Book forum: Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her by Eugene Raikhel
This book forum brings together seven scholars and artists to discuss Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her (Duke 2022). A profoundly introspective and original book, All That Was…
Tag: Features
How to Resist Policing: The Practical Meanings of Towel Masks for Student Protesters in Late 1960s Japan by Shunsuke Tanaka
Masks have long been a symbol of resistance movements around the world, especially in East Asia. As early as the 1960s, protestors in Japan began wearing masks during…
Diffracting Trauma in the Global South between biology and culture / Difractar La Noción de Trauma en el Sur Global entre biología y cultura by Benjamin Hegarty
Trauma is a concept with wide-ranging impact, moving out of limited psychiatric fields into the popular imagination and policy (Fassin 2009). Psychologists now accompany medical doctors in the w…
Writing Life (no. 21): An interview with Ruth Behar by Natashe Lemos Dekker
Image 1: One of Ruth’s writing spaces filled with family and childhood photos, art and objects that inspire her and that are filled with memories. On the laptop…
The emergence of multimorbidity as a matter of concern by Esca van Blarikom
Multimorbidity, or the co-occurrence of two or more long-term health conditions in one person, is seen as one of the greatest challenges to contemporary healthcare services. As the…
Writing Life No. 20: An Interview with Emma Kowal by Carina Truyts
Figure 1: Emma Kowal writing her thesis in 2006 with 7-month old Maya in Darwin, Australia. Image: supplied. One evening in December 2021, in a small South African…
Making embryos lively: The politics of embryo personhood when fertilization happens under a microscope by Manon Lefèvre
On May 25, 2022, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed into law the strictest ban on abortion to date, a policy that prohibits the termination of any pregnancy “from…
On the Power and Nourishment of Multidisciplinary Inquiry: Remembering Adele H. Hite by Nutrire CoLab
We were saddened to hear of the passing of our dear colleague Adele H. Hite in April 2022. Adele was a co-founding member of the Nutrire CoLab and…
Radical Harm Reduction and the Responsibility of a World by Jarrett Zigon
Addiction is exceedingly moralized. Perhaps no other concept associated with the experience of addiction reveals this more than that of responsibility. Too often, addiction is understood in…
Volodymyr Artiukh: The political logic of Russia’s imperialism
The debate around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the previous contributions in FocaalBlog, has shifted from the ‘either NATO or Russia’ dichotomy to a more nuanced exchange…
Susan Paulson: Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds
Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies,…
Don Kalb: War: New Times
It is now becoming overly clear that this cruel and unjustifiable war in and on Ukraine is not going to last ten days – as the strategists in…
“A cup of coffee and a needle”: How a harm reduction café in Copenhagen quietly demonstrates an alternative to the war on drugs by Johanna Kinnock
Behind the long counter of Café Dugnad, smells of spices and meat float out of industrial ovens. Light streams in through the glass doors of the smallish café,…
In the Journals March 2022, Part 1 by Livia Garofalo
Here’s the first part of the In the Journals for March. There’s a special issue of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry called “Special Issue on Being Human in the…
Workshop report: ‘Interrogating Speculative Futures: A workshop on the politics of imagining a future with(out) chronic illness’ by Els Roding
In 1992 Nancy Munn argued anthropological research should pay more attention to people’s lived realities of time. Since then, we have seen time and temporalities grow into a…
Alexander W. Anthony: Covid in the confines of the US
Introduction There is a calendar in my office which still hangs at March 2020; an artifact of the confusion and rush to ‘lockdown’ and to find shelter from…
Andrew Orta: The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear
Responding to a question about future of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in the wake of the pandemic, the Dean of a top program recently suggested that…
Don Nonini: Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization
Introduction Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point – whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to…
Ieva Snikersproge: Jobs or ecology? Why green growth is a pipe dream and how the pandemic could change this
My interest in the tensions between job preservation and ecological transition comes from my fieldwork among neorurals in Diois, a relatively isolated mountainous area in Southeastern France. The…
“Nothing About Us Without Us!” Really?: The Unequal Value of Lives in Harm Reduction NGOs by Catherine Larocque
Canada, like most capitalist societies of the global North, faces “an unprecedented and devastating wave of overdoses” and overdose deaths (Wells, 2017), intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic (Governm…
Andrew Flachs, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas: Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies
There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of…
Sandy Smith-Nonini: Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures
The spectacle of Russia invading Ukraine has elevated tensions over Europe’s access to natural gas and may herald a sea-change in regional geopolitics of energy. But prior to…
Captive to smell by Cristina A. Pop
The rise of Çatalhöyük is one of my favorite topics to cover in the Introduction to Anthropology course. Located in central Turkey, the proto-urban settlement was occupied for…
Writing Life No. 18: An Interview with Stefania Pandolfo by Basit Kareem Iqbal
The anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo approaches ethnography as not just the depiction of a world but as what addresses and displaces both the writer and the reader, where ethnography…