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Open Access
Two Early Byzantine Bible Manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic: Codex Climaci Rescriptus II & XI
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-02-20) Phillips, Kim
Despite the ubiquitous use of Greek by the Christian church of the late antique Southern Levant, many Christians in the region also—or only—spoke Aramaic. Today, this dialect, known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA), is relatively sparsely attested in the form of regional inscriptions and, particularly, in the form of vernacular translations of Greek biblical, liturgical and theological texts. These translations survive predominantly as undertexts within palimpsest manuscripts. Codex Climaci Rescriptus (CCR) is one of the most important palimpsest manuscript sources for the recovery of CPA texts. CCR was created around the tenth century; its superior text consists of Syriac translations of two theological works by John Climacus. This tenth century manuscript was manufactured using recycled parchment from at least eleven older, obsolete manuscripts whose texts had been scraped off in preparation for reuse. Two of these eleven manuscripts form the focus of the present study. The first—CCR II—was originally a manuscript of the Pauline Epistles in CPA translation; the second—CCR XI—was originally an Apostolos manuscript (i.e., it contained the Acts of the Apostles and the Catholic Epistles). Cutting-edge multispectral imaging technology has been brought to bear on CCR in the last decade, enabling more detailed and accurate reconstructions of its various undertexts. With the benefit of this technology, this study offers a detailed codicological introduction to each of CCR II and CCR XI, fresh editions of the undertexts themselves, as well as a commentary that begins to evaluate the ongoing significance of this manuscript for biblical and linguistic studies.
Open Access
Phenomenography in the 21st Century: A Methodology for Investigating Human Experience of the World
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-02-10) S. Åkerlind, Gerlese
Phenomenography offers a distinctive approach to studying human experience of the world, by highlighting different ways in which the same phenomena (concepts, objects, events) are experienced within any group of people. Phenomenography focuses on the relationship between meaning—people’s holistic understanding of phenomena—and structure, that is the part-whole structure of people’s awareness of phenomena. This structure of awareness then forms the basis for identifying differences in the experienced meaning of phenomena, and how awareness needs to change to allow new meanings to emerge—whether educationally, historically, culturally or socially. Over its 50-year history, there have been substantial advancements in the methods and theoretical assumptions underlying phenomenographic research, but these developments are not always recognised. This book details how the 21st-century practice of phenomenography differs from its earlier iterations, emphasising that earlier works can be misleading when used to justify current research practices. Phenomenography is a developing, not static, approach to social science research, and this book introduces further methodological and theoretical extensions to the research. Although most commonly used in educational research, the potential of phenomenography to contribute to research in other social science disciplines is increasingly being recognised and is further emphasised in this book. In this way, this book is not only essential reading for doctoral students, but will also be of interest to those already experienced in phenomenography, and to social science researchers within and outside the field of education.
Open Access
New Words to Old Tunes: Genres and Metrics of Lebanese Zajal Poetry
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-02-06) Haydar, Adnan
New Words to Old Tunes: Genres and Metrics of Lebanese Zajal Poetry introduces the rich tradition of Lebanese oral poetry, offering an in-depth study and analysis of its metrics and genres. It presents a novel framework for the proper scansion of meters and emphasises the previously overlooked roles of musical and poetic stress. It details nearly twenty zajal genres, including popular songs that use zajal metrics, and integrates musical notations and web-streamed audio links to enrich the reader’s experience. By presenting both theoretical analysis and practical applications, the book not only contributes to the academic study of Lebanese and Arab oral traditions but also supports broader efforts to preserve and disseminate this cultural heritage through digital humanities. While previous works have been largely descriptive or focused on specific poets, this book provides a detailed analytical approach to zajal metrics and their musical dimensions. This rigorous and comprehensive study will be of interest to scholars working on oral traditions, folklore studies, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, oral-formulaic poetry traditions, throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Open Access
Winter Light: On Late Life's Radiance
(punctum books, 2025-02-28) Penick, Douglas J.
