Across the United States, legislators continue to devise new ways to target parents who use drugs through a variety of state systems. In the past twenty years, the number of states penalizing substance use during pregnancy has doubled. Ostensibly a response to rising rates of opioid-related overdose deaths, such state laws almost universally endanger those already at greatest risk. …
Author Archives: Jennifer J. Carroll
Trust and the Test: Producing Narrative Certainty in an Evolving Pandemic
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
“COVID is the thing that works differently. It’s not our experience of the illness that works differently.”
A recent observation by Hannah Alcock
We both spend a lot of time in hospital Emergency Departments (EDs). We know the moods, the smells, the human tableaus played out in a loop with each new intake, each new shift. As a medical …
A Report on the Joint EASA/SMA Conference “Encounters and Engagements: Creating New Agendas for Medical Anthropology”
From June 12-14, 2013, the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA) and the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ (EASA) Medical Anthropology Network held a joint conference for their members, hosted by the Department of Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Work at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain. The original conference description claimed that “location and …
Book review: Summerson Carr’s Scripting Addiction
Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety
Princeton University Press, 2010.
323 pp., US$29.95 (paperback).
E. Summerson Carr’s Scripting Addiction is an ethnography of American talk therapy for drug users. It explores the myriad ways in which symptoms of addiction are constructed, identified, and managed in this setting. Carr’s rich and …
Reports from the Second Annual Health in Transition Conference
The second annual Health in Transition (HiT) Conference was held June 7-8 in Bucharest, Romania. The HiT Conference had its genesis last year thanks to the vision and dedication of Edit Szenassy, a PhD student at Charles University in Prague. She envisioned an environment where social scientists who research matters of health, illness, and medical care in Central and …
Call for papers: Ethnographies of Biomedicine in Post-Socialist Europe, Bucharest, June 2012
Health In Transition:
Ethnographies Of Bio-Medicine In Post-Socialist Europe
Call for Papers
7-8 June 2012
Kindly hosted by: Romanian Academy of Sciences, Bucharest, Romania
With notable exceptions, the topics of health and medicine in post-socialist Europe have received limited anthropological attention compared to research on both the global ‘North’ and ‘South’. Implicitly, medical anthropological research from academic institutions in …