I began to sweat profusely when my Geiger counter registered a radiation level of 13 microsieverts per hour—a number that indicated a high level of radioactivity. Worried, I glanced…
Bill Cosby is in prison, and Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer have been fired. Donald Trump is in office despite his own admission that he has grabbed women…
Editor’s note: We asked several scholars which readings they would recommend to students or colleagues interested in familiarizing themselves with the anthropology of ethics and morality. This is…
A Workshop Report by the Neuroscience and Society Network Introduction The Neuroscience and Society Network organised a workshop on 11-12 July 2018 at the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry…
And now for Part II for September. Enjoy! Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Mutable environments and permeable human bodies Margaret Lock Geologists have declared an epochal transition…
This year’s annual meeting for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) had an intriguing new component: an exhibition on the histories of STS in flux internationally,…
The following is taken from the forthcoming book, The Police Against Itself: Reassembling French Liberalism “After the Social,” an ethnography of French police administrative reform, the vicissitudes …
Care worker Annika announces that she does not want to go to Mr Moran. “He always complains.” “I’ll go”, says her colleague Robin, and turning to me he…
According to her midwife Jana, Mira’s was a textbook birth: it was quite fast, even for a second birth, and proceeded without any complications. In reflecting on her…
Lives change dramatically as dementia progresses. Using observations of people suffering from obsessions and compulsions, I will analyse this change along three dimensions. Obsessive-Compulsive Disord…
Warm haze As I spoke, people looked at me worriedly. The kindness in their eyes was mixed with curiosity and concern. Rather than answering me, they turned to…
Greenwoods is a neighbourhood in Nairobi, Kenya, dotted with diplomatic residences. At the time of my research on public-private assemblages of security provision and the reconfiguration of citizenshi…
Refraction of participation What does it mean to participate? What does participation do?[1] The etymology of ‘participation’ traces from the Latin word participationem, which translates as ‘sharing, …
The sleep experiment, back in Chicago in 1992… was that really more than 25 years ago? In that experiment he could locate the seed of what would become…
In early September we hosted a workshop on Africa and the Epidemiological Imagination at University College London’s Institute of Advanced Studies’ Common Ground. The workshop was sponsored by…
The question of how Willem was coping, alone in the big house, had come to concern many of those surrounding him. Over the past couple of months, Willem…
The sun wakes her up. But Mrs Wijngaard keeps her eyes closed. She is 90 years old and sits quietly in her armchair in her apartment in the…
For my doctoral research, I interviewed family members living with a loved one with early-onset dementia, a diagnosis that one receives under the age of 65. Jans, not…
Babe, my grandpa, was born on the kitchen tiles of a small Seattle home. His dad, whose own grandpa had run a seedy downtown brothel, would disappear and…
During fieldwork on dementia care in a nursing home, I was struck by the complex and layered orderings of space, time and subjectivity in daily life on the…
During my first visit to Ghana in 1998, I was involved in a research project that looked at possible co-operations between healers and psychiatric clinics. I stayed in…
Attending to what makes up ‘the everyday’ has long been a challenge for scholars in the social sciences. [1] Researchers from different disciplines and perspectives have explored how mundane…
Sour Milk At the World Health Assembly (WHA) meetings in late May, 2018, the US delegation tried to water-down or dump a very mild resolution to confirm and…
What characterises STS in different regions? What kinds of research projects, educational programs, and people are doing STS around the world? What problems exist in different regions? Can…