In the contemporary West, the elderly are regarded as somehow “other,” no longer who they used to be, no longer full members of the worlds they once inhabited. Being old is seen as a medical management issue. But old age is not a defective version of what preceded it; it is — like childhood, adolescence, and middle age — its own time of life with its own challenges and gifts. It is an unexpected experience and largely unknown terrain. Winter Light: On Late Life’s Radiance is an exploration of old age as a time when sudden and uncontrollable losses reveal and clarify patterns of existence formerly obscured. In this context, Penick tells of the lives of artists, musicians, and others who, in old age, changed radically through visionary modes of experience that otherwise would not have been possible. Near the end of their lives, Titian, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Rabindranath Tagore, Jean Rhys, Andrea Palladio, Paul Cézanne, Leoš Janáček, Igor Stravinsky, and others found unforeseen paths and articulated subtleties and beauties never before encountered. Their visions are now woven into our culture and the stories of their lives are signposts for us. As Thoreau once said: “Not ’til we are lost… not ’til we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” In five essays, concerned respectively with body, connection, pattern, loss, and vision, Winter Light explores irretrievable losses and dawning possibilities. Penick gives voice to aspects of the inner life that in old age unfold with unanticipated depth, breadth, strangeness, and light.
Open Access
Bacterial Genomes: Trees and Networks
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-02-28) Seshasayee, Aswin Sai Narain
Microbes form the “unseen majority” of life on Earth, with bacteria at the forefront as both the architects of life’s chemical foundations and agents of disease. But their story is far more complex. Bacteria thrive in diverse and extreme environments, driven by the dynamic evolution of their genomes. These tiny organisms wield an extraordinary ability to adapt, balancing genetic changes across generations with rapid physiological responses to environmental shifts. In Bacterial Genomes, the evolutionary and regulatory processes that shape bacterial life are brought to life. This textbook offers a conceptual exploration of how bacterial genomes are organized, how they evolve, and how their genetic information is interpreted through intricate molecular networks. Drawing on both cutting-edge research and the historical milestones that shaped microbiology, it illuminates how bacteria navigate the intersection of genetic adaptation and ecological resilience. Designed for college students, interdisciplinary researchers, and even the determined amateur, Aswin Seshasayee moves beyond technical jargon to provide a thought-provoking synthesis of bacterial evolution and adaptation. Unlike traditional genomics texts, this book blends historical insights with contemporary discoveries, offering a fresh perspective on the role of bacteria in shaping the living world.
Open Access
The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-02-25) Lave, Rebecca; Lane, Stuart
Despite ongoing debates about its origins, the Anthropocene—a new epoch characterized by significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems—is widely acknowledged. Our environment is increasingly a product of interacting biophysical and social forces, shaped by climate change, colonial legacies, gender norms, hydrological processes, and more. Understanding these intricate interactions requires a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative, biophysical and social research. However, mixed-methods environmental research remains rare, hindered by academic boundaries, limited training, and the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration. Time, funding, and the integration of diverse data further complicate this research, whilst the dynamics and ethics of interdisciplinary teams add another layer of complexity. Despite these challenges, mixed-methods research offers a more robust and ultimately transformative understanding of environmental questions. This Field Guide aims to inspire and equip researchers to undertake such studies. Organized like a recipe book, it assists researchers in the preparation of their field work, as well as offering entry points to key methods and providing examples of successful mixed-methods projects. This book will be of interest to scholars wishing to tackle environmental research in a more holistic manner, spanning ‘sister’ disciplines such as anthropology, statistics, political science, public health, archaeology, geography, history, ecology, and Earth science.
Open Access
Harvesting the Sea in Southeastern Arabia: Volume 1: Regional Studies
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-02-05) Anonby, Erik; Morris, Miranda J.; Watson, Janet C.E.
Traditional livelihoods and the ecosystems that sustain them are dying out around the world. This book is a collection of research on the relationships between people, their environment, their expertise and their languages along the ecologically fragile coasts of the Arabian Peninsula. These studies are the outcome of many years of collaborative fieldwork with local communities in three main regions of southern and eastern Arabia: the Musandam Peninsula, Dhofar and al-Mahrah, and the island of Soqotra. Bringing together oral literature, traditional scientific knowledge, and marine subsistence at the peripheries of the Arabian seaboard, the volume makes a major contribution to the documentation of the indigenous Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL), regional Arabic, and the Kumzari language, as well as to a greater understanding of their speakers’ mastery in harvesting the seas. Diverse contributions by scholars and language community members explore the songs and stories, experiences and viewpoints of indigenous fishers, and shed light on the cultural significance of the maritime species encountered by each community. This book is a testimony to resilient ways of life, many of which have vanished, but which at the same time may offer unique answers for the future of humanity.
Open Access
The Fight for Black Liberation: Breaking the Political Strings in the Trump Era
(punctum books, 2025-02-11) Hoston, William T.
The first presidency of Donald J. Trump further unveiled the calamity of white America’s determination to maintain societal order during a period of landmark racial upheaval. From the restrictive voting measures led by Republicans and conservatives following the 2020 election, to the death of George P. Floyd Jr. and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, to the January 6, 2021 insurrection, each racial marker continues to show the endurance and even strengthening of white America’s racist traditions alongside its avowed and always unfulfilled commitments to equality for all. The Fight for Black Liberation: Breaking the Political Strings in the Trump Era presents a political critique of the state of Black America in the Trump era, especially when so many Democratic presidents (including Clinton, Obama and Biden) have done so little for Black Americans even while relying on their votes. The book argues that amid continued structural, institutional, and systemic barriers, Black people in America must establish political independence and demand a Black political agenda to chart a path toward a Black Liberation movement. What has hindered the process of reaching a Black Liberation movement has been the assimilationist loyalty of Black Americans to the false constructs of partisanship and ideology, and this book encourages Black eligible voters, of whatever party or other affiliation, to abstain from the two-party system and become an independent voting bloc only willing to give the Black vote to a chosen party in a free partisan market that best represents Black interests. Otherwise, the Black electorate remain frozen in a two-party system that has been built to serve white interests only, even when claiming otherwise, and no amount of assimilation will make a difference.
Open Access
Ontohackers: Radical Movement Philosophy in the Age of Extinctions and Algorithms, Part I: Radical Movement Philosophy and the Body Intelligence R/evolution
(punctum books, 2024-05-16) del Val, Jaym*/Jaime
Ontohackers redefines what movement, worlds, and bodies are through the sense of proprioception reconceptualized as formless fluctuation field, a movement matrix that is itself also thought, and which underlies all life forms and fields including the inorganic. Our worlds are made of endless such entangled fields n-folding in never ending variation or enferance. The current planetary crisis has emerged due to an accidental evolutionary alignment, narrowing, and impoverishment of that matrix’s indeterminacy, that appeared gradually and eventually with bipedalism, and which created an imbalance between the larger proprioceptive field and its brain, and made the atrophied body extend itself technically in geometric fields gradually covering the planet, along with its fears, with disastrous consequences that are unleashing an unprecedented type of mass extinction and species suicide. The reply to this crisis – which is urgently due if we are to reduce even slightly the collapse coming up over the next decades – is in recovering a lost sensorimotor plasticity which is also cognitive, affective, and relational plasticity, through developing movement technes for cultivating Body Intelligence (BI), reversing and taking elsewhere the failed evolution culminating in AI, stepping down from humanist suprematist pedestals, undoing our dependency from unsustainable killing machines of sedentary consumerism that impoverish experience, stopping the reproduction of a species that has become plague (by reversing heteronormative reproductive dogmas till we reach preagricultural population levels), and recovering the joys of moving with the world, in symbiotic mutation, towards unprecedented evolutionary variations: this is our cosmic responsibility for all life on Earth. The book’s structure expresses Enferance Theory with regard to how processes of becoming have a triple movement: an incipiency unfolding the field (Part I); a condensation-expansion where the field acquires full consistency (Part II), and a resonance or memory of the field relating to other fields (Part III). Part I includes Books 1 to 3 out of 7. The preface sets the context of the book: the extinction crisis. Book 1 provides an introduction to the entire field of the book and metareflects on the book’s structure and process. Book 2 is a full treatise on proprioception, developing the theory of Body Intelligence and addressing core issues of cognition, perception, communication, and an ontological redefinition of the body as proprioceptive swarm. Book 3 develops all core concepts of Radical Movement Philosophy, unfolding into several sections, first introducing the fluctation, field, and swarm theory, secondly the core concepts of clinaos (indeterminacy), metabody (consistency), and intraduction (variation), coming together in the concept of enferance. Finally, another triad further unfolds the previous as rhythm (affect), orientation (desire), and contact (sex), closing with an orgiastic cosmo-ontology that opens the way to Part II.
