As 2018 begins we pause to briefly look back at the posts that appeared in the past year on Somatosphere. Last year we were happy to publish a number of excellent series, including “Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond,” edited by Gabrielle Hecht and Pamila Gupta, “Critical Histories, Activist Futures,” edited by Tess Lanzarotta and Sarah M. Pickman, “The First 1,000 Days of Life,” edited by Michelle Pentecost and Fiona C. Ross, and “Speculative Health,” edited by Matthew Wolf-Meyer, as well as a raft of other book reviews, book forums, and other pieces.
A huge thanks to all of the entire editorial team, our contributors, and to our readers! We’re very excited for 2018. In the coming days we’ll have a series responding to the recent #7wordsCDC story; we’ll also be continuing our numerous series and publishing forums on recent books by Alondra Nelson, Des Fitzgerald and Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega. And later in the year we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the site…. so there’s a lot to look forward to!
Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Edited by Gabrielle Hecht and Pamila Gupta
Short adventures into our planet’s toxic sensorium, by Africanists and some of their scholarly kin.
- Pamila Gupta and Gabrielle Hecht, Toxicity, Waste, Detritus: An Introduction
- Danny Hoffman, Toxicity
- Jennifer Wenzel, Waste
- Sharad Chari, Detritus
- Claudia Gastrow, Urban
- Anne Berg, Dump
- Joshua Grace, Poop
- Muchaparara Musemwa, Lake
- Robyn d’Avignon, Minerals
- Jatin Dua, Port
- Pamila Gupta, Island
- Mehta Iqani and Francois Knoetze, Art
- Jennifer Lee Johnson, Fish
- Charne Lavery, Drift
Critical Histories, Activist Futures
Edited by Tess Lanzarotta and Sarah Pickman
This series is our attempt to capture some of the insights, suggestions, critiques and experiences from a conference entitled “Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine and Racial Violence.”
- Sarah Pickman, Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine and Racial Violence
- Sarah Pickman, More than Local Arrangements: How Conference Logistics Can Speak to Values
- Ayah Nuriddin, Shelby Pumphrey, Ezelle Sanford III and J. Corey Williams, Working for the Race: Black Scholars, Invisible Labor, and the Baggage of Creating Space
- M.X. Mitchell, History, Ethics, and the Environmental Archive
- Amy Sprowles and Kerri J. Malloy, Klamath Connection and Critical Histories/Activist Futures: The Role of Interdisciplinary Discourse in Addressing Racism and Inequity in STEM Education
- Robert Rock and Nientara Anderson, Medical Student Activism: Political x Institutional x Personal
- Myrna Perez Sheldon, Justice, Science, and Pedagogy
Aftermath
A series examining the consequences of recent nationalist political turns throughout the world, including the US election.
- Veronica Davidov, “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” and Donald Trump
- Deborah Levine, #SoComplicatedSyllabus – Check it out and please contribute!
- Jessica Mulligan and Heide Castaneda, Do Americans suddenly like Obamacare? Contextualizing opinion polls and media narratives
- Pamela Block and Michele Friedner, Teaching Disability Studies in the Era of Trump
- Hunter Keys and Koen Peeters Grietens, Anomie and aftermath: the historical residue of Flemish nationalism in present-day debates on refugees in Belgium
First 1,000 Days of Life
Edited by Michelle Pentecost and Fiona C. Ross
Exploring “the ways that a global health initiative driven by new findings in epigenetics and neuroscience and by a reframing of theories about health and disease in terms of developmental origins shape ideas about (global) health and population futures, invigorate campaigns, and take form and settle in localized contexts.”
- Fiona C. Ross, Stakes of Life: Science, states, policies, publics and ‘the first thousand days’
- Terena Koster and Fiona C. Ross, ‘A bit of a compromise’: Coming to terms with an emergency caesarean section
- Kylie Marais, Mothers Matter: Developing the ‘Waiting Mother’
- Tamuka Chekero and Fiona C. Ross, ‘On paper’ and ‘having papers’: migrants navigating medical xenophobia and obstetric rights in South Africa
Speculative Health
Edited by Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Examining “how speculation makes particular kinds of persons and social forms possible; to think though other models and modes of speculation about the body, health, and disease — in film, literature, and mass media; to consider how particular technologies and techniques create futures.”
- Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Speculative Health
- Matthew Wolf-Meyer, What’s At Stake in Speculation?
