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 her car. The tweet was aimed, NHS Million said, at those who were “ignoring the rules,” so that they would understand “the reality of the situation.” The rules …
Author Archives: Des Fitzgerald
Respect, care, and labor in collaborative scholarly projects
As members of Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, we have been following the unfolding crisis surrounding Hau with profound concern (Agro 2018, Flaherty 2018). As others have noted, this crisis has revealed multiple structural issues that deserve intense engagement beyond the specifics of the individual case: open-access (OA), digital scholarship and publication, yes, but also academic power, precarity, and vulnerability; …
Experimental anthropology in the making: a conversation with Andreas Roepstorff
Andreas Roepstorff is Professor in Anthropology at Aarhus University in Denmark, where he is also Director of the Interacting Minds Centre. Since the early 2000s, he has pursued an intensely interdisciplinary and collaborative research-programme at the intersections of anthropology, science and technology studies, and cognitive neuroscience – while also using his ethnographic training to reflect back on this his own …
Entangled in the collaborative turn: observations from the field
If there really has been a ‘collaborative turn’ between the social and biological sciences, then the stakes of that turn are still very much to be negotiated. ‘Collaboration,’ of course, is not a practice or a structure simply to be aimed for: like all ethical and methodological commitments, collaboration is made in the turning – and thus the actual forms …
The collaborative turn: interdisciplinarity across the human sciences
Questions of health, medicine and science have long animated sub-disciplinary attentions in the social sciences and humanities. Recently, however, research around these topics has taken a marked collaborative turn. If topics in the medical and health sciences were once straightforward objects of study for anthropological, sociological or philosophical analysis, increasingly, to work ‘on’ such topics often means also to work …
Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture
By Philippe Descola
Translated by Janet Lloyd
Foreword by Marshall Sahlins
University of Chicago Press, 2013
488 pages, US$ 65.00 (hardcover)
Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature & Culture is not a modest book. Having first appeared French in 2005, it systematizes some of the ideas previously set out in Descola’s ethnographic work among the Achuar …