Urban by Claudia Gastrow
In July 2015 a Facebook campaign entitled selfie lixo (garbage selfie) was launched in Angola. It asked people to pose in front of piles of uncollected garbage in…
Tag: Features
Detritus by Sharad Chari
I employed the category ‘detritus’ in the early 2000s to diagnose the different kinds of residues of racial capitalism with which people struggled in the shadows of South…
Think(er)ing with Epigenetics by Ine Van Hoyweghen
Epigenetics is a much-debated field of research in the contemporary biomedical sciences. Focusing on the processes of chemical regulation surrounding (hence: epi-) genetic material, epigenetic studies…
Klamath Connection and Critical Histories/Activist Futures: The Role of Interdisciplinary Discourse in Addressing Racism and Inequity in STEM Education by Amy Sprowles
The Klamath River flows from Southern Oregon to the Pacific Ocean through some of the most wild lands of the continental United States. It is home to diverse…
‘On paper’ and ‘having papers’: migrants navigating medical xenophobia and obstetric rights in South Africa by Tamuka Chekero
Chekero met Pauline at a local pharmacy in Giyani, a small town in the north-east of the Limpopo Province of South Africa. The area is best known to…
Waste by Jennifer Wenzel
Waste is a tricky word. In our meditations in Somatosphere, waste hews toward its concrete sense as discard: material byproducts of some transformative process, metabolic or mechanical; things…
Toxicity by Danny Hoffman
1. Toxicity names forces for which there is no remediation. Ibrahim is a tour guide in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. His carefully crafted tour takes you around the…
History, Ethics, and the Environmental Archive by M. X. Mitchell
In Marshallese culture the environment itself is sacred.[1] Yet American colonizers used ancestral environments in the Marshall Islands for devastating nuclear weapons testing and related environmenta…
Toxicity, Waste, Detritus: An Introduction by Pamila Gupta
Planet Earth has entered the time of the Anthropocene. For natural scientists, this means that human activity, taken as a whole, has come to rival geological and biophysical…
In The Journals – September 2017, part I by Christine Sargent
Hi everyone! September was full of publications, so we’ll take last month in two parts. American Anthropologist “The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”: A Multispecies Approach to Territorial Pe…
Working for the Race: Black Scholars, Invisible Labor, and the Baggage of Creating Space by Ayah Nuriddin
Photograph taken by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, February 25, 2017 “Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine and Racial Violence,” a conference hosted by Yale University in February 20…
Mothers Matter: Developing the ‘Waiting Mother’ by Kylie Marais
“Waiting indicates that we are engaged in, and have expectations from, life; that we are on the lookout for what life is going to throw our way” (Hage,…
More than Local Arrangements: How Conference Logistics Can Speak to Values by Sarah Pickman
In the fall of 2016, my colleagues Tess Lanzarotta, Marco Ramos, and I met as the core organizers for the “Critical Histories, Activist Futures” conference to hammer out…
Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine and Racial Violence by Sarah Pickman
A Reframed (and Reflexive) Conference Report Organized and Edited by Tess Lanzarotta and Sarah M. Pickman After a conference ends – after the last paper coffee cup…
Beauty’s Knowledge: Hawthorne’s Moral Fable “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Leo Coleman
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a nineteenth-century moral fable that sets the fruits of experimental knowledge against obligations to humanity, and stages a dramatic encounter …
Web Roundup: Opioids as a National Emergency by Katherine Warren
After several years in the headlines, the U.S. opioid crisis has been in the news this summer as the federal government debates its status as a national emergency.…
Teaching Disability Studies in the Era of Trump by Pamela Block
In spring semester of 2017 we (Pam Block and Michele Friedner) co-taught the graduate course “Conceptual Foundations of Disability Studies.” Though the readings were the same as in…
Reproducing the Speculative: Reproductive Technology, Education, and Science Fiction by Kaitlyn Sherman
Walter, a Synthetic, quietly makes his rounds in the brightly lit, pristine interior of the Covenant, a Weyland Corporation Spaceship. Fingers pressed to the translucent, impermeable glass, he…
Things Which Have Once Been Conjoined: Science Fiction, Contagion, and Magic in the Age of Social Media by Samuel Gerald Collins
There are many interesting formations that might be called networked phenomena. Homophily and the tendency towards triad closure. Scott Feld’s Rule (I’m more likely to make friends with…
‘A bit of a compromise’: Coming to terms with an emergency caesarean section by Terena Koster
During the midwife-hosted antenatal class Cath attended in a private hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, where she would eventually give birth, pregnant women were encouraged to name…
Speculation, Certainty and the Diagnostic Illusory: The Tricorder and the Deathless Man by Thierry Jutel
In the paragraphs which follow, we will be discussing the ways in which two pieces of speculative fiction, the science fiction film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,…
Of Memorials, Sacrifice, and Hope in Turkey
This post was submitted by Dr. Sumi Colligan, Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Service-Learning Co-Coordinator at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. On the road in Turkey again this past …
Human Contamination: The Infectious Border Crossings of Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X by Sophia Booth Magnone
“What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been…
Do Americans suddenly like Obamacare? Contextualizing opinion polls and media narratives by Jessica Mulligan
“Repeal and replace” has been the rallying cry for opponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare), the signature domestic policy of the Obama administration that expanded…