This book forum brings together seven scholars and artists to discuss Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her (Duke 2022). A profoundly introspective and original book, All That Was Not Her traces a relationship between an anthropologist and his interlocutor that equally verges on friendship and antagonism. Eschewing well-trodden anthropological approaches which focus on identity or suffering, Meyers delves into …
Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism
Atlantic Books, 2021. 262 pages.
Although feminist and gender perspectives have been employed to analyse a number of disability-related topics, autism––and neurodiversity more generally––occupies a limited space in the literature. The experiences of adult autistic women, in particular, have been largely under-explored and un-theorised by feminist frameworks. In this …
Preventing Dementia? Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age
Edited by Annette Leibing and Silke Schicktanz
Berghahn Books, 2020. 268 pages
In their recently published edited volume, medical anthropologist Annette Leibing and bioethicist and STS scholar Silke Schicktanz set their focus on the “new dementia” and on related and novel approaches to dementia prevention. While the …
Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of testimony, as well as auto-ethnography, Han seeks to write from a child’s perspective, both as the daughter of parents displaced by the war and who migrate to the United States, as well …
Dána-Ain Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press, 2019) is a vividly written ethnography highlighting how medical racism shapes birth outcomes for Black women in America. Under the sign of maternal health risk and prematurity, Davis argues, the American medical system forces Black women to participate in a limited array of interventions informed by theories of wellness …
Leaving: A Narrative of Assisted Suicide
University of California Press, 2020. 248 pages.
Everyone discovers an academic doppelgänger at some point. We invest time in projects that take years to develop with requisite hunts for external funding, time-consuming efforts to carry out research that aspire to some kind of broadly defined depth, the subsequent endless transcribing, analyzing and …