Open Access
Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-05-02) Clossey, Luke
For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas. Beyond the European periphery, this global study follows Jesus across – and sometimes between – religious boundaries, from Greenland to Kongo to China. Amidst this diversity, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520 offers readers sympathetic and immersive insight into the religious realities of its subjects. To this end, this book identifies two perspectives: one uncovers hidden meanings and unexpected connections, while the other restricts Jesus to the space and time of human history. Minds that believed in Jesus, and those that opposed him, made use of both perspectives to make sense of their worlds. This book includes over one hundred images, tables and audio clips.
Open Access
Arabic Documents from Medieval Nubia
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-05-06) Khan, Geoffrey
This volume presents an edition of a corpus of Arabic documents datable to the 11th and 12th centuries AD that were discovered by the Egypt Exploration Society at the site of the Nubian fortress Qaṣr Ibrīm (situated in the south of modern Egypt). The edition of the documents is accompanied by English translations and a detailed analysis of their contents and historical background. The documents throw new light on relations between Egypt and Nubia in the High Middle Ages, especially in the Fatimid period. They are of particular importance since previous historical studies from the perspective of Arabic sources have been almost entirely based on historiographical sources, often written a long time after the events described and distorted by tendentious points of view.
Open Access
Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education: Exploring the Potential of Artistic Research
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-05-27) Dalagna, Gilvano; Östersjö, Stefan; Minors, Helen Julia; Salgado Correia, Jorge
Higher Music Performance Education, as taught and learned in universities and conservatoires in Europe, is undergoing transformation. Since the nineteenth century, the master-apprentice pedagogical model has dominated, creating a learning environment that emphasises the development of technical skills rather than critical and creative faculties. This book contributes to the renewal of this field by being the first to address the potential of artistic research in developing student-centred approaches and greater student autonomy. This potential is demonstrated in chapters illustrating artistic research projects that are embedded within higher music education courses across Europe, with examples ranging from instrumental tuition and ensemble work to the development of professional employability skills and inclusive practices. Bringing together diverse and experienced voices working within Higher Music Education but often also as professional performers, this edited collection pairs critical reflection with artistic insight to present new approaches to curricula for teaching interpretation and performance. It calls for greater collaboration between Higher Education and professional music institutions to create closer bonds with music industries and, thereby, improve students’ career opportunities. Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education will appeal to scholars, performers, teachers, but also students whose interests centre on innovative practices in conservatoires and music departments.
