Dear Readers,

In addition to the publication of high-quality peer-reviewed academic research, JEA seeks to engage with the public debate in real-time and make timely contributions on critical issues, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, we now invite relevant submissions of essays (not peer-reviewed, but subject to editorial review). JEA is a multidisciplinary journal and in addition to classic anthropological and ethnographic contributions, we welcome submissions within the fields of other social sciences, humanities, philosophy and critical theory.

On behalf of the editorial board,

Tereza Kuldova, Jardar Østbø, Christin Thea Wathne, Aleksandra Bartoszko, Steve Hall, Mathew A. Varghese

The special issue Algorithmic Governance and the Futures of Social Control invites anthropological and interdisciplinary contributions that investigate the multiple effects as well as unintended and harmful consequences of algorithmic governance and new forms of social sorting, control, and surveillance.

We suggest that the extreme case is not only where the extraordinary story lies—though this may indeed be the case! Perhaps choosing the extreme example means choosing an example of a whole that we cannot yet grasp in its totality—and by choosing such an example we try to conjure up this totality. We also invite papers that explore how extreme examples are used in public discourse more widely: How do people in various ethnographic contexts make sense of the world through such examples?