Heather Hindman

Beginning at 11:56 a.m. local time on April 25, 2015 and continuing for over two months, a series of large earthquakes and significant aftershocks, numbering more than three hundred, plagued Nepal. The earthquakes destroyed homes, historical monuments, and infrastructure, and they triggered an ongoing series of landslides, exacerbated by the monsoon. In the days and weeks following the initial earthquake, many experts on Nepal began to discuss the underlying issues that made these earthquakes as much a human-made disaster as a natural one. Our discussions evolved into a larger investigation of the role of academia in a time of crisis. Much of what is often lost in the rush to rebuild is nuance and historical context, an understanding of the particularities of place in the form of reflections on the past and its implications for the future. Anthropologists working in sites of disaster have contributed much to thinking about the aftermath of reconstruction, but they are often included in the discussion only when the urgency has passed. The essays we present here are an attempt to begin the conversation early—to introduce issues of inequality, regionalism, class, local control, the environment, and diversity even as the dust is still settling—rather than merely as a posthoc critique.

Using the theoretically and empirically multivalent concept of “Korean quality,” this article examines articulations of consumption, popular culture, and labor migration in contemporary Nepal. Drawing on the anticipation surrounding the 2010 administration of the Employment Permit System-Korean Language Test, for which over 40,000 Nepalis were candidates, we embed this moment in longer histories of desire and discipline. The qualification mechanism deployed in this system both shifts and is crosscut by Nepali landscapes of risk, class habitus, and expectation. Going beyond the frames in which such phenomena are usually considered, we suggest, is necessary for mapping oft-hidden entanglements of transnational processes. [Keywords: Quality, labor migration, (South) Korea, Nepal, assessment, class, expectation]

Organizers of South by Southwest balked at threats against discussions of harassment and diversity in the gaming community. Now there's a separate program for that. How does that reflect on the main show that goes on without them? Why is it important to protect the people disrupting systems that need disrupting?(http://womensenews.org/2015/11/threats-of-violence-online-and-off-spread-troubling-silence/)