Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Magdalena Stawkowski, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of South Carolina

About a year into my field research in Kazakhstan, I went to the city of Kurchatov, once the secret command center of the Soviet nuclear program, to make some photocopies. On the ground floor of an apartment building I found a store whose owner had a copy machine as well as several glass display cases selling souvenir stickers, magnets and other objects featuring hammers and sickles, stars and mushroom clouds.

These kinds of trinkets were not particularly surprising to me. You can find them in many places. But a bright yellow button about the size of my palm stopped me in my tracks: “I am a radioactive mutant” (“Ya radioaktivnyy mutant”), read its simple message.

I laughed to myself, thinking that the button was meant to be funny, that a tourist would buy it to wear ironically and tell stories about having been near a nuclear test site.

But the button’s message is also true for the thousands of people who live in this area. Residents actually say, “I am a mutant,” when they talk about their bodies, their family histories and their radioactive environment.

As a cultural-medical anthropologist, I study health and illness as life experiences. I’ve spent many months in villages around the Soviet-era Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, known locally as the Polygon.

In my book “Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan,” I explore how the people here have created new forms of mutual aid and camaraderie in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe. Their stories weave together fallout, the Cold War and secret government agencies, international aid workers and scientists, and everyday life in the Anthropocene.

Scale of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan

The Polygon is a roughly 7,000-square-mile (18,000-square-kilometer) area, close to the size of New Jersey, that was the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear testing ground for 40 years.

Between 1949 and 1989, more than 450 nuclear tests took place here with a total explosive yield of 2,500 Hiroshima bombs. The most devastating were the above-ground tests, 116 of which were detonated between 1949 and 1963. I’ve seen the archival footage: mushroom clouds rising over the steppe, shock waves knocking people down dozens of miles away.

Today, this history is etched into a landscape pockmarked with deep craters and atomic lakes, contaminated with radioactive isotopes cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239 that can remain dangerous for thousands of years.

I brought the mutant button to show Burkut. At 78, he was the oldest resident in the village of Koian. A pensioner, he was once a tractor operator on a massive Soviet state farm. He and others of his age watched bombs going off in the distance as they worked.

He laughed at the button, and we sat down for tea. His wife boiled the water longer than needed – as was explained to me as a matter of fact, everyone in the village does this “for the radiation.”

When nuclear testing ended and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Polygon was closed and then simply abandoned. Kazakhstan became an independent nation stuck with legacies of nuclear testing. No cleanup, no warnings, no evacuations – just a vast, contaminated landscape left to nature, metal scavengers and whoever called it home.

This abandonment has never been formally addressed: As of today, there is not a single international body with a mandate to assist communities like Koian. What residents experience as personal abandonment is also a global policy failure.

When I talk about my fieldwork, many Americans are shocked to find that “living on a nuclear test site” is even a logical statement. But thousands of people do still live in scattered villages and homesteads around the test site’s borders or inside the official perimeter, with some settlements just a thousand feet from atomic craters that have become watering holes for livestock.

A landmark 2025 report released by Norwegian People’s Aid estimates that atmospheric nuclear tests are on track to cause at least 2 million additional cancer deaths worldwide, a figure that includes the region around the Polygon.

What is particularly devastating about the Polygon’s story is that Soviet state institutions knew about the health impacts of radiation exposure early on. In the late 1950s, secret medical clinics monitored nearby populations, under the pretext of treating animal-borne diseases as they cataloged radiation-induced illnesses and tracked death rates. This went on for almost 40 years and affected mostly ethnic Kazakhs.

Burkut is one of many people around the Polygon I came to know who lived through it all – the mushroom clouds, the shaking house. He buried neighbors and family members who died of strange cancers or what doctors called “mysterious illnesses.” The same doctors blamed their problems on “unsanitary lifestyles” and never mentioned nuclear fallout.

Only during the Soviet policy of glasnost (openness) in the 1980s did information begin to appear.

Embracing radiation

Health studies, albeit partial, document elevated cancer rates throughout the region, and the Kazakh state officially recognizes Burkut and over 1 million others as radiation victims. So the state has enshrined victimhood in law, even though the science remains contested.

Bodies respond to radiation exposure differently, and decades of secrecy mean that exposure documentation is partial at best. Science can’t draw a clear line between residents’ headaches, dizziness, intestinal issues and kidney problems, let alone the cancers and radiation. Burkut and the rest have local antidotes for the problem. Boiling water is but one.

