Case studies in social medicine: a review by Joshua Franklin
Case Studies in Social Medicine is a new series in the New England Journal of Medicine that began in 2018 and concluded in March of 2020, totaling 15 brief…
Tag: Features
COVID-19 Forum: Introduction by Christos Lynteris
Since its emergence in December 2019, COVID-19 has led to a global pandemic, in everything but name. To date, over 100,000 people have been infected across the globe,…
Provincializing Metabolism (On the Poverty of Modernism) by Maurizio Meloni
According to accepted wisdom and textbooks, “metabolism” is a nineteenth-century term and concept, established at the confluence of organic chemistry, cell biology, and physiology. In Microscopical R…
Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions by Maurizio Meloni
In the last few years, a renewed interest in metabolic exchange, and in ideas of a porous and permeable body, has come from disciplines like microbiomics, nutrigenomics, and epigenetics. Moreover, a…
Head circumference by Emily Yates-Doerr
For Spanish click here. In the early months of 2016, as global media sources incited fear among pregnant women that Zika would result in babies with small heads…
The Social Life of Metrics by Rosario García-Meza
For English click here La vida social de las métricas Guatemala es uno de los países de Centroamérica que ha reportado en la última década uno de los…
Toxic Disavowal by Chloe Ahmann
Figure 1. “Residents want out of industrial ghetto.” Photo by Lloyd Fox for the Baltimore Sun, 1998. In April 1998, Jeanette succumbed to terminal cancer. She was only…
Art, the Clinic, and the Political Exercise of Thinking by Eva Marxen
From 2002-2013, the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona (MACBA) brought together professionals from the fields of psychoanalysis, art therapy, and anthropology to provide different services for a va…
Against Forgetting: Telling Stories After Zika by Eliza Williamson
For English click here. Contra o Esquecimento: Contando Histórias após o Zika Dois anos atrás, em um aeroporto, enquanto esperava uma conexão, recebi uma mensagem de WhatsApp de uma…
Web Roundup: Measles, Vaccinations and Epidemics by Whitney Arey
This month has been filled with news stories about the growing problem of measles outbreaks in the U.S. and around the world. In the U.S. this has been…
Book Forum: Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay by Andrés Romero
Introduction Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (2018) is a masterful undertaking on the anthropology of disaster and its everydayness. An ethnograp…
From women to women: building the state response to the Zika epidemic in Brazil by Isabele Villwock Bachtold
For English, click here. De mulher para mulher: construindo a resposta do estado à epidemia de Zika no Brasil ‘Minha vida era uma antes e outra depois da…
In the Journals – November 2019 by Livia Garofalo
Here’s our November In the Journals. For the posthumanists out there, there is a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society on Transversal Posthumanities that might be of…
Histórias of Zika by Luísa Reis-Castro
For English click here. Era o ano de 1947. Em uma floresta chamada Zika, em Uganda, liderados pelo médico-entomologista escocês Alexander J. Haddow, pesquisadores colocaram macacos-rhesus em p…
Bioethnography and the Birth Cohort: A Method for Making New Kinds of Anthropological Knowledge about Transmission (which is what anthropology has been about all along) by Elizabeth F.S. Roberts
© Elizabeth F. S. Roberts These are pots and dishes. They transmit food and love. They transmit lead. They transmit class. They transmit enduring inequality and new forms…
A Poetics of Dementia by Rosemarie Buikema
One rainy morning in November, I called my mother. “Hi mum, how’re you doing?”“Well, it isn’t much fun to be sitting here in a chicken run all day…
Introduction: Excavating and (re)creating the biosocial; birth cohorts as ethnographic object of inquiry and site of intervention by Sahra Gibbon
Longitudinal birth cohorts are increasingly recognised as important for understanding how biological, social and environmental processes interact over time and contribute to health inequalities. Birt…
PrEP at the After/Party: The ‘Post-AIDS’ Politics of Frank Ocean’s “PrEP+” by Benjamin Weil
Introduction HIV/AIDS prevention efforts have taken many forms, ranging from pop-up stalls at LGBTQ+ Pride parades to circuit parties at popular queer venues. In this essay, we examine…
The ethnographic fact: a discussion of ethics in anthropological fieldwork by Florian Göttke
Note: A working-syllabus can be found below. Please add more recommendations in the comments. The lone-fieldworker model of research may still be the norm for anthropology in the…
Crafting a ‘critically-applied’ PrEP collaboration in Memphis by Matthew Thomann
Encountering PrEP I became interested in PrEP as an object of anthropological research on the L train between 1st and 3rd Avenues in Manhattan. It was the summer…
Power in the Face of Indian Surrogacy by Emma Abell-Selby
Introduction Power is in the air we breathe, and no matter where we are there are always individuals with more power over others. In “An anthropology of structural…
Staging Seizure: The Chronic Contingency of Epilepsy Diagnosis by Megh Marathe
Epilepsy is a chronic illness and disability characterized by recurrent, unpredictable seizures. Epileptic seizures are transient events during which people lose control over all or parts of body-min…
Syndemics: Considerations for Interdisciplinary Research by Rosalynn Vega
In this short piece, I explore how medical anthropology could be deployed through interdisciplinary collaborations in a way that is both theoretically rich and poised to positively impact…
PrEP at the Margins: Towards a Critically Applied Anthropology of Nordic PrEP Access by Tony Joakim Sandset
In the spirit of this series on a ‘critically applied’ approach to PrEP, this piece shows how thinking with the concept of marginality can contribute to an analysis…