Bruce O’neill
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 127966 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Bruce O’neill |
| NOMBRES | Bruce |
| APELLIDO | O’neill |
| FIRMA | O’NEILL B |
| AFILIACIONES | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2035-8993 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 15 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 392 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 15 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2009 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Acknowledging the 2025 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology
I am incredibly honored to accept the Anthony Leeds Prize for Urban Anthropology. It is a particularly daunting recognition. For as long as I have been a student of the city, the books recognized by the Leeds Prize have been a great inspiration. These are the books that illustrated for me rigorous fieldwork, clear and gripping prose, and most of all, a moral clarity that has shaped the way that I think, teach, and write about urban life. These ha…
Off-grid
Categorically, to be positioned off the municipal grid has meant social illegibility. Those living off-grid, in turn, have been shown necessarily to be hyper resourceful in order to improvise a claim of membership upon the city. Coming on the heels of decades of liberalizing reforms in post-socialist Romania, however, this essay turns attention onto Bucharest’s unplanned and unincorporated suburbs to detail an ongoing experiment to recast the pol…
The Subject of the Underground
Romania's 2007 accession into the European Union initiated a surge in foreign direct investment into its capital, Bucharest. New middle classes quickly took shape that pressed against the limits of the city's socialist-era infrastructure. To accommodate the new middle classes, city planners and private developers have invested billions of euros to redesign and expand subterranean transportation, commercial, and residential spaces. This essay take…
The Digital Underground
Much has been written about the public life of cities, almost all of which is grounded in observations taken from the square and the sidewalk. Yet across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, environmental, demographic, and economic pressures have prompted cities to invest in new and expanded underground spaces, such as subterranean Metro systems, pedestrian passageways, and the basement levels of buildings where apartments, offices, cafes, bars and re…
Up, down, and away
Anthropologists have become increasingly sophisticated in the analysis of class by detailing the urban margins, by 'studying up' to examine elite wealth, and by charting the rise of the global middle classes. The anthropological commitment to depth, however, tends to keep these three strata separate in ways that mirror analytically the kind of segregation observed on the ground. Tight analytical framings risk obscuring the co-ordinates of privile…
Segmenting the city
Following Romania's accession into the European Union (EU) in 2007, a wave of foreign direct investment quickly transformed its capital city, Bucharest, into a global leader in business services. With this new economy came new middle classes whose turn toward auto-mobility materially overwhelmed the city center. To preserve the quality and character of the city, urban planners and bureaucrats proposed to "mobilize" the middle classes underground …
Fada
Reviewed by: Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger by Adeline Masquelier Bruce O'Neill Adeline Masquelier, Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 264 pp. Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger is a study of youth prolonged, perhaps indefinitely, by precarious economic circumstances. At the center of the book are samari, or young unmarried men, who have completed their formal education but who are unable to …
Stuck here
This paper traces the transnational dimensions of affect by way of boredom to open a perspective onto the scale at which homelessness is internalized and embodied. While boredom is commonly thought of in both literature and in philosophy as a predicament of slowed time marked by the absence of immediate activity, the geographical argument here is that boredom among Bucharest's homeless is a spatial relationship whose dimensions are shaped by a cu…
The ethnographic negative
Outside the main railway station in Bucharest, Romania, otherwise unemployed day laborers hustle for small change as informal parking lot attendants (parcagii). While their efforts yield numerous ethnographic observations of entrepreneurial activity, these attendants report "doing nothing" day in and day out. This article explores the tension between etic observations and emic feelings in order to ask a methodological question: how can "not doing…
Bored Stiff
This essay reflects upon the intimate entanglement of superfluity and boredom in postcommunist Bucharest, Romania, where the politics of social exclusion unfolds through the inability to participate in consumer practices and chronic underconsumption leaves the city's most excluded population-the homeless-bored day in and day out. In response, men discarded from work and home by a brutally competitive economy head into the bowels of the city's tra…
Cast Aside
The homeless, in post-Communist Bucharest, Romania, are bored. They describe themselves as bored all of the time. Drawing upon nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork that moves between Bucharest's homeless shelters and squatter camps, day centers and public parks, this article approaches the homeless's boredom as an everyday affect structured by the politics of consumption in post-communist Bucharest. At the center of this study sits not si…
Of camps, gulags and extraordinary renditions
From fascist prisons to Communist-era gulags, Romania does not simply have a history of torture, but also an existing infrastructure conducive to its practice. Romania, human rights organizations have made clear, hosted a number of 'secret detention centers' used by the US government in its program of 'extraordinary rendition', whereby intelligence agents illegally rendered, detained and tortured suspected terrorists. Both Romania's gulags and it…
Infrastructural violence
This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of 'infrastructural violence'. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation, before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of 'infrastructural violence' c…
Down and Then Out in Bucharest