My first question about life in the Polygon was always, “Why do people stay?”

As Burkut and others explained without jest, “Our organism is different now.” They would tell me, “Clean air is our death,” meaning that the radioactive environment as they know it has changed them so they now depend on it.

I found that people live in what I call an “atomic collective” – a community bound together by contamination and cultural, political, economic and social abandonment. Their logic for staying is not rooted in denial but in affirmation and adaptation. Decades of shared experience in a place where scientific uncertainty runs deep has galvanized local perceptions. “People who move to the city can survive only two years – maximum,” Burkut told me. “Only two are still alive of those who left.”

Those who have tried relocating to cities faced discrimination as “people of the Polygon,” or were thought of as backward peasants who end up cleaning floors and living in moldy apartments. Where Burkut focuses on the dead, Ainur, a 40-year-old woman who grew up in the shadow of the test site, focuses on staying put. “At least here we can grow our own food, raise animals, and the air is clean,” she explained.

They’re affected by their ecosystem, Koian’s residents will say, but they’ve survived. “We’re used to it,” many people told me.

Refusal to be victims

When I lived in Koian, I watched neighbors share everything from gasoline to food to medicine. Everyone helps cut grasses in the fall and build towering piles of it on the village’s barns for winter feed. Together, their herds of horses, cows and sheep number in the thousands. Networks are everything when alternatives don’t exist.

Some of the younger men work in mines in the region, some even within the Polygon itself. Others have scavenged metal from grown-over nuclear sites. These prospects are dwindling, though. “We can survive on our livestock,” one herder explained, rejecting how outsiders see their impoverished life. These descendants of Kazakh nomadic herders, who once moved freely across the steppe with their animals, now speak of staying put as a mark of strength rather than constraint.

No one is asking for paved roads, new schools, emergency services or clean land. When electricity is knocked out by the common winter blizzards, they light candles. Outsiders may see apathy. During my time in Koian I understood this as their collective refusal – a community’s decision to reject systems that had abandoned them and instead create their own terms for survival.

“I am a radioactive mutant” isn’t just a darkly humorous button – it is a declaration of collective strength that emerged from collective abandonment.

Today’s policy debates about resuming nuclear testing largely ignore these stories. But the atomic collective is the living present, not ancient history – and a future that any new testing will necessarily produce.

“Radioactive mutant” is not some abstract concept – it’s what human beings call themselves after surviving what strategists deemed necessary. Kazakhstan’s Polygon offers a warning: There is no such thing as a limited nuclear test, only communities left to become self-sufficient by abandonment, on their own by necessity, enduring what others decided was worth the cost.

Magdalena Stawkowski received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, IREX, Social Science Research Council Eurasia Program, The Danish Institute for International Studies (Danish Council for Independent Research).

– ref. Mutual aid and self-sufficiency are key to life near USSR’s contaminated nuclear test zone in Kazakhstan – https://theconversation.com/mutual-aid-and-self-sufficiency-are-key-to-life-near-ussrs-contaminated-nuclear-test-zone-in-kazakhstan-260862

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Menika Dirkson, Associate Professor of History, Morgan State University

In the midst of a civil war, married couple Ernesto and Linda Fuentes fled their home country of El Salvador and headed for Philadelphia, via Mexico, in November 1983.

Ernesto was an activist who dispensed food and medicine in Salvadoran refugee camps. Linda was a union organizer for banks and clothing factories.

The Salvadoran government viewed activists, especially suspected guerrilla fighters and union leaders, as threats to its regime. It placed activists’ names on “death squad hit lists.” The couple decided to leave after receiving threatening letters and phone calls.

With false documents and the help of a humanitarian church group, they arrived at the Tabernacle United Church in West Philadelphia on May 12, 1984. The congregation declared itself a public sanctuary for undocumented refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala. An estimated 500,000 undocumented Salvadorans lived in the U.S. around that time.

The Fuenteses used the pastor’s office as their bedroom. Church members were instructed to keep the doors locked and not admit strangers, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

As a historian of race and policing in Philadelphia after the Civil Rights Movement, and the daughter of an immigrant, I’ve been exploring Philly’s history of sanctuary and how religious congregations, activists and city officials have supported local refugees over the past 40 years.

A ‘welcoming city’ for immigrants

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker has emphasized since May 2025 that Philadelphia is a certified “welcoming city.” She notably does not call Philadelphia a “sanctuary city.”

