Re-enacting memories by Elinor Ochs
One way to ‘think with dementia’ is to phenomenologically shift from ‘memory’ to ‘remembering’ and to mine ‘remembering’ for its qualities and potentialities as socio-culturally limned experience. Whe…
Tag: United States
The Banality of Lost Guns: Producing Null Data Sets by Kristin Doughty
On the evening of June 6, 2016, a man with a concealed carry permit misplaced his loaded 9mm Kahr handgun in the middle of a park filled with…
The Sacrifice Zones of American “Energy Independence”: Pipeline and Refinery Expansion in the Chicago Region
By Graham Pickren, Roosevelt University § The United States is seemingly on its way to “energy independence.” Since the oil price increases and gas lines of the 1970s shocked…
The Reproductive and Carceral Politics of Ambiguity by Natali Valdez
Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women behind Bars Carolyn Sufrin University of California Press, 2017, 311 pages. Jailcare sheds light on a dark place. The ethnography exposes…
Web Roundup: Annals of Injury and Dispossession by Talia Gordon
In a 2013 essay in American Anthropologist, Andrea Muehlebach summarized the concept of “precarity” as “a shorthand for…the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age…
Breaking news! Big Shift in Biomediatization from “Swine Flu” to H3N2 to the Trump Administration’s Attack on Breastfeeding by Charles L. Briggs
The H3N2 epidemic didn’t really take off until early January 2018—at least as far as US media coverage is concerned. A crucial marker was the New York Times‘…
Nadine Ehlers and Leslie R. Hinkson’s Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine by Naomi Zucker
Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine Nadine Ehlers and Leslie R. Hinkson (editors) University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 256 pages “The focus on race in medicine and the…
We Need to Talk About “Gun Violence”: Reflections on Terminology and Contexts of Violence by Joe Anderson
Among the many political challenges of our time, gun violence in America has emerged as one of the most divisive. A retreat into partisan communities prevents us from…
Funny, Awkward, Tender, Focused: Drawing Bodies by Andrea Ford
Drawings from my research on childbirth in California created an opportunity for sharing reflections on fieldwork and “seeing.” Birth is a highly mediated experience, with ubiquitous images of…
Is Health Activism a Collective Responsibility? by Beza Merid
During the tumultuous “repeal and replace” frenzy in the spring and summer of 2017, the US House of Representatives and Senate moved quickly to consider bills intended to…
Web Roundup: Women, Withdrawal, and Antidepressants by Katherine Warren
In April, an article in the New York Times caused a stir with the headline, “Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit.” The piece begins with a…
Starbucks, Racism, and the Anthropological Imagination
Capitalism is generated through moral and economic negotiations. After a series of discrimination allegations, Starbucks announced in April that it would close to eight thousand stores on May…
On Thinking with People and their Escapes: A Review of Unfinished through Storytelling by Onur Günay
Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming João Biehl and Peter Locke, editors Duke University Press, 2017. 400 pages. If hierarchy is the key to sociological knowledge production, what…
(Anti)Institutional Menses: Our Blood, Our Business by Andrea Ford
Photo courtesy of “Jane” Jane started us off by saying “I grew up in the US, so I could never count on having healthcare.” Jane (for whom I’m…
Diaspora, Gender & Mediated Revolution
In several relatively recent papers (2017, 2015a, 2015b) I’ve made the point that for tens of millions of Egyptians, the uprisings of 2011 weren’t something they physically experienced…
Coleman Nye and Sherine Hamdy on their new graphic novel, Lissa
https://utorontopress.com/us/lissa-2 Interview by Perry Sherouse Perry Sherouse: In your article in George Marcus and Dominic Boyer’s volume on collaborations, you write that “comics – fa…
#Adulting and the Disordered State of American Adulthood
[pquote]It is a word apt for the state of social adulthood in the US, where a long-eroding set of markers from the twentieth century are collapsing into a…
Guerilla Graffiti: Sabotaging Homeland
Greetings from Bhubaneshwar! I’m on leave in India working on projects far removed from Egypt and the Middle East, but I’m also reviewing materials and cleaning up things…
Weeds, Herbicides, and Bodies: Emerging Entanglements in Toxic Agricultural Landscapes
By Tony VanWinkle, Sterling College § Dedicated to the memory of Jackie Dill. Pigweed. Photo by author. Shortly after the unexpected death of friend and mentor Jackie Dill, I…
Laura L. Heinemann’s Transplanting Care by Ellen Rubinstein
Transplanting Care: Shifting Commitments in Health and Care in the U.S. Laura L. Heinemann Rutgers University Press, 186 pp. Heinemann’s work eschews the dramatic moment of transplant…
Commentary: Toxic Bodies, Part I
By Mónica Salas Landa, Lafayette College § Oil infrastructure, Poza Rica, Veracruz, Mexico. Image by author. ‘‘How do you feel living right across from the oil and gas complex?’’ I…
Institutional Inconsistencies: The Case of “Transgender” by V Varun Chaudhry
The CDC’s recent attempt to dictate and regulate possibilities for funding and research included attention to broad swaths of people, including those deemed “vulnerable” and/or receiving “entitlements…
DragNet: January 16 – January 31, 2018
Image from projects.bettergov.org DragNet is back, with a recap of a number articles that came up last month in our twitter feed. In World News, we have a…
Hurricane Bomb
By Rosa E. Ficek, University of Puerto Rico at Cayey § Nobody went outside. The outside world did not exist. There was no internet or television. The power had gone…