This paper analyzes at the level of space the invention and management of homelessness in postsocialist cities. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides shelter space in Bucharest, Romania, this paper foregrounds the political significance of placing homeless populations to better understand neoliberal governance as a set of spatially minded practices, arguing (ultimately) that spac…
The political agency of cityscapes
How does spatial organization contribute to the governance of a population? This article explores how the construction of monumental streetscapes turns city spaces into technologies of political control. It is the central claim that monumental spaces are not just static representations of particular ideologies; rather, the production of monumental spaces contributes to the project of autocratic governance. It is an argument rooted in the claim th…
Infrastructural violence
This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of 'infrastructural violence'. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation, before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of 'infrastructural violence' c…
Cast Aside
The homeless, in post-Communist Bucharest, Romania, are bored. They describe themselves as bored all of the time. Drawing upon nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork that moves between Bucharest's homeless shelters and squatter camps, day centers and public parks, this article approaches the homeless's boredom as an everyday affect structured by the politics of consumption in post-communist Bucharest. At the center of this study sits not si…
Down and Then Out in Bucharest
This paper analyzes at the level of space the invention and management of homelessness in postsocialist cities. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides shelter space in Bucharest, Romania, this paper foregrounds the political significance of placing homeless populations to better understand neoliberal governance as a set of spatially minded practices, arguing (ultimately) that spac…
Of camps, gulags and extraordinary renditions
From fascist prisons to Communist-era gulags, Romania does not simply have a history of torture, but also an existing infrastructure conducive to its practice. Romania, human rights organizations have made clear, hosted a number of 'secret detention centers' used by the US government in its program of 'extraordinary rendition', whereby intelligence agents illegally rendered, detained and tortured suspected terrorists. Both Romania's gulags and it…
The ethnographic negative
Outside the main railway station in Bucharest, Romania, otherwise unemployed day laborers hustle for small change as informal parking lot attendants (parcagii). While their efforts yield numerous ethnographic observations of entrepreneurial activity, these attendants report "doing nothing" day in and day out. This article explores the tension between etic observations and emic feelings in order to ask a methodological question: how can "not doing…
The political agency of cityscapes
How does spatial organization contribute to the governance of a population? This article explores how the construction of monumental streetscapes turns city spaces into technologies of political control. It is the central claim that monumental spaces are not just static representations of particular ideologies; rather, the production of monumental spaces contributes to the project of autocratic governance. It is an argument rooted in the claim th…
Bored Stiff
This essay reflects upon the intimate entanglement of superfluity and boredom in postcommunist Bucharest, Romania, where the politics of social exclusion unfolds through the inability to participate in consumer practices and chronic underconsumption leaves the city's most excluded population-the homeless-bored day in and day out. In response, men discarded from work and home by a brutally competitive economy head into the bowels of the city's tra…
Stuck here
This paper traces the transnational dimensions of affect by way of boredom to open a perspective onto the scale at which homelessness is internalized and embodied. While boredom is commonly thought of in both literature and in philosophy as a predicament of slowed time marked by the absence of immediate activity, the geographical argument here is that boredom among Bucharest's homeless is a spatial relationship whose dimensions are shaped by a cu…
Up, down, and away
Anthropologists have become increasingly sophisticated in the analysis of class by detailing the urban margins, by 'studying up' to examine elite wealth, and by charting the rise of the global middle classes. The anthropological commitment to depth, however, tends to keep these three strata separate in ways that mirror analytically the kind of segregation observed on the ground. Tight analytical framings risk obscuring the co-ordinates of privile…
The Subject of the Underground
Romania's 2007 accession into the European Union initiated a surge in foreign direct investment into its capital, Bucharest. New middle classes quickly took shape that pressed against the limits of the city's socialist-era infrastructure. To accommodate the new middle classes, city planners and private developers have invested billions of euros to redesign and expand subterranean transportation, commercial, and residential spaces. This essay take…
Segmenting the city
Following Romania's accession into the European Union (EU) in 2007, a wave of foreign direct investment quickly transformed its capital city, Bucharest, into a global leader in business services. With this new economy came new middle classes whose turn toward auto-mobility materially overwhelmed the city center. To preserve the quality and character of the city, urban planners and bureaucrats proposed to "mobilize" the middle classes underground …
The Digital Underground
Much has been written about the public life of cities, almost all of which is grounded in observations taken from the square and the sidewalk. Yet across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, environmental, demographic, and economic pressures have prompted cities to invest in new and expanded underground spaces, such as subterranean Metro systems, pedestrian passageways, and the basement levels of buildings where apartments, offices, cafes, bars and re…
The political agency of cityscapes
How does spatial organization contribute to the governance of a population? This article explores how the construction of monumental streetscapes turns city spaces into technologies of political control. It is the central claim that monumental spaces are not just static representations of particular ideologies; rather, the production of monumental spaces contributes to the project of autocratic governance. It is an argument rooted in the claim th…