Open Access
Roles and Relations in Biblical Law: A Study of Participant Tracking, Semantic Roles, and Social Networks in Leviticus 17-26
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-05-30) Canu Højgaard, Christian
Leviticus 17–26, an ancient law text known as the Holiness Code, prescribes how particular persons are to behave in concrete, everyday situations. The addressees of the law text must revere their parents, respect the elderly, fear God, take care of their fellow, provide for the sojourner, and so on. The sojourner has his own obligations, as do the priests. Even God is said to behave in various ways towards various persons. Thus, the law text forms an intricate web of persons and interactions. There is a growing awareness that ancient law texts were not arbitrary collections of legal paragraphs but articulations of certain world views. The laws were rational in their own respect and were based on the lawgiver’s ethos. However, since the ethical values of the lawgiver rarely—if ever—surface in the text itself, it has proven difficult to grasp with traditional, exegetical methods. This study offers a novel approach to mapping out the ethos of an ancient law text like Leviticus 17–26. By employing social network analysis, the participants and their interactions are mapped to scrutinize the ethical roles embodied by the persons of the law. To accomplish this, the study undertakes meticulous research into both the participants and the interactions of Leviticus 17–26. The book investigates a semi-automatic approach to extracting participant information from a text and offers new methods for analysing Hebrew interactions (realised as verbal predicates) in terms of dynamicity, causation, and agency.
Open Access
Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-05-29) Mehl, Margaret
Japan was the first non-Western nation to compete with the Western powers at their own game. The country’s rise to a major player on the stage of Western music has been equally spectacular. The connection between these two developments, however, has never been explored. How did making music make Japan modern? How did Japan make music that originated in Europe its own? And what happened to Japan’s traditional music in the process? Music and the Making of Modern Japan answers these questions. Discussing musical modernization in the context of globalization and nation-building, Margaret Mehl argues that, far from being a side-show, music was part of the action on centre stage. Making music became an important vehicle for empowering the people of Japan to join in the shaping of the modern world. In only fifty years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese. Music and the Making of Modern Japan represents a fresh contribution to historical research on making music as a major cultural, social, and political force.
Open Access
Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience
(punctum books, 2024-05-28) Tomlinson, Matt
If you tried speaking with a dead person and they gave you a clear response, how would you react? Mediums develop their minds and bodies to communicate messages from the deceased to their living loved ones, and in Speaking with the Dead, anthropologist Matt Tomlinson describes his experiences training as a medium with a Spiritualist congregation in Canberra, Australia. The book is written in a first-person narrative style that brings “extrahuman” relationships to life, showing what it is like to learn and practice mediumship: the strategic suspension of skepticism; the wobbly first attempts; the embarrassing failures; and the moments, both unsettling and enthralling, when someone tells you that yes indeed, you’ve just described her grandfather who died in 1978. Speaking with the Dead brims with stories of talented mediums and Tomlinson is not interested in proving or disproving mediumship, preferring instead to illustrate how mediums bring their practices to life. In contrast to the popular image of mediums as shameless frauds, Tomlinson describes earnest and committed seekers from a wide range of backgrounds who often struggle to understand their own experiences. Their profits are therapeutic rather than financial. And they worry about endings as much as anyone else: the passing of physical lives, the closure of beloved churches. Speaking with the Dead is ultimately a book about the lively side of death, grounded in Spiritualists’ conviction that life is eternal and your social network extends to the astral plane. It is a close examination of how mediumship works culturally, which is to say, how mediums and audiences work together to create senses of transcendent connection.
Open Access
On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery
(punctum books, 2024-05-15) Buck, Dorothea; Antonetta, Susanne
In 1936, at age nineteen, Dorothea Buck followed the trail of a star along the mudflats of her North Sea home, Wangerooge Island. Hospitalized at a Christian institution called Bethel, she was sterilized under Nazi law upon a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Buck lost her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher—the sterilized could not get a college degree. Instead, she became an artist and activist. Buck, who lived to the age of 102, fought throughout her life for psychiatric reform. She created her own form of psychiatric treatment, which she called “trialogue,” in which psychosis experiencers, family, and clinicians join together to examine the experience of psychosis. Trialogue seminars still take place today. Buck also demanded recognition of the Nazi murders of the disabled and the mentally ill. Many of these victims were psychiatric patients gassed in chambers built into six of Germany’s asylums. In 2008, Buck told an audience commemorating these murders that there must be “no second-class victims” of Nazi rule. Biologically based psychiatry, Buck believed, would always reduce a condition like hers to something “genetically caused, meaningless, and incurable.” Like fellow German Paul Schreber’s Memoirs, Buck’s On the Trail of the Morning Star calls for a radical rethinking of what it means to live with and in psychosis. This publication is the first time one of her major writings appears in English.
