Over the course of the last several months, a series of chilling videos have been shared across Zambian social media, purporting to link COVID-19 vaccines with a global…
We are often told that anti-epidemic masks should not be politicised. Though often well intentioned, this admonition falls short of taking masks seriously as social and historical objects.…
Ättestupa is the Swedish word given to a number of steep cliffs. The myth of the ättestupa holds that in prehistoric Nordic times, older community members would throw themselves off…
The Excavating the Biosocial series has so far focused on birth cohorts as ethnographic object (Gibbon and Pentecost 2020). In this post, I explore the expansion of interest…
The six review essays in this collection emerge from a joint launch of five books and one dissertation/ book-in-progress and a panel at the recent annual meeting of…
I hovered in the doorway as the palliative care nurse who I was shadowing that day indicated I should. She entered the darkened side room to check on…
Chronicity, ageing, and social life Old-age related health conditions evolve into both a dynamic and an inert chronicity which, in the end, produces a particular quality of life…
As the pandemic ravages the rest of the world, the casualty rate in Africa remains a mystery to those who predicted doom for the continent. Given African countries’…
Plastics in the oceans. Beaches littered with plastics. Images of whales and cows with plastics in their bellies. Calls for citizens not to litter, to throw away trash…
Kalindi’s laptop sits inside her car, which serves as a writing space sometimes. The last time I spoke to Kalindi in person was at the Society for the…
“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?” “I can, but your head is cut off. I just see your neck. Can you hear me?” “Yeah, yeah, I hear you. &nb…
Image 1: Hélène’s home office. The pandemic has revealed the fragility of our lives and the vulnerability of our bodies. It has also revealed the importance of fleshy…
“Should all deaf children learn sign language?” This seemingly innocuous question was the theme of a roundtable article published in the influential journal Pediatrics in 2015, which compiled…
As the United States began closing its borders in March 2020, Americans with diabetes, already under threat from the coronavirus, faced another pandemic hazard: pharmacies were regularly running…
Every day for the month of March 2021, I watched the numbers of Covid-19 cases in Kenya climb and climb. Family and friends sent me messages that the…
Is long Covid disseminated by newspapers? On April 14th, 2021, the British journalist and writer George Monbiot published an article entitled “Apparently just by talking about it, I’m…
Figure 1. Sue’s writing space in the beautiful Syilx (Okanagan) Nation territory. With Scooter, the family’s unruly cat. The development of our writing dyad has unfolded organically over…
Para español aquí. It was one of those early spring evenings where the sun was warm and the air fresh. My friends and I were at the park,…
When I ask Willow, an Afro-Puerto Rican young woman in her 20s, if quarantine has helped reduce the stigma of mental illness, she responds: I think it will…
It is 11 am in Vancouver. Danya sits at a desk beside a large window that looks out onto tree tops and electrical wires. Rain pools in the…
In early February 2021, Tanzanian Health Minister Dorothy Gwajima announced that the Tanzanian government would not partake in COVID-19 vaccination campaigns—“we are not yet satisfied that those vacc…
Much has been written of late on the ‘biosocial’ in the social sciences and humanities — see for example Ingold (2013), Meloni et al (2016), Lloyd and Muller…
On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience Abou Farman University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 360 pages. Max More, a trained philosopher and the present Ambassador and…
When we were children my mother always told us there was nothing to fear from thunderstorms. But it was hard not to notice that she did so whilst…