David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Value
‘Value’ is the one central themes that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped…
Tag: Features
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Lost People
Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his…
Intersections of Political Power, Religion, and Public Health in Africa: Covid-19, Tanzanian President Magufuli, and Nigerian Prophet T. B. Joshua by Laura A. Meek
This is the final piece in the Contested Truths series, which has been edited by Jia Hui Lee, Laura A. Meek, and Jacob Katumusiime Mwine-Kyarimpa. This series analyzes…
Introduction to Book Forum on Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War by Andrew Brandel
Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of…
Situating our knowledge practices: a review of AusSTS2021 by Jaya Keaney
In June 2021, more than 180 early-career Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars and participants congregated at this year’s Australasian STS Graduate Network Conference (henceforth AusSTS2021)…
Digital exclusions: mental health and digital life by Dörte Bemme
We are closing our series with a podcast that turns to the absences and missing voices emerging alongside Digital Psy; the lifeworlds&…
Book Forum: Reflections on Dána-Ain Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth by Sameena Mulla
Dána-Ain Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press, 2019) is a vividly written ethnography highlighting how medical racism shapes birth outcomes for Black …
Mapping Algorithmic Assumptions: Reflections from a Society for Psychological Anthropology roundtable by Alexa Hagerty
Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch als Industriepalast, 1926. Detail. Image in public domain Introduction: surveil, classify and predict by Alexa Hagerty and Livia Garofalo The works distilled by the…
Conference Report: Social Medicine from the South by Alice Hilborn
(On behalf of the Wellcome Trust Global Social Medicine Network) Introduction Social Medicine from the South was a virtual two-day mini-conference consisting of two panels that took place…
“The Truth Is Not Known”: COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy as a Failure of Biomedicine’s Moral Legitimacy in Zambia by Justin Haruyama
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…
The Social Potential of Continuing to Wear Masks by Christos Lynteris
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.…
Falling off the cliff: Mythical sacrifice mirrored in Sweden’s Covid-19 response by Carolina Johnson
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 new trial communities: challenges and opportunities in preconception cohorts by Michelle Pentecost
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…
Book Forum: Therapeutic Politics of Care in Asia by Nicholas Bartlett
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…
Stepping into the hospital side room: a place for death in England by Erica Borgstrom
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…
Social Life of Chronic Living by Peter van Eeuwijk
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…
Handling Contested Truths in Times of Crises: Ghana’s COVID-19 Experience by Ignatius Suglo G.D
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’…
Plastic Pollution Goes Far Beyond Litter by Gauri Pathak
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…
Writing Life No. 15: An Interview with Kalindi Vora by Alberto Morales
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…
Mediated Intimacies: Teletherapy and the Changing Face of American Mental Healthcare by Rebecca J. Lester
“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…
Writing LifeNo. 14: An Interview with Hélène Mialet by Catelijne Coopmans
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…
Not “just tools”: The framework of equivalence and cochlear implants in Jordan by Timothy Y. Loh
“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…
On borrowed time: Living with chronic terror in the United States’ insulin crisis by Erin V. Moore
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…
Predicting Across Time and Space by Bettina Ng’weno
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…