The articles collected in this issue of Public Culture all serve as a model for using fine-grained local knowledge to interrogate and refine grand theories like globalization or neoliberalism. We follow tuberculosis research from nineteenth-century Berlin through to mid-twentieth-century Britain and India; we visit the “virtual world” of online poker to understand how people act under and make sense of uncertainty; we explore East African encounters with psychological counseling and witness the local particularities of the globalization of the mind; we see both the violence and the intimacy of extortion in Guatemala; through a study of Gezi Park we come to better understand property regimes in Turkey; and we discover how US nuclear workers are certain to experience exposure and why such injuries and harms are both normalized and justified.
In the first Forum essay, Robyn Creswell begins with a lovely illustration of untranslatable words, drawing upon his own experience...
