Professor Didier Fassin delivered the Roger Allan Moore Lecture on Friday, February 3, 2012 at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
In this lecture, titled, “On Resentment and Ressentiment,” Didier Fassin discusses the differences between the concepts of resentment and ressentiment, specifically as formulated by Jean Améry and the implications of that distinction in …
Since Spring 2008, I’ve been studying videogaming, conducting participant-observation research in and around the World of Warcraft (WoW), interviewing and surveying the citizens of this online community. I have been particularly fascinated by players’ relationships to their WoW “avatars,” the in-game graphical representations of their characters. Via avatars, gamers can temporarily separate or even “dissociate” from …
The courtroom is a modern and fairly small space, with room for perhaps 100-120 people in the gallery. At the start of proceedings on January 10, the gallery was quite full. By the next day fewer than half the seats were occupied. Most of those remaining appear to be connected to the legal teams of the two sides. This is …
When I first began interviewing pharmaceutical company executives on site, I was baffled by the size of their “government affairs” or similarly named departments. I understood that regulatory matters were complex and important to the process of drug licensing, but did management of that task require entire departments of full-time employees? The reason for this remained unclear to me until …
(A disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own, and I do not speak for my department or university.)
In my first post on the Risperdal suit that commenced in Austin this week, I said that the outcome of the case potentially concerns much more than the $579 million plus penalties that Johnson & Johnson might have to return to …
I. Marketing = Education
The first evidence brought before the jury on the afternoon of January 10 was the deposition of a former Janssen product manager, Thomas Anderson, who was one of two marketing managers responsible for launching Risperdal in 1993. The exhibit placed before the jury was a document from the early planning days, entitled “Building a Consensus.” The …