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Other Books
& Special Issues

A full (and up to date) list of my publications, including book chapters and journal articles, is available on my UCL website

BOOK

An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange: Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond

In this volume we outline the promise of an analytic focus on ‘intellectual exchange’, as well as elaborating an ethnographically informed framework for its study across cultures and contexts. 

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BOOK

Detachment: Essays on the limits of relational thinking

This volume urges a reconsideration of the productive potential of disconnection, distance and detachment, as ethical, methodological and philosophical commitments. In so doing, we write against the grain of a strong tendency in contemporary social theory and public life.

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BOOK

The State We’re In: Reflecting on Democracy's Troubles

What makes people lose faith in democratic statecraft? The question seems an urgent one. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, citizens across the world have grown increasingly disillusioned with what was once a cherished ideal. 

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BOOK

Southeast Asian Perspectives on Power

Southeast Asia has undergone innumerable far-reaching changes and dramatic transformations over the last half-century. This book explores the concept of power in relation to these transformations, and examines its various social, cultural, religious, economic and political forms.

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JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE

Anthropology and Humanism (2020):
Volume 45, Issue 2: 175-402

Special Section: Unsettling Anthropologies of Care

In this special section, we explore care as a morally ambiguous and relationally unstable set of practices. By exploring care over longer temporal frames and across shifting subjectivities and intersubjectivities, we show how enactments of care are often unsettled by the transforming dynamics of relationships across time and often entail a multiplicity of competing affects and aspirations, such as hope and failure, love and resentment, pragmatism and utopianism, and connection and disconnection. We thus suggest an analytic approach to care that questions care as either morally suspect or morally virtuous and instead allows for the compromised, shifting, and ambiguous dimensions of care practices to take center stage.

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JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE

Anthropology Today (2022): Volume 38, Issue 2: i-ii, 1-31
Special Issue: Mindfulness and Culture

In this special issue of Anthropology Today on mindfulness and culture, we reflect on the historical and cultural contexts that inform mindfulness and meditation. The anthropologists in this issue provide rich, qualitative accounts of mindfulness’ historical and cultural complexities. Each article shows that broader ontological and metaphysical ideas about what it is to be human and to engage with the world necessarily inform mindfulness practice.

Taken together, this special issue illustrates that anthropological approaches enable

us to explore the lived experience of culturally embedded assumptions about the mind and mental health.

© 2025 by Joanna Cook

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