Welcoming cities have immigrant-friendly initiatives that make education, housing, workers’ rights, legal aid and language services accessible to immigrants and refugees without using the term “sanctuary city” in their laws and policies.

The presumed goal of this phrasing is to keep Philadelphia off the Trump administration’s radar and protect its US$2.2 billion in federal funding for health and human services.

However, Philly was, at various points, an official sanctuary city.

In 2014, then-Mayor Michael Nutter signed an executive order detailing that local police were not required to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement unless the case involved a warrant or violent felon.

Nutter later rescinded Philadelphia’s sanctuary city status in an effort to dissuade congressional Republicans from passing a House bill that would deny sanctuary cities federal money earmarked for law enforcement and recidivism reduction. However, the next mayor, Jim Kenney, reinstated the order on Jan. 4, 2016.

Throughout 2017, President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions used executive orders, speeches and the immigration raid Operation Safe City to force Philadelphia officials to assist ICE or lose federal grants.

In 2018, Philadelphia won a lawsuit against the Trump administration that denied ICE access to police databases to find undocumented immigrants and prohibited city employees from assisting ICE.

Roots of sanctuary cities

The sanctuary movement started back in the 1960s. But it wasn’t immigrants who were seeking sanctuary. It was Americans.

Around 1968, drafted resisters who were opposed to fighting in the Vietnam War sought refuge in churches in the U.S. Northeast. One of the earliest cases involved Robert Talmanson, who received sanctuary in Boston’s Arlington Street Unitarian Church. He was later arrested by U.S. marshals and local police and incarcerated in Virginia for three years.

In November 1971, Berkeley, California, became the first sanctuary city in the country when 12 local churches inspired the City Council to pass a resolution offering sanctuary to draft resisters. It also banned city employees from “assisting in the investigation or arrest of any sanctuary seeker.”

In the two decades that followed, several Quaker, Presbyterian, Catholic and Jewish congregations across America and Canada used their houses of worship as sanctuaries for Central American refugees who were fleeing civil war, government repression and genocide.

Philly joins national movement

Frustration and outcry over the United States’ low acceptance rates of Central American asylum-seekers sparked Philadelphia’s sanctuary movement.

In January 1984, members of Tabernacle United Church, where the Fuentes couple would soon take refuge, voted to join the national sanctuary network. As the Rev. James MacDonald explained at the time, the congregation chose to “violate a human law in order to respond in obedience to God’s law.”

By May, the First United Methodist Church of Germantown also became a sanctuary church. A few months later, the church sheltered a young Guatemalan couple, Joel and Gabriela, and their 3-year-old daughter, Lucy. Joel, an activist who worked with unions and student groups, had been tortured by Guatemala City police.

On Jan. 14, 1985, INS staged nationwide raids of sanctuaries and arrested 60 undocumented immigrants and 16 sanctuary workers – including pastors, nuns and priests – for violating immigration laws. Joel and his family were among those seized. They were released when church members bailed them out as they awaited deportation hearings.

A new pathway to citizenship

By the mid-’80s, 42,000 people from 2,000 religious institutions in 60 cities nationwide had joined the sanctuary movement.

On Nov. 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It granted undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before 1982 one year to apply for amnesty. If eligible, they would begin a five-year pathway to citizenship.

Approximately 3 million people successfully became naturalized citizens through the amnesty program.

In the Philadelphia area, at least 5,000 to 7,000 people were undocumented in 1986. Advocates at the nonprofit Nationalities Service Center and American Friends Service Committee noted that many immigrants wanted to apply for amnesty but feared the program was a trick.

A decade later, immigration enforcement got tougher.

Local police assist ICE

In 1996, Congress passed Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This granted local police the right to assist immigration officials in arresting and detaining unauthorized immigrants.

As of April 2026, over 1,600 law enforcement agencies in 39 states and two U.S. territories have a 287(g) agreement with ICE. The program offers local police free training in ICE procedures along with funding for equipment, vehicles and overtime pay.

While the Philadelphia Police Department has never signed a Section 287(g) agreement, about 68 Pennsylvania agencies have, including in neighboring Delaware County.

But these agreements aren’t always long-lasting. Between January and March 2026, two departments in Bucks and Chester counties rescinded their agreements with ICE to make residents feel safe after American-born protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed during ICE operations in Minneapolis.