- Sophia Booth Magnone, Human Contamination: The Infectious Border Crossings of Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X
- Thierry Jutel and Annemarie Jutel, Speculation, Certainty and the Diagnostic Illusory: The Tricorder and the Deathless Man
- Samuel Gerald Collins, Things Which Have Once Been Conjoined: Science Fiction, Contagion, and Magic in the Age of Social Media
- Kaitlyn Sherman, Reproducing the Speculative: Reproductive Technology, Education, and Science Fiction
- Leo Coleman, Beauty’s Knowledge: Hawthorne’s Moral Fable “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Experiments with pedagogy
Edited by Hannah Kienzler
- Ari Gandsman, Teaching Medical Anthropology
- Sandra Hyde, Bending the Odds: Pedagogy and Dialogue in Large Lecture Courses
- Hannah Mohammad, Making the theoretical practical: Engaging undergraduate students in research methods
Top of the heap
- Hannah Gibson, Top of the heap: Noelle Sullivan
- Hannah Gibson, Top of the heap: Nayantara Sheoran Appleton
Features
- Bridget Bradley, Sandalia Genus, Lilian Kennedy, Hannah Lesshafft and Alice Street, Who Cares? A Discussion on Care from Edinburgh’s Centre for Medical Anthropology
- Danya Glabau, Kirk Fiereck and Melina Sherman, Biofinance: Speculation, Risk, Debt, and Value from Bios: A conference report
- Emily Yates-Doerr, The ethnographic case: series conclusion
- Sadeq Rahimi, Subjectivity After the Subject
- Laura Perler and Francesca Rickli, From Harry Potter to Jesus – A transfigurative conference report
- Thomas J. Csordas, The Impossibility of the Inert: Placebo and the Essence of Healing
- Ine Van Hoyweghen, Katrin Solhdju and Kim Hendrickx, Think(er)ing with Epigenetics
Book forums
- Nancy Rose Hunt’s A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo, edited by Todd Meyers
- Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Beyond Catastrophe: The Pasts and Futures of Kinship in Colonial Congo
- Richard Keller and Emer Lucey, Tensions of Empire Redux?
- Joe Trapido, Music and Infertility in the Nervous State
- Joshua Walker, Enclaves and States in (Post)colonial Congo: Spatial Logics and Epidemiological Metaphors
- Lys Alayna-Stevens, Scholarly Synaesthesia
- Nancy Rose Hunt, A Reply
- Nayanika Mookherjee’s The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971, edited by Todd Meyers and Andrew Brandel
- Andrew Brandel, Introduction: The Violence of Life and Its Images
- Swayam Bagaria, Interiorities of Memory
- Jennifer L. Culbert, Communicating Violence: Reviewing The Spectral Wound
- Amrita Ibrahim, The Performance of Public Secrets in The Spectral Wound
- Naveeda Khan, On Counting
- Naeem Mohaiemen, Time of the Writing, the Hour of Reading
- Veena Das, The Grains of Experience
- Nayanika Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound and New Lines of Flight: A Reply
- Elizabeth A. Wilson’s Gut Feminism, edited by Alexandra Sarkozy
- Des Fitzgerald, Comment on Gut Feminism
- Megan Warin, Incisive Gutting – and Tolerating a Capacity for Harm
- Harris Solomon, A Strange Kind of Sad
- Amber Benezra, Stomachaches
- Elizabeth A. Wilson, A reply
- Emilia Sanabria’s Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil, edited by Eugene Raikhel
- Elena Calvo-González, Plastic Bodies, plastic lives: ambiguity, corporality and change in Brazil
- Anita Hardon, Fluid hormones
- Daniela Tonelli Manica, How to deal with the politics of body plasticity?
- Emily Yates-Doerr, Plastic bodies
- Emilia Sanabria, A response
Book reviews and essays
Edited by Seth Messinger
- Leo Coleman, Material as opposed to what? Three recent ethnographies of welfare, biological labor, and human dignity
- Mackenzie Cramblit, Alice Street’s “Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital”
- Casey Golomski,Lenore Manderson, Elizabeth Cartwright and Anita Hardon’s The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology
- Katie Barron, Janis H. Jenkins’ “Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness”
- Murphy Halliburton, Luhrmann and Marrow’s Our Most Troubling Madness
- Tara Mahfoud, ‘Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us’ / a conversation with Lochlann Jain
- Damien Droney, Book review: Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
- Dina Omar, Orkideh Behrouzan’s Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran
- Setrag Manoukian, On Plastic Reason by Tobias Rees
Web Roudups
Edited by Lily Shapiro
- Jane Roberts, Web Roundup: Moving forward in the face of uncertainty and debatable facts
- Lily Shapiro, Web Roundup: Water
- Emily Goldsher-Diamond, Web Roundup: If it Ledes, it Bleeds
- Jane Roberts, Web Roundup: Moral enhancement
- Lily Shapiro, Web Roundup: Marching for Science, which is what, exactly?
- Emily Goldsher-Diamond, Web Roundup: A Hack By Any Other Name
- Maria Cecilia Dedios, Identity politics, partisanship and healthcare
- Moira Kyweluk, Web Round Up: Time to Chill? Egg Freezing and Beyond
- Katherine Warren, Web Roundup: Opioids as a National Emergency
- Kathleen Lynch, Web Roundup: NFL Concussion Risk and our Chronic, Traumatic Entertainment
- Cinzia Greco, Web Roundup: Gender and Health
In the Journals
Edited by Anna Zogas
- Anna Zogas, January 2017
- Christine Sargent, February 2017
- Julia Kowalski, March 2017: Part I, Part II
- Danya Glabau, April 2017
- Livia Garofalo, May 2017
- Aaron Seaman, June 2017: Part I, Part II
- Danya Glabau, July 2017
- Livia Garofalo and Ann Marie Thornburg, August 2017
- Christine Sargent, September 2017: Part I, Part II
- Julia Kowalski, October 2017
- Anna Zogas, November 2017
- Anna Zogas, December 2017