Down and Then Out in Bucharest
This paper analyzes at the level of space the invention and management of homelessness in postsocialist cities. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides shelter space in Bucharest, Romania, this paper foregrounds the political significance of placing homeless populations to better understand neoliberal governance as a set of spatially minded practices, arguing (ultimately) that spac…
Of camps, gulags and extraordinary renditions
From fascist prisons to Communist-era gulags, Romania does not simply have a history of torture, but also an existing infrastructure conducive to its practice. Romania, human rights organizations have made clear, hosted a number of 'secret detention centers' used by the US government in its program of 'extraordinary rendition', whereby intelligence agents illegally rendered, detained and tortured suspected terrorists. Both Romania's gulags and it…
Infrastructural violence
This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of 'infrastructural violence'. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation, before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of 'infrastructural violence' c…
Cast Aside
The homeless, in post-Communist Bucharest, Romania, are bored. They describe themselves as bored all of the time. Drawing upon nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork that moves between Bucharest's homeless shelters and squatter camps, day centers and public parks, this article approaches the homeless's boredom as an everyday affect structured by the politics of consumption in post-communist Bucharest. At the center of this study sits not si…
Bored Stiff
This essay reflects upon the intimate entanglement of superfluity and boredom in postcommunist Bucharest, Romania, where the politics of social exclusion unfolds through the inability to participate in consumer practices and chronic underconsumption leaves the city's most excluded population-the homeless-bored day in and day out. In response, men discarded from work and home by a brutally competitive economy head into the bowels of the city's tra…
The ethnographic negative
Outside the main railway station in Bucharest, Romania, otherwise unemployed day laborers hustle for small change as informal parking lot attendants (parcagii). While their efforts yield numerous ethnographic observations of entrepreneurial activity, these attendants report "doing nothing" day in and day out. This article explores the tension between etic observations and emic feelings in order to ask a methodological question: how can "not doing…
Stuck here
This paper traces the transnational dimensions of affect by way of boredom to open a perspective onto the scale at which homelessness is internalized and embodied. While boredom is commonly thought of in both literature and in philosophy as a predicament of slowed time marked by the absence of immediate activity, the geographical argument here is that boredom among Bucharest's homeless is a spatial relationship whose dimensions are shaped by a cu…
Segmenting the city
Following Romania's accession into the European Union (EU) in 2007, a wave of foreign direct investment quickly transformed its capital city, Bucharest, into a global leader in business services. With this new economy came new middle classes whose turn toward auto-mobility materially overwhelmed the city center. To preserve the quality and character of the city, urban planners and bureaucrats proposed to "mobilize" the middle classes underground …
Fada
Reviewed by: Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger by Adeline Masquelier Bruce O'Neill Adeline Masquelier, Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 264 pp. Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger is a study of youth prolonged, perhaps indefinitely, by precarious economic circumstances. At the center of the book are samari, or young unmarried men, who have completed their formal education but who are unable to …
The Digital Underground
Much has been written about the public life of cities, almost all of which is grounded in observations taken from the square and the sidewalk. Yet across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, environmental, demographic, and economic pressures have prompted cities to invest in new and expanded underground spaces, such as subterranean Metro systems, pedestrian passageways, and the basement levels of buildings where apartments, offices, cafes, bars and re…
Up, down, and away
Anthropologists have become increasingly sophisticated in the analysis of class by detailing the urban margins, by 'studying up' to examine elite wealth, and by charting the rise of the global middle classes. The anthropological commitment to depth, however, tends to keep these three strata separate in ways that mirror analytically the kind of segregation observed on the ground. Tight analytical framings risk obscuring the co-ordinates of privile…
The Subject of the Underground
Romania's 2007 accession into the European Union initiated a surge in foreign direct investment into its capital, Bucharest. New middle classes quickly took shape that pressed against the limits of the city's socialist-era infrastructure. To accommodate the new middle classes, city planners and private developers have invested billions of euros to redesign and expand subterranean transportation, commercial, and residential spaces. This essay take…
Off-grid
Categorically, to be positioned off the municipal grid has meant social illegibility. Those living off-grid, in turn, have been shown necessarily to be hyper resourceful in order to improvise a claim of membership upon the city. Coming on the heels of decades of liberalizing reforms in post-socialist Romania, however, this essay turns attention onto Bucharest’s unplanned and unincorporated suburbs to detail an ongoing experiment to recast the pol…
Acknowledging the 2025 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology
I am incredibly honored to accept the Anthony Leeds Prize for Urban Anthropology. It is a particularly daunting recognition. For as long as I have been a student of the city, the books recognized by the Leeds Prize have been a great inspiration. These are the books that illustrated for me rigorous fieldwork, clear and gripping prose, and most of all, a moral clarity that has shaped the way that I think, teach, and write about urban life. These ha…
Sociology (14 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Politics (9 obras) · Law (8 obras) · Economics (6 obras) · Ethnography (6 obras) · Urban Planning and Governance (6 obras) · Epistemology (5 obras) · Psychology (5 obras)