Conjunctures: Who Counts, What Circulates, and the Politics of Children

Appadurai, Arjun Ralph Michael Rao Vyjayanthi Robles-Anderson Erica

The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupting every arena of social life. Even then, we aimed to see “the virus in the context of the planet” and not to succumb to “the temptation to see the planet solely through the lens of the virus.” (3) We've taken those words to heart. The present issue offers a somewhat dispersed set of articles about apps and air filters, shopping malls and circuses, urban majorities and children. Yet in the light of the current conditions, these topics reveal a set of conjunctural surprises. The essays in this issue remind us that the coronavirus spreads through particular contexts and that we should poise ourselves to observe and to notice what comes next. This issue opens with two essays about tracking majorities. In “Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of...