Community activism continues

According to Pew Charitable Trusts, nearly 16% of Philadelphia’s 1.6 million residents are immigrants, largely from Asia and the Caribbean.

The exact number of undocumented immigrants in Philadelphia is unknown. However, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 250,000 immigrants in Pennsylvania – 1.5% of the state’s total population – are undocumented.

Since January 2025, ICE crackdowns in sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and New York have resulted in the number of people held in ICE detention jumping from 40,000 to 73,000 people in January 2026.

Citizens and advocacy groups have stepped up to protect immigrants from ICE. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and the AR-12-toting members of the Black Lion Party for International Solidarity participated in protests in Philadelphia. Public school students from Northeast and Edison high schools have led anti-ICE walkouts.

On Jan. 29, 2026, City Council members Kendra Brooks and Rue Landau introduced an “ICE Out” package. The bills aim to codify the right of police to not share immigration, citizenship and personal data with ICE, or detain and hand over arrested individuals to the federal agency.

The legislation also proposes a ban on ICE agents who wear masks or hide their badges, use unmarked cars and city vehicles, or use municipal spaces as staging areas for enforcement and raids. And it would prohibit city employees from giving ICE access to libraries, shelters, health centers and recreation centers without a judicial warrant.

Community activists have long used civil disobedience and humanitarian aid to protect undocumented immigrants who are searching for a fresh start in the U.S.

An interfaith network inspired Philadelphia to become a sanctuary city. Today, churches such as Center City’s Arch Street United Methodist Church and North Philly’s Church of the Advocate, along with other congregations, uphold this tradition while a multicultural community across the city continues that fight.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Menika Dirkson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Philadelphia’s 40-year history of protecting undocumented immigrants began with churches hiding refugees from El Salvador – https://theconversation.com/philadelphias-40-year-history-of-protecting-undocumented-immigrants-began-with-churches-hiding-refugees-from-el-salvador-278756

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Yuanyuan (Gina) Cui, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Coastal Carolina University

Americans are skipping restaurant dinners, delaying car purchases and scouring for grocery deals. Amid tariff anxiety and broader stress over affordability, consumer confidence has dropped to levels not seen in over a decade, according to The Conference Board, a business think tank. At this point, it’s wealthier consumers who are powering the bulk of spending in the U.S. economy.

So what explains the success of Erewhon’s US$22 smoothie?

The Los Angeles grocery chain selling these fancy concoctions is doing so well, it opened three new stores in 2025 – its biggest expansion since 2011. The chain reportedly generates $1,800 to $2,500 in sales per square foot, up to five times what a typical U.S. supermarket earns.

These aren’t ordinary blended drinks; they include ingredients such as high-grade sea moss gel, adaptogenic mushrooms and collagen peptides. Often they come with a celebrity’s name attached.

It’s all part of the broader boom in the U.S. specialty food market, which has surpassed $219 billion – up nearly 150% in a decade, according to the Specialty Food Association. That far outpaces the roughly 47% growth seen in overall U.S. grocery sales over the same period.

Independent retail data from the market research firm Circana also confirms this growth: Even as inflation-weary consumers have traded down to store brands in many categories, premium and specialty products held up and even grew their dollar share of the market through 2025. On TikTok, creators who once filmed designer-bag hauls now post $12 tinned fish boards. Craft chocolate bars that cost $8–$12 are being marketed as, without irony, “self-care.”

So if consumers are this anxious, why are they still splurging? In fact, these aren’t contradictions – they’re two expressions of the same psychological reaction.

When people feel life is out of control, they reach for something small, expensive and signaling virtue. This is the real reason premium food is booming while some traditional luxury brands struggle, say consumer psychologists.

We are professors of consumer behavior and marketing who study how people make purchasing decisions amid economic uncertainty, and ask what explains the gap between how consumers feel and how they actually spend. Our work points to a consistent finding: When people feel they’ve lost control over the big things, they seek it in the small ones.

A quick detour through the makeup drawer

Economists have seen this before.

In 2001, Estée Lauder Chairman Leonard Lauder coined the term the “lipstick index” after he saw that lipstick sales rose 11% following the Sept. 11 attacks. When big luxuries feel out of reach, consumers find a small substitute. A $60 lipstick is extravagant for a cosmetic, but next to the Hermès handbag it psychologically replaces, it feels like a bargain.

