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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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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…
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…
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…
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…
Here I ruminate on recent writing experiments at the convergence of poetry and ethnography as a means to convey experiences of suffering. Recent ethnographies of suffering highlight innovative…
If I were asked for a definition of myself, I would say that I am one who waits; I investigate my surroundings, I interpret everything in terms of…
We are interested in the ways that the concept of “cross-disability” has become an unquestioned value and goal in development and advocacy work: organizations, programs, and advocacy efforts…
I have never lost my childhood habit of beachcombing for special rocks and shells, and I think of ethnography as involving a similar process of collecting bits of…
White ants are a delicacy in the subregion Acholi in northern Uganda. Since fresh ones are available only once a year when they become flying roamers, one 100-kg…
On February 8, 2019, a symposium organized by Nancy Rose Hunt on the scholarship and career of Luise White was held at the University of Florida. In the…
One summer evening while I was conducting fieldwork on sign language interpreting in Hanoi, Vietnam, the board members of the Hanoi Deaf Cultural Group (HDCG1), all of whom…
Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique Rachel Louise Moran University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 224 pages. 1. When Michelle Obama launched the “Let’…
The natural body meets the body politic in the act of vaccination, where a single needle penetrates both. – Eula Biss, On Immunity In recent years, outbreaks of highly…
When thinking about care, it is easy to assume an asymmetrical structure with two fixed two roles: the care-giver and the cared-for. It is likewise easy to assume…
I am a cultural anthropologist who conducts research with deaf children and their families in Mexico City. Echarle ganas is a Mexican colloquial expression that roughly translates to…
I dream of a black cat. She jumps over a barbed wire fence, and across it. She leaps from one side from one side of the fence to…