Open Access
Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-05-08) Desmond, Adrian
In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man's institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil's Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull's pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.
Open Access
Lividity
(punctum books, 2024-05-08) Rosenfield, Kim
In Lividity, poet Kim Rosenfield works within the outskirts of language, draining it of connotation and excess. Using words and phrases culled from linguistics textbooks and language-learning manuals, Rosenfield invites the reader to experience the everyday vernacular as dislocated affect. What happens when language acts as organ donor? When language, the conveyor of our vulnerability, is transposed into new and often failing terrain? Are expressions of meaning vital enough to keep the organism functioning? What happens when meaning loses its moorings?
Open Access
Learning Statistics with jamovi: A Tutorial for Beginners in Statistical Analysis
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-01-15) Navarro, Danielle; Foxcroft, David
Based on Danielle Navarro’s widely acclaimed and prize-winning book Learning Statistics with R, this elegantly designed textbook offers undergraduate students a thorough and accessible introduction to jamovi, as well as how to get to grips with statistics and data manipulation. Lucid and easy to understand, Learning Statistics with jamovi covers the analysis of contingency tables, t-tests, correlation, regression, ANOVA and factor analysis, while also giving students a firm grounding in descriptive statistics and graphing. It includes learning aids for applying statistical principles using the jamovi interface, as well as embedded data files to accompany the book, and comprehensive chapters on probability theory, sampling and estimation, and null hypothesis testing. Freely available in open access, Learning Statistics with jamovi is an ideal introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, as well as behavioural and health science students and anyone who needs to understand and use statistical analysis in their work.
Open Access
Being in Shadow and Light: Academics in Post/Conflict Higher Education
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-01-06) Belluigi, Dina Zoe
Academia and its citizens, during periods of political violence and social conflict, are often overlooked. When attention is given, the focus tends to be on student activism, access to higher education, or curriculum development. The experiences of academics affected by conflict remain under-researched, despite the crucial role they play as educators and in generating, documenting, preserving and challenging knowledges. This is particularly concerning given that academics have−and continue to be−at risk as targets of sanction, persecution and oppression. This edited volume seeks to address this gap by exploring, and evoking, the complexities of academic subjectivity, place and practice in contexts where intellectual and state authority are contested or in transition. It features contributions by academics, artists and memory activists who have stepped bravely outside of the parameters of their disciplines, with modes of enquiry and representation that include conversations, vignettes and case studies, critical ethnographies, oral life histories, interviews, poetry and collage. Within the ten chapters are consideration of conflicts within Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, England, Mexico, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Syria and Venezuela. Being in Shadow and Light encourages a deeper understanding of academics’ navigation of these difficult conditions. The authors’ insider-outsider positioning brings forth the richness of ways through dilemmas−of omission, trauma, displacement, inheritance, injustice, distortion, desire. Grounding the many social, cultural, economic, and epistemic politics within academia, troubles the enclosure of ‘conflict’ in politics at the grand level, as if only within the realm of interest for state and international actors. Against sanitising the uncertainties and particularities of being an academic figure, the authors reflect on the states and sites of conflict as spaces which shape living. This work is a call to recognize, document and study the often-overlooked subjectivities and contributions of academics thinking and practicing within societies undergoing conflict(s) and in their aftermath. As such, it will be of interest to academics, students and staff working within universities, as well audiences interested in intellectuals and institutions in contexts undergoing change.