [AIAN] people cut by 6.6 years (more than twice the rate of White people) and having no evident prospects of rebounding?⁵ This frightful abbreviation of life brings the length for which an average AIAN baby born now is expected to live down to 65.2 years, which is more than a decade shorter than the US national average and “equal to the life expectancy of the total U.S. population in 1944”.⁶ Such an alarming rate of decline in life expectancy could not be the result solely of the millions of especially older people killed at disproportionate rates by a disease we had never heard of four years ago (of whom nearly two hundred are still dying daily in the United States with comparable numbers likely elsewhere in the world though difficult to confirm because of variations in reporting infrastructure). Rather, such a precipitous drop in life expectancy reflects substantial deaths among younger populations as well. Hence, it is the product of the meeting of the crisis disease with “excess mortality” among younger populations resultant of the other public health crises—gun violence, opioid overdoses, and cardiovascular diseases—not adequately prevented or treated by a broken healthcare system.⁷ Worse still, there is little expectation of improvement; indeed, without crisis funding and with many likely to fall back out of the social safety net temporarily provided by expanded access to Medicare, the situation is set to worsen.

And, if the crisis is behind us, what are we to make of our students struggling to show up and “perform” as they did “before” the pandemic, with mental distress levels being reported to be very high⁸ (to which we can attest from the view from the instructor/classroom)? As one of us recently heard the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New Hampshire, John Broderick, say in a speech on his main cause for advocacy today:⁹ “We do not have a mental health system in this country; we have wonderful people working in mental health, but we do not have a mental health system.” And what of the millions of people (mostly Hispanic, and women more than men) pushed out of work and/or disabled by long Covid symptoms only to have to then also battle a broken U.S. social security system?¹⁰ And what of Black children dying from guns at roughly five times the rates of White children after a notable rise across the board during these pandemic years (an unbelievable 50% rise between 2019 and 2021)?¹¹ And what more of trans people fearing for their well-being in both law and life with 359 active bills among 499 that have been introduced across the U.S. to block trans people from receiving legal recognition, basic healthcare services, education access, and public acknowledgment of their existence?¹²

And why, why, why…? As Heather McGhee pertinently set out to find out about the U.S.’s lack of public amenities: “Why can’t we have nice things?” The central motif in her argument is the public pool closed down and filled with cement because racism in the Jim Crow South would rather everyone lose out on public goods than allow for them to be shared with Black residents. Whoever would have thought of healthcare as a “nice thing” in much the same way? But, here we are. One of the key articles in this May issue, by Risa Cromer and Sophie Bjork-James, helps us make deeper sense of this persistent, pernicious dynamic. Using “feminist necropolitics” as the central theoretical foundation, it reveals the intersectional concerns and connections arising in debates over reproductive and environmental justice in the post-Roe, and now post-Dobbs, United States.

Fortin and Coutin’s article applies a critical lens to the necessity of translating immigration documentation, showing how these processes can be thought of as a “craft” that involves discretion, which can ultimately counter otherwise alienating processes of bureaucratic inscription. In Flores’ article, “About time: Temporal control and illegality in Nashville, Tennessee,” we encounter similar complexities in how temporal maneuvers within the immigration law system can be and are employed, both on the side of the state and the individuals subjected to its power, in profoundly impactful ways – especially by intermediaries.

The Directions essays bring similarly critical analysis to the criminal justice system and draw our gaze well beyond the U.S., which can often take up an outsized amount of space and attention. In essence, together, these and other pieces in this journal issue remind us that systemic racism and the afterlives of colonialism are distant but also close, foreign but also domestic, past but also present.

Also in this issue, Nelli Sargsyan’s article puts forward the concept of “civic patriarchy” to describe the extension of patriarchal power relations into leftist spaces, reminding us that even in seemingly “progressive” spaces there are continuing and stronger solidarities with existing social orders—but there are also moves against these, towards a more equitable collective life. Using the example of post-conflict reconstruction in Kosovo, Agathe Mora’s article shows how the bureaucratization of rule of law ends up reproducing new forms of rights inequality, particular by excluding existing norms around property rights and inheritance. De Bondt, de Wilde, and Jaffe’s article also examines rights in relation to property, but through a “more-than-human” lens which considers the political agency of rats—and, by extension, other animals—as city residents with political claims.

As all our lives (especially in the Global North) hurtle forward at their familiar, pre-pandemic breakneck speed with a layer of post-pandemic urgency to make up for lost time and grant release (relief?) to the sense of anxiety that we are in fact pursuing the impossible, we find ourselves caught between the reality that is visible and that which is invisible. This issue of the journal calls us to confront the invisible head-on and helps us to answer some of the questions lurking in our subconscious minds, gnawing at our “second brains” (vagus nerves), repeatedly reminding us that things are not alright (all right).

