Charles Briggs on his book, Unlearning
Interview by Ilana Gershon https://upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/3998-unlearning Ilana Gershon: This book is a generous and intricate homage to your mentors and those who …
Tag: Pandemics
Don Nonini: Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization
Introduction Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point – whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to…
On the Search for the Origins of COVID-19: A Forum by Andrew Lakoff
More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the origin of the virus causing the disease remains uncertain. The predominant theory is that its emergence in human populations…
COVID-19 and The Lessons Anthropology Learned from HIV/AIDS by Merrill Singer
On April 24, 1980, Ken Horne, a San Francisco resident, was reported to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) as a young man suffering with an old man’s…
COVID-19 and the extraordinary normality of the War on Drugs by Jennifer L. Syvertsen
As if it were not challenging enough during the “normal emergencies” [1] of the United States-led War on Drugs, research and advocacy for sane drug policies becomes even…
Defining Wellbeing: Tensions in the World Bank’s approach to Universal Health Coverage by Marlee Tichenor
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
Gavin Smith: Rereading Marx on machines in the time of COVID-19
Gavin Smith, University of Toronto “One of the many perils lies in normalizing the ‘batshit crazy’ presently underway.”—Wallace, Liebman, Chavez & Wallace 2020: 5 The COVID-19 pandemic has…
What Does Toilet Paper Teach Us about Our Defecation Habits? by Bicram Rijal
Illustration by Bicram Rijal An Australian photographer embarks on a jungle expedition in search of a “critically endangered species.” With a Canon camera on his shoulder and a…
“The Measles from the Time of My Grandfather”: Amazonian Ethnocide Memories in Times of Covid-19 by Carlos Fausto
“Kanari Kuikuro shows me a pot full of winged leafcutter ants he has just collected”. November, 2002. Xingu Indigenous Land, Brazil. Photo by Carlos Fausto Two weeks ago,…
“Stay the fuck at home” by Des Fitzgerald
On April 5th, NHS Million, an unofficial campaign for people who “love and cherish” the UK’s National Health Service, tweeted a video of a distressed nurse recording a message in…
Epidemiological Publics? On the Domestication of Modelling in the era of COVID-19 by Catherine Montgomery
The COVID-19 pandemic has been called “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco” (Ioannides, 2020), while the editor of the Lancet has declared that “the handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the…
“It can be seen” – COVID-19’s Disasters for Workers by Hannah Borenstein
Ethiopia, where I am currently doing dissertation fieldwork, reported its first case of COVID-19 on March 13, 2020. But for runners who work in transnational sport, COVID-19 had…
The toilet paper panic: coronavirus and reflections from confinement by Abril Saldaña
The video shows two women coming to blows over a packet of loo rolls; the manager intervenes, trying to calm them down. One of the women has a…
Don’t Fight the Future by Matthew Wolf-Meyer
For the last few years, I’ve been teaching a class called “Human Futures.” I designed it because I was struck by the increasing pessimism among the undergraduates I…
Epidemic Philosophy by Warwick Anderson
Can a virus ever prompt good philosophy? Within weeks of its emergence, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was galvanizing celebrity European philosophers and social theorists, most of them men in…
Our COVID Museum: Notes from Physician-Anthropologists on the Frontlines of an Evolving Pandemic in Seattle and New York City by Kimberly Sue
As the pandemic of SARS-CoV2 (the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19) unfolds it continues to impact contemporary forms of sociality and community, health, care, governance, and global interconne…
Populist Pharmakons by Juan Carlos Gabaldon
On March 22, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro delivered a long cadena– an impromptu speech carried live by public and regime-controlled TV stations – dedicated exclusively to COVID-19. Wearin…
Epidemic Times by Helge Jordheim
Epidemics like Covid-19 fundamentally change the order of time. The present moves faster, the past seems further removed, and the future appears completely unpredictable. Everyday homogenous time spl…
Covid-19: scales of pandemics and scales of anthropology by Jean Segata
Outbreak, epidemics, and pandemics are technical terms from epidemiology. They are used for temporal, geographical, and quantitative classification of infectious diseases. These terms are fundamental…
We urgently need to understand the medication histories of COVID-19 victims by Stefan Ecks
On March 18, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Howard Bauchner discussed a possible link between common hypertension medications and a heightened risk of dying with a coronavirus…
Syndemics of COVID-19 and “pre-existing conditions” by Clare Herrick
As I write, there are more than 660,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 30,000 deaths across almost every country in the world, with infection rates accelerating everywhere…