For the last 25 years, in my work as an applied medical anthropologist, I have called attention to and explored syndemics, the biosocial adverse interaction of two or more diseases and the social conditions of the local or regional context in which they occur. The study of syndemics offers a way to address both health risks and unjust and …
Category Archives: Features
Infrastructures of inequality: Caring tweets, public health, and COVID-19 in Delhi
One tweet asks for help finding a hospital bed in Delhi, India’s capital. Another asks where to find oxygen. These tweets joined a sea of similar pleas for assistance over social media amidst India’s second-wave surge of COVID-19 in the spring of 2021, which led to oxygen and hospital bed shortages across the country. People tweeted asking for help for …
What A 1993 Outbreak Can Tell Us About Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pandemic Preparedness
In 1993, the Four Corners region of the Southwestern United States experienced an unknown virus outbreak that killed its victims within 48 hours. While the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) turned to biomedical science to understand the mysterious virus, the affected Indigenous community turned to their own history. Ultimately, Navajo oral history offered answers that streamlined the research process and …
Introduction to Book Forum on Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War
Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of testimony, as well as auto-ethnography, Han seeks to write from a child’s perspective, both as the daughter of parents displaced by the war and who migrate to the United States, as well …
Situating our knowledge practices: a review of AusSTS2021
In June 2021, more than 180 early-career Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars and participants congregated at this year’s Australasian STS Graduate Network Conference (henceforth AusSTS2021) to reflect on the theme of “situated practice.” The third event since the network was founded in 2017, this year’s multi-sited gathering comprised local nodes in the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Darwin, …
Digital exclusions: mental health and digital life
This article is part of the series: Tracking Digital Psy
We are closing our series with a podcast that turns to the absences and missing voices emerging alongside Digital Psy; the lifeworlds and experiences of those not interpellated into digital care. In this podcast, we explore the notion of “digital exclusion”, commonly used to describe the challenges of digital participation in terms of a lack of devices or skills. Here, we approach digital exclusion as an empirical artifact and trace its edge through policy, care provision, technology design, and the everyday.
The first part focuses on the UK, where we talk to a disability activist and share the highlights of a “theatre of the oppressed” workshop that took place in London. Collectively we produced artistic responses to the theme “digital exclusion” with people who experienced barriers to …