Fish by Jennifer Lee Johnson
If you’ve seen Hubert Sauper’s (2004) documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare you may remember the stark contrast he draws between the sterile disassembly line of a factory producing Nile…
Tag: Features
Lake by Muchaparara Musemwa
Introduction Urban man-made bodies of water such as lakes can be sources of aesthetic beauty and leisure and can boost a city’s economy and tourism industry. They satisfy…
Art by Mehita Iqani
Cape Mongo is a multimedia installation that focuses on consumer waste as medium and subject. It is a complex artwork, comprising sculpture using found materials (mostly what viewers…
Anomie and aftermath: the historical residue of Flemish nationalism in present-day debates on refugees in Belgium by Hunter Keys
I. ‘Everything is the same level as the ground’ As protests against Assad morphed into slaughter, Khalid[i] did his best to avoid fighting. At the time, he was…
Poop by Joshua Grace
For colonial officials in British East Africa, African excrement endangered public health because Africans were reckless defecators. The world was their toilet, and they simply went where they…
Medical Student Activism: Political x Institutional x Personal by Robert Rock
Robert Rock and Nientara Anderson are medical students involved in a broad range of activism efforts at the Yale School of Medicine, including the US Health Justice initiatives…
Island by Pamila Gupta
Island. They are meditative, graspable and productive to think with. On the one hand, they are often conceptualized as the beginning of the world, sites of existential and…
Dump by Anne Berg
South Africa, 1994. Apartheid before, democracy after. Nonetheless, obstinate continuities stretch across this important rupture. Bisasar Road Landfill, the largest registered landfill on the A…
Port by Jatin Dua
Indian Ocean port cities are worlds of coral and glass. Consider Lamu or Zanzibar on the East African coast with their labyrinthine old towns where ornate buildings made…
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…
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 …