Through my work in African laboratories I am regularly made aware of the challenging equipment shortages faced by research laboratories in many low/middle-income countries (LMICs). This extends far…
Expired ReEBOV tests in a hospital laboratory in Sierra Leone. Photograph by Ann Kelly In June 2015, as Sierra Leone and Guinea was experiencing new surges in clusters…
This post is part of a feature on “How Capitalists Think,” moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bergen) and Tijo Salverda (University of Cologne). Following the…
Il convient plutot de s’attacher à ce que signifie ȇtre un homme, avant de problématiser la folie en terms de santé et maladie, Ludwig Binswanger, Le Rȇve et…
Anthropologist Charlie Piot has been conducting research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa for over thirty years. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity…
Research on capitalism commonly distinguishes between neoclassical economics and political economy. If neoclassical economics have dominated scientific debates since the 1930s at the latest, the ninet…
By Matthieu Bolay, Université de Neuchâtel When I was carrying out fieldwork in Guinea and Mali between 2010 and 2014, some ministry officials, with whom I discussed the topics…
Image from ACLU.org For this dragnet update we have several fascinating articles to highlight. Among the stories from the United states was an article on the NYPD’s unofficial power…
Fifty years after student protests shook much of the Cold War world, in the “West” and in the “East,” “Global 1968” has become the catchphrase to describe these…
Miracle babies. The microscopic enchantments of embryos. The image of a woman holding that much-desired infant. In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is replete with awe-inducing imagery, often bordering…
by Esther Mulders For the past two years, I’ve been volunteering in Zambia with Studio Zambia, a Dutch non-profit organisation that I co-founded in 2016 and currently co-run.…
Beaches are good places to think with about waste and ruination. They were once generically places of waste (in the etymological sense of “unoccupied, uncultivated”) while recognized as…
What does making a new life look like from the perspective of a mobile phone? For the phone of a woman using the public health care system in…
As we start into 2018, we seize the opportunity of this post by Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan on their influential edited volume States at Work to…
‘States at Work’ aims to contribute to the academic debates on processes of state-building in Africa, and, among development practitioners, on the role of the state in development,…
In the late 1990s, a group of Japanese researchers set out to investigate whether small-scale gold mining operations near the shores of East Africa’s Lake Victoria were resulting…
How political authority and legitimacy are sustained in societies marked by socio-economic inequality and political exclusion has been a long-standing preoccupation in the social sciences. Especially …
Waste and toxicity are foundational categories of knowledge for the Anthropocene. Consider how natural scientists approach the topic. Empirically, the “great acceleration” they’ve identified correspon…
Policy makers, development workers, orphanage voluntourists, missionaries, prospective adoptive parents: ignore this book at your peril. “AIDS orphans” are commonly imagined as the…
The ocean has long been considered the ideal location for the disposal of waste—including, among many other things, treated and untreated sewage poured easily into the sea, the…
Mining is a toxic business and gold mining is particularly noxious. Mercury and cyanide pollute river-ways and sentient bodies. The large-scale evacuation of earth often acidifies water tables,…
If you’ve seen Hubert Sauper’s (2004) documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare you may remember the stark contrast he draws between the sterile disassembly line of a factory producing Nile…
Introduction Urban man-made bodies of water such as lakes can be sources of aesthetic beauty and leisure and can boost a city’s economy and tourism industry. They satisfy…
Cape Mongo is a multimedia installation that focuses on consumer waste as medium and subject. It is a complex artwork, comprising sculpture using found materials (mostly what viewers…