The past month has been a big one for the moon. There was a total solar eclipse across Chile and Argentina on July 2, a partial lunar eclipse visible nearly everywhere except North America on July 16, and a black supermoon on July 31 over North America. On July 22, India launched its Chandrayaan-2 space probe, marking ISRO’s second …
Category Archives: Features
The social life of PrEP in Kenya
This article is part of the series: A 'Critically Applied' Approach to PrEP
I have perhaps an unpopular position to declare: Although pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an enormous biomedical breakthrough in the prevention of HIV, it also symbolizes much of what is wrong in current global health practice.
Since 2013, I have been working on HIV prevention research in Kenya, which, as pointed out in this series introduction, has the second highest …
Is Hunger Culture-Bound?
Over the last decade, indigenous Marind communities in the rural district of Merauke, West Papua, have seen vast swaths of their forests and savannas razed to make way for monocrop oil palm plantations. These developments are promoted by the Indonesian government as part of efforts to achieve national self-sufficiency in basic commodities, including palm oil, sugar, and rice. On the …
How Medicare For All Challenges our Ideas of Black Deservingness
The contemporary debate over healthcare in the United States revolves around an unstated but somewhat widely understood notion of what people deserve. The question of “deservingness” is particularly important when we hone in on the demographics of the American populace and think critically about who is currently underserved by the current medical system in the U.S., and who stands …
Banking on Human Milk Exchange Relations
Recognizing the work people perform to help others is an important part of any definition of a social good. In the case of donor human milk, there is a particular need to recognize the unnamed mothers who literally donate of themselves to make this invaluable health provision possible. These women are drawn from all across the UK and, as they …
Book Forum: Tomas Matza’s Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia
This article is part of the series: Book forum
In Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (Duke University Press, 2018), Tomas Matza traces the landscape of “psy” disciplines, practices, and institutions across postsocialist Saint Petersburg. Writing with a distinctive conceptual subtlety and care, Matza pushes beyond a range of well-established interpretations to examine the multiple ways in which psychotherapy has provided tools for people to understand …