Working Assumptions – review
In Working Assumptions, Julia Hobsbawm examines the impacts of Covid-19 and generative AI on the future of work. Exploring debates around how flexible working impacts productivity, the rising number o…
Tag: pandemic
Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge – review
In Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge, João Biehl and Vincanne Adams assemble reflections on the role of anthropology in understanding healthcare in today’s world of…
Why did the Left Fail the Covid Test So Badly?
Note: Contrary to this site’s policy of not republishing work from other sites, which has been in effect for several years, this exception is a must. It is…
The Collapse of the Canadian University and the Rise of the Church of Covid
February of 2022 was a particularly dark month, both in Quebec and in Canada generally. In Quebec, we had the expansion of the use of “vaccine passports” to…
Introducing: “Disaster X”
Disaster X is a new publication, that is tied to this site: it is available on Substack. Here I just want to briefly introduce the material that already…
Susan Paulson: Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds
Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies,…
Alexander W. Anthony: Covid in the confines of the US
Introduction There is a calendar in my office which still hangs at March 2020; an artifact of the confusion and rush to ‘lockdown’ and to find shelter from…
Andrew Orta: The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear
Responding to a question about future of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in the wake of the pandemic, the Dean of a top program recently suggested that…
Ieva Snikersproge: Jobs or ecology? Why green growth is a pipe dream and how the pandemic could change this
My interest in the tensions between job preservation and ecological transition comes from my fieldwork among neorurals in Diois, a relatively isolated mountainous area in Southeastern France. The…
Andrew Flachs, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas: Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies
There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of…
Sandy Smith-Nonini: Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures
The spectacle of Russia invading Ukraine has elevated tensions over Europe’s access to natural gas and may herald a sea-change in regional geopolitics of energy. But prior to…
The century of pandemics. A conversation with Mark Honigsbaum
Medical historian Mark Honigsbaum speaks of a “century of pandemics” that stretches from the Spanish flu of 1918 to our Corona-related present. In an interview with Philipp Sarasin,…
Infrastructures of inequality: Caring tweets, public health, and COVID-19 in Delhi by Emilija Zabiliūte
One tweet asks for help finding a hospital bed in Delhi, India’s capital. Another asks where to find oxygen. These tweets joined a sea of similar pleas for…
Protecting the Pandemic from the People: Perpetual Panic, Permanent Emergency
There are some suggestions that the Omicron variant could well end “the pandemic”. And that is a problem. It is a problem on two fronts. First, a variant that…
What A 1993 Outbreak Can Tell Us About Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pandemic Preparedness by Rebecca Lynn Perez
In 1993, the Four Corners region of the Southwestern United States experienced an unknown virus outbreak that killed its victims within 48 hours. While the Centers for Disease…
Rafael Wainer: COVID-19: Complicity, complacency, and connections
Image 1: Social distancing signs. Photo by ©Acabashi CC-BY-SA 4.0 To understand the massive world-disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic we need a sociology of complicity. Since the different…
A Life of Struggle: Imam Yasin Abu Bakr
On Thursday, October 21, 2021, just after 9:00pm, Imam Yasin Abu Bakr of the Jama’at al-Muslimeen of Trinidad and Tobago, passed away at the age of 80. He…
“Legibility by Invitation”: Rohingya Refugees and the Struggle for Political Recognition
Once, in mid-August 2018 in a café tucked away in Klang Valley, Malaysia, Husin, my Rohingya research collaborator, and I sat with Fatimah, a young Rohingya woman. As…
The Pandemic Narrative and the War Against the People: Day 2 of an Online Interdisciplinary Symposium
Friday, July 30, 2021 was Day #2 of an online international and interdisciplinary symposium organized by Doctors for Covid Ethics (see the report for Day #1). The symposium…
Summer break!
This past academic year we have continued with our regular content featuring anthropological analyses of current events (the pandemic and the assassination of Peter R. de Vries, for…
The False Pandemic and the Great Reset: Day 1 of an Online Interdisciplinary Symposium
A brief note before the main content for this report: since last publishing to this site I have been occupied with preparing a long and detailed series of…
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…
COVID-19: THE SYSTEM, Part 2
In Part 1 we ended with the documentary’s discussion of the type of business model that has been created around COVID-19, or to match the title of the…
COVID-19: THE SYSTEM, Part 1
On March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19’s spread was now a pandemic, and on March 13, 2020, when here in Quebec a total…