Angela was angry—even now, when I listen to the audio recording, I can hear the bitterness in her voice. We sat in the conference room of the public library near her home, where we had met for a formal interview, and she detailed the reasons for her anger, starting right in even before I had turned on the recorder, such …
Category Archives: Features
A ‘Critically Applied’ Approach to PrEP: Introduction
This article is part of the series: A 'Critically Applied' Approach to PrEP
This series has two aims. The first is to deepen anthropological engagement with a novel biomedical technology to prevent HIV. The second is to help bridge the divide between ‘critical’ and ‘applied’ approaches in our discipline. Over the following months we will publish a series of articles that work toward these joint goals. To introduce this series I begin with …
Scholarly Stretching and Meta-Ethnography in the Medico-Legal Borderlands
This article is part of the series: Medico-Legal Borderlands
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 …
Book Forum: Saida Hodžić’s The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life After NGOs
This article is part of the series: Book forum
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 …
Restoring the balance: Living well with pain
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’ …
(Un)Categorizing Albinism
This article is part of the series: Disability from the South: Toward a Lexicon
“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 …