I’m an “expert” at overhauling syllabi. At least, I should be. I’ve taught a medical anthropology course almost every term for the past ten years, and no matter what promises I’ve made to myself, I can’t stop making changes when it’s time to teach again. All new assignments, new books, switching from articles to books and vice versa — I’ve …
Category Archives: Teaching Resources
How to teach anthropology in a pandemic?
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
…“… a deadly pestilence is in our town, strikes us and spares not, and the house of Cadmus is emptied of its people while Black Death grows rich in groaning and lamentation… Raise up our city, save it and raise it up… If you rule this land… better to rule it full of people than empty. For neither tower nor
Science in Dark Times: a syllabus on science, technology, and medicine under illiberal political regimes
Modi, Trump, Bolsonaro: three avatars of a moment marked by the rise of a far-right populism, what many commentators have even described as a revitalized fascism. As I watched the courage of protestors who rallied against the racist Citizenship Amendment Act in India, and the sycophancy of elected officials in the United States who failed to remove a racist president …
Immunity and (Anti-)Vaccination: Histories, Metaphors, Theories – A Syllabus
The natural body meets the body politic in the act of vaccination, where a single needle penetrates both. – Eula Biss, On Immunity
In recent years, outbreaks of highly contagious diseases like measles and whooping cough have reached epidemic proportions in the US. Such a resurgence in supposedly eradicated diseases has been attributed to rising rates of vaccine refusal in …
How to Pay Attention
This article is part of the series: Experiments with pedagogy
The main challenge in running a seminar on the anthropology of attention is that such a thing doesn’t exist.* While anthropologists often think quite deeply about attention, worrying about our own noticing practices or what our interlocutors focus on, we rarely write about the concept head-on. When we do write about attention, we rarely problematize it in the way we …
Is Health Activism a Collective Responsibility?
This article is part of the series: Experiments with pedagogy
During the tumultuous “repeal and replace” frenzy in the spring and summer of 2017, the US House of Representatives and Senate moved quickly to consider bills intended to either eliminate the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) or restrict its various provisions. The American Health Care Act (AHCA) in the House and the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) in …