Life/NonLife: a forum by Ann H. Kelly
This Somatosphere forum features essays written in the wake of a debate held at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom…
Tag: Features
Suffering, Agency, and the Value of Early and Late Life by Iben Mundbjerg Gjødsbøl
‘Do no harm’ is the first principle in both research ethics and bioethics, conveying an inherent ambiguity in the biomedical imperative to create healthier and longer human lives.…
Scholarly Stretching and Meta-Ethnography in the Medico-Legal Borderlands by Laura Bisaillon
We met some years back at a scholarly conference where we were both presenting papers on a common theme: health care in the service of the law. We…
Book Forum: Saida Hodžić’s The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life After NGOs by Erin V. Moore
Saida Hodžić’s The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs (University of California Press, 2017) illuminates the myriad state and non-state actors collaborating on campaigns ag…
(Un)Categorizing Albinism by Giorgio Brocco
“Everything started with a little spot in the head, right up [by] my right ear! I don’t even remember the precise day or week I discovered it. Instead,…
Restoring the balance: Living well with pain by Else Vogel
Like dementia, persistent pain comes with irreparable losses: physical restrictions, strained relationships, financial problems, perished dreams and ambitions. Both conditions require ethnographers an…
Queer Zones: Refugees from Africa and Interactions with Canada’s Borderlands by Notisha Massaquoi
On June 28, 2009, a group of queer Africans took to the streets of Toronto. In what is one of the largest and longest-running Pride parades in North…
Sticky notes by Simon Cohn
I remember when I was a lot younger and my grandmother was still alive, her flat became increasingly filled with small pieces of paper attached by tape to…
Integration by Clara Devlieger
In one of several letters he wrote to me during my fieldwork, Serge addressed what he considered to be the problems of integration for disabled people in the…
Why we must go beyond focusing on the ‘overrepresentation’ of racialized people in HIV criminalization by Eli Manning
We can trace an unbroken record of injustice back through generations, to our grandfathers and our grandmothers, our great-grandfathers and to those before them. We can trace them…
Disrupted connections: On participation in caring for a mother with dementia by Tanja Ahlin
On a sunny, stifling afternoon, my friend, an Ayurvedic doctor, ushers me into a scantily furnished examining room of his clinic in central Kerala, South India. There, a…
development by Christine Sargent
Umm Adnan,[i] like many women I met during my research on Down Syndrome and kinship in Jordan, was extremely protective of her son Adnan. The youngest of four,…
Searching, Studying and Doing Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands by Laura Bisaillon
Medico-legal borderlands? What is this nebulous sounding compound concept, “medico-legal borderlands”? How has it been used by social scientists whose ethnographic studies scratch at itches in the…
Exclusion and gatekeeping in psychiatric-legal borderland: Keeping the material in view by Agnieszka Doll
The concept of the “medico-legal borderland” commonly refers to the discursive intersection of medical and legal knowledges in the constitution of a new knowledge regime (McClelland, 2013). The…
Gramps and the Gangster visit the memory clinic by Jason Danely
“Are you free tomorrow?” “Sure, what’s going on?” “It’s a big day for Gramps! I’m taking him to the doctor. I guess someone from the ward office said…
Lateral Solidarity by Raphaëlle Rabanes
It was the afternoon of December 31st. Dinner had been served in the bedrooms of the rehabilitation clinic, but Ms. Dats decided that hers could wait: She had…
Ebola Afterlives by Eva Vernooij
Image by Eva Vernooij Adiatu[1], a young Sierra Leonean laboratory scientist, turns on the light in the high risk room of the molecular unit of the recently renovated…
Changing Time by Janet Weston
History and dementia are both concerned with time. Writing history is all about folding time, making sense of things that have become confused and confusing with the passage…
Micro-activist Affordances by Arseli Dokumaci
I met Ahmet, a disabled young man, during a visual ethnography I conducted in Istanbul, Turkey (2009), where I worked with people with disabilities related to rheumatoid arthritis…
test by Temp Admin
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Filmmaking as a way to document illness: The Good Breast and Unrest. by Cinzia Greco
We know that illness can be narrated but can it be shown? Feminist artists have been amongst the first to show the sick female body. Jo Spence used…
The Abortion Green Scarf as a Boundary Object: Beyond the Curse of the Left by Mara Dicenta
Science and Technology Studies (STS) can engage with social movements in a variety of forms. STS scholarship has provided methods, theories, and concepts related to how information and…
The Stories Continue by Annelieke Driessen
Much to our pleasure we got many positive responses following the publication of our series, ‘thinking with dementia’. Some of these responses suggested novel directions in which we…
Disability in and through Rural Worlds by Vandana Chaudhry
The vast majority of disabled people in the Global South inhabit rural worlds and their experiences are shaped by material, relational, and social specificities of rurality, and yet…