1. Biopolitical Fieldwork By the end of 2023, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 public health emergency to be over. With this announcement came the realisation that,…
Since 2020, the category of “essential work,” and the exploitative conditions it legitimized during the COVID-19 pandemic, has sparked waves of labor protest across the globe. Feminist scholars…
Introduction In the summer of 2020 in a rural village in Telangana, India, a small but angry crowd donning cloth masks gathered outside the community isolation centre set…
Introduction In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Reddit user shared an unusually intimate post about their relationship with Replika, an AI chatbot[1] designed for companionship: “I…
When I began doctoral fieldwork in 2022 in Unity Colony[1]—a low-income informal settlement (or Jhuggi Jhopdi Cluster) in south Delhi—just over a year after the pandemic’s second wave…
The set of essays in this series approach the COVID-19 pandemic as an unfinished event, where debates and discussions must continue to explore and illuminate our stakes in…
For this installment of In the Journals, Koichi Kameda de Figueiredo Carvalho suggests two French journals which may be of interest to Somatosphere readers: Revue Anthropologie des Connaissances…
A swimming pool is never just water. It’s a heavily managed aquatic ecosystem, held in precarious balance by chemistry, cultural norms, and care. Without treatment, pools explode with…
Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis murdered nearly 300,000 disabled people: in gas chambers, by poison or overdose, or simply by leaving them to starve (Herzog 2025, 1).…
Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcolm, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts (eds.) (Bloomsbury: 2024) Far beyond fitness tips about “boosting testosteron…
Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare by Nora Kenworthy (MIT Press: 2024) One chilly winter day, I (the author of this review) was standing in line…
Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization by Harry Yi-Jui Wu (MIT Press: 2021) Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s Mad by the…
The 2022 Mpox outbreak in the Global North disrupted the temporality of epidemics amid an uncertain recovery from COVID-19. Immediately associated with men who have sex with men,…
Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023).…
Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023).…
Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023).…
Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023).…
Somatosphere welcomes you to the April edition of “In the Journals.” Scroll through our monthly round up of new research across anthropology, STS and social science journals. Culture,…
Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford,…
Covid-19 is a pandemic that has to be approached as syndemic. This is what Yasar Abu Ghosh convincingly argues in this deeply disturbing and profoundly illuminating collective volume,…
Anthropological histories of the COVID-19 pandemic exceed the virus and epidemiological trends. Although its catastrophes have escalated globally, they have not unfolded homogeneously. The intensitie…
Somatosphere welcomes you to the June edition of “In the Journals.” Scroll through our monthly round up of new research across anthropology, STS and social science journals. Anthropologie…
A Life of Worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam’s Age of Anxiety by Allen Tran (University of California Press: 2023) In A Life of Worry, Allen L. Tran…
Introduction Days before his death, Ernest Becker wrote with remarkable clarity on the human dishonesty around death. “The basic human predicament,” Becker submits, is “that we are simultaneously…