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…
Tag: Features
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…
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…
Enlisted Laborers of Public Health: overlaps in the work of soldiers in historical perspective by Pamela Maddock
In April, a friend relayed her experience of getting a test for COVID-19 at a drive-through site at a university in Rhode Island, describing “dozens of camouflaged National…
COVID-19 as analogy for antimicrobial resistance by Danny de Vries
Introduction Being in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic sets the right stage for us to ponder the problem of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. What is exactly the…
Pandemic Time by Barclay Bram
I was sitting at my computer when we got the call. My father in his chair, my mother on the sofa. Two days earlier we had found out…
Women, gender and viruses: coronas and microscopes in the time of a pandemic by María Jesús Santesmases
Among the multitude of narratives prompted by the current pandemic, the biography of June Dalziel Hart Almeida has been circulated by the BBC and other periodicals in numerous…
Heat and Covid-19 in the Off-Grid City by Nausheen Anwar
Amidst almost unstoppable contagion, many hung their hopes on heat and humidity as a potential defence against contracting Covid-19 in the early months of the pandemic. Early studies…
Web Roundup: Covid-19, Racial Justice, Immigration, Climate Justice, Reproductive Justice, or “How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics” by Whitney Arey
As I was thinking about the task of reviewing the anthropological, bioethical, and/or STS implications of the past month of news, my mind kept returning to the introduction…
Raúl Acosta, Flávio Eiró, Insa Koch and Martijn Koster: Introduction: Urban struggles: governance, resistance, and solidarity
Raúl Acosta, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich Flávio Eiró, Radboud University Insa Koch, London School of Economics Martijn Koster, Radboud University The global …
Raúl Acosta: Navigating promises and good intentions: technomorality and scepticism among peripheral cycloactivists in Mexico City
Raúl Acosta, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich On April 4, 2019, Pedro cycled for over an hour to get to our meeting with Mexico City’s Security Minister. …
COVID-19 and The Lessons Anthropology Learned from HIV/AIDS by Merrill Singer
On April 24, 1980, Ken Horne, a San Francisco resident, was reported to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) as a young man suffering with an old man’s…
COVID-19 and the extraordinary normality of the War on Drugs by Jennifer L. Syvertsen
As if it were not challenging enough during the “normal emergencies” [1] of the United States-led War on Drugs, research and advocacy for sane drug policies becomes even…
Rethinking the house as a public health technology of preparedness by Imogen Bevan
The main public critique levelled at the UK government’s “Stay Home” campaign was its failure to be implemented fast enough, and the abandonment of community contact tracing in…
The metropolis and mental life in the age of COVID-19: Delaying descent into the blasé attitude by Rafael Wainer
The COVID city: Class, physical isolation, and virtual connection At the time of writing this we are all experiencing what the classical sociologist Émile Durkheim would call a…
Advocacy Letters: An Invitation by Emily Yates-Doerr
Somatosphere is launching a new series to share political and social advocacy letters. Please submit your open letters to emilyjf@gmail.com Dear Reader, We are launching this series to…
Wrong, but Useful – for Whom? The Politics of Pandemic Modeling by Marit Tolo Østebø
On March 17th, after a tepid initial COVID-19 response, Prime Minister Boris Johnson began encouraging citizens to avoid non-essential social contact. President Donald Trump followed suit, introducin…
Trust and the Test: Producing Narrative Certainty in an Evolving Pandemic by Jennifer J. Carroll
“COVID is the thing that works differently. It’s not our experience of the illness that works differently.” A recent observation by Hannah Alcock We both spend a lot…
Sharing responsibilities, coping with the coronavirus: why Swedish and French response strategies are not that different by Morgan Meyer
Citizens, governments and academics spend much time these days with one activity: making comparisons.[1] National response strategies to cope with the coronavirus are compared, as well as whether…
Entrepreneurship and E-Health: How Promises of Innovation are Transforming India’s Primary Care Sector by Sandra Bärnreuther
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
Health for all? Access to healthcare among precarious populations in Norway by Vilde Fastvold Thorbjørnsen
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
From Quality of Life to Disability Justice: Imagining a Post-Covid Future by Faye Ginsburg
Like a CT-scan of the American body politic, the Covid-19 crisis has revealed deep fault-lines in our medical system, especially the inequities that stratify health care along lines…
A Viral Education: Scientific Lessons from India’s WhatsApp University by Banu Subramaniam
We know of allopathy, and homeopathy, but how about cowpathy? The last is a line of consumer goods that feature the healing properties of the sacred “Hindu” cow…