Hannah Appel
Biographic Data
| ID | 349 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hannah Appel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hannah |
| FAMILY NAME | Appel |
| SIGNATURE | APPEL H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7896-3227 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 559 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Tenants of the World, Unite! From Atomisation to Structural Power in Financialised Tenancy
Recent transformations in the political economy of housing—particularly the corporatisation, concentration, and financialisation of landlording—paradoxically intensify both the atomisation of the tenant experience and the potential for organised tenants to exercise structural power. This potential collective power, however, is not self‐actualising. Building on two years of participatory action research and one year of operational data from the Ca…
Pan African capital? Banks, currencies, and imperial power
U.S. and Europe-based banks and international financial institutions including the IMF have been central to critical accounts of Africa’s place in global capitalism. And yet since 2008 these institutions have been in retreat on the continent, partially replaced by Pan African Banks. Putting ethnographic work with Africa-based finance professionals into dialogue with heterodox economic thinking on banks and currency sovereignty, I argue that we mu…
World Anthropological Perspectives on Economic Nationalisms
As rising numbers of national governments promote economic nationalist policies and the withdrawal from (or renegotiation of) global political and economic relationships, the impossibility of disconnecting from global circulations is illustrated by the traveling discourse of economic nationalism itself, although conceptualized and implemented quite differently as refracted through specific historical and political contexts. Drawing on the possibi…
Let's Get Free
The majority of people incarcerated in the United States have not been convicted of any crime. Rather, they are there because they are too poor to pay their way out of jail. The financialization of the criminal legal system means that wealthy people go free while poor people suffer through indefinite detention or face an interest-bearing price of freedom: commercial bail bonds contracts, an industry worth more than $2 billion annually. Bail debt …
Towards justice: A communiqué from Los Angeles
In this communiqué the Institute on Inequality and Democracy foregrounds the work of some of their movement partners — more appropriately understood as movement teachers — organizations that are on the frontline of the struggle against disposability and death in Los Angeles and beyond. They demonstrate the necessity of building a new common sense about relations of property and personhood, debt and wealth, reparation and redistribution
The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea
The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea
The Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a sweeping theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in…
To Critique or not to Critique? That is (perhaps not) the Question
Comment on Salverda:To Critique or not to Critique? That is (perhaps not) the Question
Conclusion: Energy ethics and ethical worlds
What happens when the effects of our ethical actions stretch beyond, often far beyond, first‐ and second‐person phenomena? What happens when one person's richly textured ethical world is another's profound violation? Energy offers a particularly useful empirical terrain on which to think through the questions posed by ethical worlds. Ethical worlds gesture both to the supra‐individual, supra‐present contexts in which we all craft quotidian ethics…
The Promise of Infrastructure
Infrastructural time / Hannah Appel -- The future in ruins : thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure / Akhil Gupta -- Infrastructures in and out of time : the promise of roads in contemporary Peru / Penny Harvey -- The current never stops : intimacies of energy infrastructure in Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel -- Infrastructure, apartheid technopolitics, and temporalities of "transition" / Antina von Schnitzler -- A public matter : water, hyd…
Promise of Infrastructure
Toward an Ethnography of the National Economy
What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent? What does it do? This article argues for ethnographic attention to national economies as a serial global form, arguably the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity. In dialogue with feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, economic anthropology, and the social studies of finance, this article asks how national economies beco…
Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria, by Kristin Peterson
In the late 1970s economist Douglas North, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize, quipped, ‘It is a peculiar fact that the literature in economics [ ... ] contains so little discussion of the centra
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas
Education with a Debt Sentence: For-Profit Colleges as American Dream Crushers and Factories of Debt
The idea life of money and poststructural realism
Comment on Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The social life of money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Finance, Figuration, and the Alternative Banking Group of Occupy Wall Street
If the imaginative project of capitalism comes to life through processes of figuration, it is the white male figure of the banker, the trader, or the broker who lends imaginative cohesion to what we might otherwise consider a diverse set of practices and people scattered unevenly across landscapes. However, as both Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing have argued, attention to figuration can also expand the fields of possibility, allowing us to reimagine…
Occupy Wall Street and the Economic Imagination
This article explores the making of an expansive and expanding economic imagination in disparate Occupy sites-the Alternative Banking working group of Occupy Wall Street, the daily life of lists in Liberty Square, née Zuccotti Park, and the work of Strike Debt. In particular, I focus on transformative possibility in unanticipated places. Where anthropology and critical theory have often sought out capitalism's otherwises for inspiration and poten…
Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India , by Gupta, Akhil
Crude domination: An anthropology of oil , edited by Behrends, Andrea, Stephen P. Reyna and Günther Schlee
Walls and white elephants: Oil extraction, responsibility, and infrastructural violence in Equatorial Guinea
Starting from the juxtaposition of Equatorial Guinea's luxurious private oil compounds with the sporadic and uneven public infrastructure outside their walls, this article explores how infrastructure becomes a key site through which oil and gas companies and Equatoguinean actors negotiate entanglement and disentanglement, responsibility and its abdication. If basic forms of infrastructural violence include exclusion and disconnection, that violen…
Offshore work: Oil, modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea
Oil scholarship often focuses on oil as money, as if the industry were a mere revenue-producing machine-a black box with predictable effects. Drawing on fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I take the industry as my object of analysis: infrastructures, labor regimes, forms of expertise and fantasy. Starting from a visit to an offshore rig, I explore the idea of "modularity"-mobile personnel, technologies, and legal structures that enable offshore work…
The Anthropology of Global Productions: Producing and Critiquing the Global
Offshore work: Oil, modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea
Oil scholarship often focuses on oil as money, as if the industry were a mere revenue-producing machine-a black box with predictable effects. Drawing on fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I take the industry as my object of analysis: infrastructures, labor regimes, forms of expertise and fantasy. Starting from a visit to an offshore rig, I explore the idea of "modularity"-mobile personnel, technologies, and legal structures that enable offshore work…
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
Walls and white elephants: Oil extraction, responsibility, and infrastructural violence in Equatorial Guinea
Starting from the juxtaposition of Equatorial Guinea's luxurious private oil compounds with the sporadic and uneven public infrastructure outside their walls, this article explores how infrastructure becomes a key site through which oil and gas companies and Equatoguinean actors negotiate entanglement and disentanglement, responsibility and its abdication. If basic forms of infrastructural violence include exclusion and disconnection, that violen…
Toward an Ethnography of the National Economy
What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent? What does it do? This article argues for ethnographic attention to national economies as a serial global form, arguably the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity. In dialogue with feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, economic anthropology, and the social studies of finance, this article asks how national economies beco…
Occupy Wall Street and the Economic Imagination
This article explores the making of an expansive and expanding economic imagination in disparate Occupy sites-the Alternative Banking working group of Occupy Wall Street, the daily life of lists in Liberty Square, née Zuccotti Park, and the work of Strike Debt. In particular, I focus on transformative possibility in unanticipated places. Where anthropology and critical theory have often sought out capitalism's otherwises for inspiration and poten…
Conclusion: Energy ethics and ethical worlds
What happens when the effects of our ethical actions stretch beyond, often far beyond, first‐ and second‐person phenomena? What happens when one person's richly textured ethical world is another's profound violation? Energy offers a particularly useful empirical terrain on which to think through the questions posed by ethical worlds. Ethical worlds gesture both to the supra‐individual, supra‐present contexts in which we all craft quotidian ethics…
Pan African capital? Banks, currencies, and imperial power
U.S. and Europe-based banks and international financial institutions including the IMF have been central to critical accounts of Africa’s place in global capitalism. And yet since 2008 these institutions have been in retreat on the continent, partially replaced by Pan African Banks. Putting ethnographic work with Africa-based finance professionals into dialogue with heterodox economic thinking on banks and currency sovereignty, I argue that we mu…
Tenants of the World, Unite! From Atomisation to Structural Power in Financialised Tenancy
Recent transformations in the political economy of housing—particularly the corporatisation, concentration, and financialisation of landlording—paradoxically intensify both the atomisation of the tenant experience and the potential for organised tenants to exercise structural power. This potential collective power, however, is not self‐actualising. Building on two years of participatory action research and one year of operational data from the Ca…
The idea life of money and poststructural realism
Comment on Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The social life of money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
To Critique or not to Critique? That is (perhaps not) the Question
Comment on Salverda:To Critique or not to Critique? That is (perhaps not) the Question
The Anthropology of Global Productions: Producing and Critiquing the Global
Walls and white elephants: Oil extraction, responsibility, and infrastructural violence in Equatorial Guinea
Starting from the juxtaposition of Equatorial Guinea's luxurious private oil compounds with the sporadic and uneven public infrastructure outside their walls, this article explores how infrastructure becomes a key site through which oil and gas companies and Equatoguinean actors negotiate entanglement and disentanglement, responsibility and its abdication. If basic forms of infrastructural violence include exclusion and disconnection, that violen…
Offshore work: Oil, modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea
Oil scholarship often focuses on oil as money, as if the industry were a mere revenue-producing machine-a black box with predictable effects. Drawing on fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I take the industry as my object of analysis: infrastructures, labor regimes, forms of expertise and fantasy. Starting from a visit to an offshore rig, I explore the idea of "modularity"-mobile personnel, technologies, and legal structures that enable offshore work…
Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India , by Gupta, Akhil
Crude domination: An anthropology of oil , edited by Behrends, Andrea, Stephen P. Reyna and Günther Schlee
Finance, Figuration, and the Alternative Banking Group of Occupy Wall Street
If the imaginative project of capitalism comes to life through processes of figuration, it is the white male figure of the banker, the trader, or the broker who lends imaginative cohesion to what we might otherwise consider a diverse set of practices and people scattered unevenly across landscapes. However, as both Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing have argued, attention to figuration can also expand the fields of possibility, allowing us to reimagine…
Occupy Wall Street and the Economic Imagination
This article explores the making of an expansive and expanding economic imagination in disparate Occupy sites-the Alternative Banking working group of Occupy Wall Street, the daily life of lists in Liberty Square, née Zuccotti Park, and the work of Strike Debt. In particular, I focus on transformative possibility in unanticipated places. Where anthropology and critical theory have often sought out capitalism's otherwises for inspiration and poten…
Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas
Education with a Debt Sentence: For-Profit Colleges as American Dream Crushers and Factories of Debt
The idea life of money and poststructural realism
Comment on Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The social life of money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria, by Kristin Peterson
In the late 1970s economist Douglas North, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize, quipped, ‘It is a peculiar fact that the literature in economics [ ... ] contains so little discussion of the centra
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
Toward an Ethnography of the National Economy
What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent? What does it do? This article argues for ethnographic attention to national economies as a serial global form, arguably the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity. In dialogue with feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, economic anthropology, and the social studies of finance, this article asks how national economies beco…
The Promise of Infrastructure
Infrastructural time / Hannah Appel -- The future in ruins : thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure / Akhil Gupta -- Infrastructures in and out of time : the promise of roads in contemporary Peru / Penny Harvey -- The current never stops : intimacies of energy infrastructure in Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel -- Infrastructure, apartheid technopolitics, and temporalities of "transition" / Antina von Schnitzler -- A public matter : water, hyd…
Promise of Infrastructure
The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea
The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea
The Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a sweeping theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in…
To Critique or not to Critique? That is (perhaps not) the Question
Comment on Salverda:To Critique or not to Critique? That is (perhaps not) the Question
Conclusion: Energy ethics and ethical worlds
What happens when the effects of our ethical actions stretch beyond, often far beyond, first‐ and second‐person phenomena? What happens when one person's richly textured ethical world is another's profound violation? Energy offers a particularly useful empirical terrain on which to think through the questions posed by ethical worlds. Ethical worlds gesture both to the supra‐individual, supra‐present contexts in which we all craft quotidian ethics…
Towards justice: A communiqué from Los Angeles
In this communiqué the Institute on Inequality and Democracy foregrounds the work of some of their movement partners — more appropriately understood as movement teachers — organizations that are on the frontline of the struggle against disposability and death in Los Angeles and beyond. They demonstrate the necessity of building a new common sense about relations of property and personhood, debt and wealth, reparation and redistribution
World Anthropological Perspectives on Economic Nationalisms
As rising numbers of national governments promote economic nationalist policies and the withdrawal from (or renegotiation of) global political and economic relationships, the impossibility of disconnecting from global circulations is illustrated by the traveling discourse of economic nationalism itself, although conceptualized and implemented quite differently as refracted through specific historical and political contexts. Drawing on the possibi…
Let's Get Free
The majority of people incarcerated in the United States have not been convicted of any crime. Rather, they are there because they are too poor to pay their way out of jail. The financialization of the criminal legal system means that wealthy people go free while poor people suffer through indefinite detention or face an interest-bearing price of freedom: commercial bail bonds contracts, an industry worth more than $2 billion annually. Bail debt …
Pan African capital? Banks, currencies, and imperial power
U.S. and Europe-based banks and international financial institutions including the IMF have been central to critical accounts of Africa’s place in global capitalism. And yet since 2008 these institutions have been in retreat on the continent, partially replaced by Pan African Banks. Putting ethnographic work with Africa-based finance professionals into dialogue with heterodox economic thinking on banks and currency sovereignty, I argue that we mu…
Tenants of the World, Unite! From Atomisation to Structural Power in Financialised Tenancy
Recent transformations in the political economy of housing—particularly the corporatisation, concentration, and financialisation of landlording—paradoxically intensify both the atomisation of the tenant experience and the potential for organised tenants to exercise structural power. This potential collective power, however, is not self‐actualising. Building on two years of participatory action research and one year of operational data from the Ca…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (9 works) · Capitalism (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Finance (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (6 works)