Then, as now, people seek agency wherever they can find it. Consumer psychologists call this “compensatory consumption”: buying things to feel in control when life feels out of control.

While even beauty sales are softening, that impulse hasn’t disappeared. It has just found better hosts – such as food.

In many ways, food is an ideal product for this compensation. It’s experiential – something you taste, smell and savor. It’s also emotional – carrying associations with comfort, care and home. And it’s visible, because if you’re on social media, what you eat is now as public as what you wear. Premium food isn’t just eaten – it’s filmed, posted and performed.

Most importantly, it’s still relatively accessible. Twenty-two dollars may be an absurd price for a drink, but it’s cheap compared with a $400 wellness retreat.

Indulgence with a side of virtue

Here is what separates this moment from Lauder’s lipstick index. That example was purely about pleasure, as consumers sought indulgence as consolation. Today’s premium food purchases carry an additional layer: They are coded as virtuous.

An Erewhon smoothie isn’t just a treat. It’s organic, superfood-enriched and wellness-aligned. By the same logic, a $20 bottle of single-estate olive oil isn’t just cooking fat; it’s a commitment to craft and health. Premium tinned fish isn’t convenience food; it’s sustainably sourced protein caught in the wild with packaging beautiful enough to display.

This “virtue coding” does the most important psychological work in the sales transaction: It transforms indulgence into self-investment. You’re not splurging during a downturn; you’re doing something for your health. You’re not being frivolous; you’re supporting small producers. Research shows that people need reasons to justify pleasurable purchases, especially during financial anxiety – and premium food is powerful because the justification is built into the product. The organic label, the sustainability story, the wellness framing – they all dissolve guilt before it even kicks in.

Consumed in the kitchen and again on the feed

There’s a reason this trend is accelerating now. Many premium food purchases are consumed twice – once physically and once digitally. The Erewhon smoothie purchase isn’t really about the drink; it can be as much about the content as the drink. The tinned fish board is plated for Instagram before anyone takes a bite.

Social media doesn’t just amplify the trend; it completes it. When you post a photo or video of the smoothie, you’re broadcasting that you value wellness, quality and intentionality. In a cultural moment when flaunting a designer bag feels tone-deaf, food provides perfect cover. It’s the safest flex there is. It’s no surprise that one YouTube video of an Erewhon haul by food creator @KarissaEats has drawn over 14 million views.

All of this raises a fair question: Does the growing focus on the “K-shaped economy” explain this boom? As many economists see it, low- and middle-income shoppers are increasingly pulling back, as they face an affordability squeeze from health care to housing and education. But wealthier consumers are picking up the slack and then some, splurging on luxury and powering gross domestic product growth.

In this scenario, premium food thrives because it’s still affordable for the people who are doing fine, even as everyone else cuts back. That’s partly true. But this explanation doesn’t account for another shift – why affluent consumers are foregoing splurges on items like designer handbags in favor of premium groceries.

This is why the virtue framing matters so much. If the question was purely about having money to spend, traditional luxury would be booming as well. It isn’t. A case in point is LVMH, the conglomerate behind Louis Vuitton and Dior, which saw its fashion division’s profits decline 13% across all of 2025.

Even consumers who are flush with disposable income need psychological permission to spend during anxious times. The premium food phenomenon is about why food has become the thing they choose – not about who can afford to splurge.

And when a smoothie becomes a status symbol, it tells us something about economic security more broadly. Food prices have climbed nearly 30% since 2019, outpacing 23% for overall consumer prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For a family stretching a tight grocery budget, $22 isn’t a smoothie. It’s dinner.

The need for control, the desire for identity, the comfort of virtue permission — these are universal. A single mother working two jobs feels the same craving for agency as the influencer filming her grocery haul. It’s just that the purchases that satisfy those needs are increasingly constrained by price. The justification only works if you can afford your indulgence.

What’s really in the cart

The next time you’re in a grocery store and you reach for something a little more expensive than what you might need, you should pause – not to put it back, but to think about what you’re actually reaching for.

Chances are it isn’t really about the product. It’s about the feeling of choosing something when the world feels out of hand.

A $22 smoothie is never just a smoothie. It’s what people seek out when they need permission to feel OK.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why Americans are buying $22 smoothies despite feeling terrible about the economy – https://theconversation.com/why-americans-are-buying-22-smoothies-despite-feeling-terrible-about-the-economy-279425