An Unlikely but Necessary Conversation: When Enemies Meet
It’s so easy to see our enemies as — well, enemies. What does it take to re-see them as human? Late in life, Erika Jacoby and Ursula Martens…
Tag: risk
Punctuated Lives – Staying Healthy with Lynch Syndrome by Laura Louise Heinsen
Every two years, a letter from the Gastroenterology unit drops into Maria’s mailbox. It is a call to attend her regular surveillance colonoscopy to check for potential precancerous…
Risky business: how older ‘at risk’ people in Denmark evaluated their situated risk during the COVID-19 pandemic by Amy Clotworthy
This blog post is a teaser for a longer article to be published in vol 41, issue 2 of the Journal of Anthropology and Aging in November 2020.…
The Making of Vizag Gas Leak Disaster: Procedural lapses or Regulatory Design?
Hundreds of tonnes of poisonous Styrene gas leaked out of the LG Polymers plant in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh on the 7th of May 2020, leaving 11 dead and…
What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19, Part 4: A Conversation with Physician-Anthropologist, Dr. Bjørn Westgard
Recently, I checked in with Dr. Bjørn Westgard, to see how he was doing. Back in the ‘90s, Bjørn was enrolled in a wildly demanding, combined M.D./Ph.D. program…
What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19, Part 4: A Conversation with Physician-Anthropologist, Dr. Bjørn Westgard
Recently, I checked in with Dr. Bjørn Westgard, to see how he was doing. Back in the ‘90s, Bjørn was enrolled in a wildly demanding, combined M.D./Ph.D. program…
Silent Spring in Europe calls for a New Social Ecology by Tanja Bogusz
Deserted streets in Rome, empty dance-halls in Berlin, died-out tourist attractions in Barcelona, and a lonely Eiffel-Tower in Paris: Europe is experiencing its first locked-down spring. It marks…
What knowledge did successful hedge fund managers rely upon to survive the financial crisis of 2007-2008?
When it’s over COVID 2020 will be examined as an exercise in risk management. The same was done for the financial crash of 2007-2008. Tomes have been written…
“We Use Our Mouths to Trade”
At Ghana’s Kumasi Central Market gossip is more than idle talk. It helps traders mitigate economic risk and boost professional reputations. In the yam yard, wholesale traders bargain…
Playing with Conspiracy Theories
What might viewing conspiracism as a form of play tell us about the workings of contemporary culture, our capacity for critical thinking, or how we build new understandings?…
Risk is Your Business: Citizen Science after Fukushima by Maxime Polleri
I began to sweat profusely when my Geiger counter registered a radiation level of 13 microsieverts per hour—a number that indicated a high level of radioactivity. Worried, I glanced…
Against Risk Perception: The Deficit Model and Public Understandings of Risk
The deficit model frames public controversies about contamination as a lack of scientific understanding or trust in government institutions. People are seen as deficient in knowledge about an…
Disciplinary Violence
#MeToo is an opening for change—but can anthropologists look beyond the media moment to confront sexual violence and transform the discipline? Those who speak up to share stories…
What’s At Stake in Speculation? by Matthew Wolf-Meyer
We’ve long been thinking about health, well-being, illness, sickness, and disease, in relation to risk. That things might not be maintained at their present levels, either individually, among…
The Anthropology of Trump’s Executive Order on Immigration
Ever since the pioneering work of Mary Douglas on risk back in 1992, anthropologists have understood that there is a difference between what is actually dangerous and what…
Does #Evidence Matter?
Evidence, whether in law, in natural or social science, or in belief systems, is about establishing certainty. Evidence has thus been central to law, to science, and to…
Interrogating #Evidence: Epistemological Challenges in the Contemporary World
What social practices are used to constitute evidence? What counts as evidence and why? How are different types of evidence processed, and how do evidence protocols participate in…
Web Roundup: Data, Safety, and Bias by Lily Shapiro
Many people probably saw the news that Facebook allegedly privileges left-leaning stories in its trending news section, a story broken by Gizmodo at the beginning of this month.…
To Fieldwork, To Write
[Savage Minds is pleased to run this essay by guest author Kim Fortun as part of our Writers’ Workshop series. Fortun is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer…