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; …
Author Archives: Matthew Wolf-Meyer
What’s At Stake in Speculation?
This article is part of the series: Speculative Health
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 our cared-for, or socially, is not something new, even if we’ve entered a period of intensification, with calls to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act, and the slow, often subtle chipping …
Speculative Health
This article is part of the series: Speculative Health
The last thirty years have seen an intensification in ways of thinking about our health and disease in the future tense. Risk, precarity, subjunctivity — all three point to the ways that temporality shape human experience, subjectively, interpersonally, and institutionally. But what if we turn our attention away from the clinic and its therapeutic technologies — which focus on the …
Is It Okay to Say that Research ‘Verges on Scientific Racism’?
Last fall, a group of researchers – mostly biological anthropologists and sleep researchers – published a study of three ‘pre-industrial’ communities, one in Latin America, two in Africa, and claimed that based on their data, consolidated nightly sleep is a human norm, inferring that it is the product of natural selection. The media picked up the research findings, and I …
Intimate, Familiar and Strange, or Why I Don’t Teach a Class on Sleep
This article is part of the series: Experiments with pedagogy
One of the insights into teaching provided to me by Donald Morse, one of my undergraduate professors, was to never teach the same class twice. But, simultaneously, not to overburden oneself by developing a new course every year. His model, which I’ve entirely stolen, was to teach one-third texts he knew intimately, one-third texts he was familiar with, and …
Once More unto the Breach (of capitalism and nature) – jonathan crary’s 24/7
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Verso Books, 2013. 133 pp.
Years ago, I gave a talk at Stanford University, an hour drive north from Santa Cruz. During the question and answer period after the talk, an economist in the audience raised a question about my argument that despite widespread belief in the emergence …