Category Archives: Features

Features

Scholarly Stretching and Meta-Ethnography in the Medico-Legal Borderlands

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We met some years back at a scholarly conference where we were both presenting papers on a common theme: health care in the service of the law. We bonded over our shared academic interest in Stefan Timmermans and Jonathan Gabe’s (2002) “medico-legal borderlands” framework. As we came to realize, our research agendas were both conceptually situated within ‘borderland’ spaces. We …

BooksFeatures

Book Forum: Saida Hodžić’s The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life After NGOs

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Saida Hodžić’s The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs (University of California Press, 2017) illuminates the myriad state and non-state actors collaborating on campaigns against “Female Genital Mutilation” (FGM) in Ghana, where genital cutting was already on the decline. From a uniquely multi-scalar perspective, Hodžić reveals how cutting emerged as a problem to be shared by African …

Features

Restoring the balance: Living well with pain

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Like dementia, persistent pain comes with irreparable losses: physical restrictions, strained relationships, financial problems, perished dreams and ambitions. Both conditions require ethnographers and care professionals to shift focus from cure to care, from treating illnesses to learning how to live with restrictions. The question thus emerges: how do we learn to live with such ‘diseases that do not go away’ …

Features

(Un)Categorizing Albinism

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“Everything started with a little spot in the head, right up [by] my right ear! I don’t even remember the precise day or week I discovered it. Instead, I remember that it still hurts and I have a persistent headache!” Fadhili said with a feeble voice brightened by a soft smile. As our discussion of his health continued, he kept …

Features

Queer Zones: Refugees from Africa and Interactions with Canada’s Borderlands

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On June 28, 2009, a group of queer Africans took to the streets of Toronto. In what is one of the largest and longest-running Pride parades in North America, this group led the way. As well as being queer and born in Africa, they were all also seeking refugee status in Canada. As they proceeded along the parade route, they …

Features

Sticky notes

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I remember when I was a lot younger and my grandmother was still alive, her flat became increasingly filled with small pieces of paper attached by tape to an apparently random collection of things. On each paper was written the name of the object it was stuck to; ‘toaster’, ‘cooker’, ‘sink’, ‘chair’ and so on. Over time, as she forgot …