Strange Work in Familiar Places: Inside Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Border Hotels
The new appreciation of previously dismissed types of work may be short lived, and their ongoing fight for a living wage is certainly not won. However, this crisis…
Tag: COVID-19
It takes two to tango by Miriam Verhage
This post draws on findings from a phone-based qualitative interview project in the Netherlands. During April 2020, we interviewed 59 seniors about their experiences during the COVID-19 crisis…
Asian Medicines, COVID-19 and the Politics of Science: An Unpublished Letter to the Editor of Nature by Sienna Craig
We are sharing below a ‘Letter to the Editor’ submitted to Nature. On May 6, 2020, an article titled “China is promoting coronavirus treatments based on unproven traditional…
Outsides and insides: Covid-19 seen from the first floor of a house in Mirpur, Dhaka by Hasan Ashraf
In this contribution to Somatosphere’s Dispatches from the Pandemic we attend to practices of boundary making, of separating outsides from insides. The new coronavirus appeared on the global…
Cain and Able: A Reflection on Coronavirus
The story of Cain and Able from the Christian Holy Bible is common knowledge but to recap. Cain and Able both offer sacrifices to God: Cain offering produce…
The ‘Dark Ages’ – a misused metaphor for a post-antibiotic future by Rachel Irwin
In 2014, then Prime Minister David Cameron told the British public that ‘we are in danger of going back to the Dark Ages of medicine.’ He was introducing…
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Problems with Project Roomkey in the COVID-19 Pandemic by Lauren Ensor
“Constrained to exist in public spaces, the homeless are constant targets of regulation, criminalisation, expulsion and erasure.” – Randall Amster On April 3, 2020, Californian Governor Gavi…
On the tendency to periodise capitalism through the event of the global pandemic
JAKUB CRCHA & SHACHI MOKASHI The coronavirus, by the virtue of its novelty, sudden unexpected appearance, and the scale of consequent disruption, has been easily incorporated into the…
A Room with a View: Observations from Two Pandemics by Linda M. Whiteford
From my balcony, I see Tampa Bay’s calm water, the Dali Museum’s distinctive architecture, the Mahaffey Theater’s empty parking lot, the balconies and porches of St, Petersburg, Florida,…
Sanitary cordons in COVID-19: experience and the object of epidemiological interventions by Alejandro Cerón
What is the object of epidemiological interventions during an epidemic? Is it the virus, the disease, the fear, the chaos, or the threat to security? And what is the objective…
The Pandemic Push to Rethink the Field Site
New Intimacies and De-Masking in Medical Anthropology and Global Health. A Reflective Blog CLAIRE SOMERVILLE The concept of fieldwork, and its’ physical manifestation, the “field site”, has bee…
Haitian migration and dreams in Chile: Questions for global mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. by Gabriel Abarca-Brown
I met Pierre (34)[1] in a northern Santiago neighbourhood during my ethnographic fieldwork early in 2018. He was one of the hundreds of Haitians who arrived in Chile,…
Eating Like an Alaskan?: Quarantine Reflections on the Anchorage Museum’s “What Why How We Eat” Exhibition
Abigail AdamsCentral Connecticut State University I’m writing from my dining room table and the CostCo bulk carton of matzoh peeks at me from a kitchen cupboard. I’m reminded…
Book Review: The Anthropology of Epidemics by Ann H. Kelly, Frédéric Keck and Christos Lynteris
In The Anthropology of Epidemics, editors Ann H. Kelly, Frédéric Keck and Christos Lynteris curate a collection that provides insight into how ethnographic studies of epidemics might challenge…
Mapping out the Affect of Covid-19 on Cancer Care in the UK: Reflections on a Changed Landscape
CLARA FABIAN-THEROND As a medical anthropology PhD student my plan was to start ethnographic research, examining the socio-cultural impact of personalised therapeutics in the NHS colorectal and ov…
Book Review: The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham
In The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction, Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham unpack the ‘how’ of the gig economy through quantative datasets and ethnographic vignettes from countries includ…
From Bat Soup to Bean Sprouts: Coronavirus Food Fears in Historical Perspective by Jack Greatrex
On a trip to Shandong, China, at the end of January 2020, a few days after the lockdown of Wuhan, I watched a video of a stewed bat…
In and outside the nursing home: On the (im)possibilities of meaningful contact while being held apart by Natashe Lemos Dekker
Ben (77) wrote this poem when he became unable to visit his wife Lise in the nursing home where she lived, expressing the loss and desperation of suddenly…
First in Masks? How Czechs Wore Face Masks When There Weren’t Any Available by Susanna Trnka
On March 18, 2020, the Czech Republic became the first country in Europe to legislate mandatory coverage of the mouth and nose in all public areas in an…
Research in Virtual Lab Worlds during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Heading into Steve’s[1] university laboratory for the first time, I anxiously waited to begin observing the lab members’ work with computational protein structure prediction and design. This lab…
A Place Apart by Benjamin Hegarty
On a crisp autumn day in April in Melbourne, my phone has several missed calls from an Indonesian friend. With a heavy heart, I call back to see…
Empty Beds and Mounting Deaths: COVID-19 and U.S. Healthcare’s Systemic Failures by Miao Jenny Hua
It was afternoon in early April and I was only two-thirds of the way through my 12-hour shift. Between checking on how one patient was breathing and whether…
Richard H. Robbins: The Economy After Covid-19
Richard H. Robbins, SUNY Plattsburgh One feature of both the economic recession of 2007/2008 and the present Covid-19-induced economic collapse is increased central bank bouts of quantitative easi…
In the Journals – Prisons and Pandemics
Prisoners’ Round by Vincent Van Gogh via wikimedia Welcome back to In the Journals! My name is Ally, I am a graduate student beginning a Master’s in Anthropology at…