But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

At its best, anthropology helps us to “remember” (re-member), vividly and soberly; it also helps us make meaning of such violence in ways that can help us see beyond the past to envision new (or, at least, more just) futures.

What, then, does the duly high standard that might comport with “ethnographic refusal” (Simpson 2007) look like in our moment in history?¹³ If nothing else, we know that it is grounded in “the plight of those who are struggling every day to maintain what little they have left”—as expressed in their own “voice(s)” and languages (Simpson 2007, 75)—and is profoundly cognisant of the very tortuously deep linkages between the contemporary fields in which we choose to work and those continuing struggles that have and oft-times continue to take place in cotton, cane, tobacco, rice, cocoa, and other fields in which many have been forced to labor, globally, in the past and present (Shange 2019, 10; McKittrick 2013). We would like to think that this issue might rise to such a standard and live up to—or, at a minimum, contribute to meeting—aspirations, for our “post-pandemic” world, that are consistent with such a standard.

Sindiso MnisiWeeks, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Georgina Ramsay, University of Delaware, are Co-Editors-in-Chief of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Author Action Recommendations

Andrea Flores: I’d like to draw attention to the work of two organizations. First, through its local partners, the Immigration Law and Justice Network provides the kind of free (or low-cost) legal services that Angel, the young man described in my article, relied on for his visa case. You can donate to the ILJ Network here: https://njfon.kindful.com/. Second, the Tennessee Immigrant Rights and Refugee Coalition (TIRRC) is an immigrant and refugee-led collaborative successfully fighting for their communities’ rights. In 2022, TIRRC organized for a different kind of licensure than the driver’s licenses I discuss in my article. They pushed to close state professional and commercial licensing loopholes in fields like nursing, social work, and skilled trades for DACAmented and other precariously documented immigrants. Due to their and others’ efforts, the Workforce Expansion Bill went into effect on July 1, 2022. You can donate to TIRRC here: https://www.tnimmigrant.org/donate

Agathe Mora: While I was doing fieldwork in Pristina in 2012, the launch party for the journal Kosovo 2.0 was stormed by Muslim extremist members of Plisat, a local football club. Kosovo 2.0 is one of the few independent, critical journalistic platforms in the region. Their genre of fine-grained, ‘uncompromising’ journalism is not only rare but vital to, in their own words, listen to people’s experiences, explain complex realities, provide context and provoke conversations in Kosovo, the region and beyond’. In my article, I mention that very few Kosovo Property Agency (KPA) claimants (mainly displaced Kosovo Serbs) were able to actually repossess properties they legally own in Kosovo. During fieldwork in Kosovo and in Serbia, I visited several legal aid organisations, which helped claimants make sense of the documents they received from the KPA and follow up on the implementation of decisions. Ten years later, these organisations continue their painstaking legal work, and Pravna Pomoc is one of them.

Risa Cromer and Sophie Bjork-James: There are several organizations working on reproductive and environmental justice in and beyond Indiana to which we would like to point readers. Both the Indiana NAACP (https://www.indynaacp.org/) and the Chisolm Legacy Project (https://thechisholmlegacyproject.org/) work on issues of racism and anti-environmentalism locally. The Indiana Task Force (https://ywtf-gla.aauw.net/) is a BIPOC-led, grassroots organization that leads reproductive justice initiatives across Indiana. The Online Abortion Resource Squad (https://www.abortionsquad.org/) is an all-volunteer group that helps people around the world access accurate information and services for abortion. All need donations from supporters.

Herre De Bondt et al.: Focusing on Amsterdam’s rats, our paper argues for a more expansive conceptualization of citizenship that is attentive to nonhumans’ claims to the city. While the focus of this paper lies elsewhere, we recognize that some urban residents have less difficulty than others contending with the types of challenges associated with rats’ presence and behavior. Various organizations throughout Amsterdam help residents create safer and more liveable neighbourhoods, and organize ‘forms cafés’ to help residents navigate complex bureaucracies. Reporting rat sightings, rat-proofing a house, or getting a free appointment with Amsterdam’s public health service and their pest managers can be a daunting task for some. One organization that plays a key role in establishing neighborhood teams (buurtteams) to support local communities in such matters is HVO Querido. Anyone can donate to this organization here: https://hvoquerido.nl/helpen/doneren/. Rats themselves, however, are much less likely to receive support from non-profit organizations. In terms of action, we recommend that readers conceive of cities as urban ecologies, and seek to be open to the varied interests of human and nonhuman residents.

The Craft of Translation: Documentary Practices within Immigration Advocacy in the United States
Susan Bibler Coutin,  Véronique Fortin