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Introduction: Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics and traces (2023)
Journal Article
Alexander, C. (2023). Introduction: Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics and traces. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 29, 8-30. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13899

This volume follows failures out into the world exploring how they unfold ethnographically. Taking a longer view shows how objects, narratives and diagnoses of failures may be crafted, acted on, suffered, resisted—unmade or recomposed. Thus while tro... Read More about Introduction: Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics and traces.

Suspending failure: temporalities, ontologies and gigantism in fusion energy development (2023)
Journal Article
Alexander, C. (2023). Suspending failure: temporalities, ontologies and gigantism in fusion energy development. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 29(S1), 114-132. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13905

Tracing the history of terrestrial fusion energy to a giant multinational experimental fusion facility under construction reveals a series of consequential failures, re-evaluations of once defunct designs, but also persistence. To account for how thi... Read More about Suspending failure: temporalities, ontologies and gigantism in fusion energy development.

The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate (2022)
Journal Article
Alexander, C. (2022). The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 64(4), 934-965. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417522000159

This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fuelled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practise quite different forms of thrift. Since... Read More about The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate.

Thrift, Anti-thrift, Scale and Paradox (2022)
Book Chapter
Alexander, C., & Sosna, D. (2022). Thrift, Anti-thrift, Scale and Paradox. In C. Alexander, & D. Sosna (Eds.), Thrift and its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy. Berghahn Books

Cleaning up and moving on: Kazakhstan's 'nuclear renaissance' (2020)
Journal Article
Alexander, C. (2020). Cleaning up and moving on: Kazakhstan's 'nuclear renaissance'. Habaršy Хабаршы (Ķazaķ memlekettìk ķyzdar pedagogikalyķ universitet) (Қазақ мемлекеттік қыздар педагогикалық университеті), 4, 113-125

How do we reconcile a resilient nuclear past with what appears to be a radiant nuclear future? Kazakhstan has freed itself from the legacy of the Cold War - contaminated lands and radiation-related pathologies - to move forward. Cleaning, after all,... Read More about Cleaning up and moving on: Kazakhstan's 'nuclear renaissance'.

Global Entanglements of Recycling Policy and Practice (2020)
Book Chapter
Alexander, C., & Reno, J. (2020). Global Entanglements of Recycling Policy and Practice. In M. Aldenderfer (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopaedia of anthropology. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.18

The landscape of global economies of recycling has rapidly changed over the early 21st century. Increasingly, policy and economic and scholarly attention on environmental transformation have focused on this topic, in keeping with Gabrielle Hecht's ch... Read More about Global Entanglements of Recycling Policy and Practice.

When the Statue is both Marble and Lime (2020)
Book Chapter
Duckworth, C., Wilson, A., Van Oyen, A., Alexander, C., Evans, J., Green, C., & Mattingley, D. (2020). When the Statue is both Marble and Lime. In C. Duckworth, & A. Wilson (Eds.), Recycling and reuse in the Roman economy (449-460). Oxford University Press

A Chronotope of Expansion: resisting spatio-temporal limits in a Kazakh nuclear town (2020)
Journal Article
Alexander, C. (2023). A Chronotope of Expansion: resisting spatio-temporal limits in a Kazakh nuclear town. Ethnos, 88(3), 467-490. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1796735

This article starts by anatomising the various strategies used by the Soviet regime to contain and ‘disappear’ the nuclear weapon test site in Kazakhstan before moving on to outline attempts by the independent Republic of Kazakshtan's National Nuclea... Read More about A Chronotope of Expansion: resisting spatio-temporal limits in a Kazakh nuclear town.

Waste and its Disguises: Technologies of (Un)knowing (2020)
Journal Article
Alexander, C., & O’Hare, P. (2023). Waste and its Disguises: Technologies of (Un)knowing. Ethnos, 88(3), 419-443. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1796734

The introduction to this special issue starts with a brief thematisation of the key theoretical interventions in the anthropology of waste in order to situate our own contribution. We follow this by discussing, and adding to the recent anthropology a... Read More about Waste and its Disguises: Technologies of (Un)knowing.

Introduction: The Values of Indeterminacy (2018)
Book Chapter
Alexander, C., & Sanchez, A. (2019). Introduction: The Values of Indeterminacy. In C. Alexander, & A. Sanchez (Eds.), Indeterminacy : waste, value, and the imagination (1-30). Berghahn Books

Charity and philanthropy (2018)
Book Chapter
Alexander, C. (2018). Charity and philanthropy. In H. Callan (Ed.), International encyclopaedia of anthropology : anthropology beyond text. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1689

Anthropological analyses of charity are often based on Maussian theories of gift exchange and inequalities between donor and recipient, sometimes compounded by spectacular displays of giving or by aid, both humanitarian and faith-based, from the glob... Read More about Charity and philanthropy.

Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing (2018)
Journal Article
Alexander, C., Hojer Bruun, M., & Koch, I. (2018). Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing. Critique of Anthropology, 38(2), 121-139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x18758871

Struggles over housing are one of the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time. Yet questions over access to, plus the redistribution and maintenance of secure housing have only recently begun to be considered anthropologically... Read More about Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing.

Homeless in the Homeland: housing protests in Kazakhstan (2018)
Journal Article
Alexander, C. (2018). Homeless in the Homeland: housing protests in Kazakhstan. Critique of Anthropology, 38(2), 204-220. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x18758872

This article tracks housing protests in Kazakhstan’s former capital city, Almaty, from 1989 to 2016 for what they reveal about shifting ideas of rights and obligations between citizens and state. Three broad models of moral economies of housing emerg... Read More about Homeless in the Homeland: housing protests in Kazakhstan.

What is Waste? (2017)
Report
Gregson, N., & Alexander, C. (2017). What is Waste?. [No known commissioning body]

The meeting as subjunctive form: public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies (2017)
Journal Article
Alexander, C. (2017). The meeting as subjunctive form: public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(S1), 80-94. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12595

Drawing on meetings within structured project environments in Turkey and Britain, this essay explores how and if this kind of highly rational, instrumental meeting travels and why so much frustration is typically expressed by British participants in... Read More about The meeting as subjunctive form: public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies.