Category Archives: Lectures

Lectures

From Mink to the Wild: COVID-19 through the Mirror of Sylvatic Plague

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This article is part of the series:

Even as pandemic response is focused on understanding, controlling and preventing COVID-19 among humans, a ghost haunts epidemiological concerns about the disease: reverse-zoonotic sylvatic Covid. Or, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to spill-back from humans to domestic or farmed animals, and from there to wild-life, where the virus can establish ineradicable disease reservoirs. This scenario is not far-fetched: the case of …

Lectures

When ‘a People’s War’ Turns Against Them: Reflections on Uganda’s ‘War of the Wananchi’ against COVID-19

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This article is part of the series:

Introduction

“This is a people’s war”, declared President Museveni after the country’s first COVID-19 case, adding, “I have come here to lead the war of the wananchi [against Covid-19]”[1]. When COVID-19 became a reality in Uganda, the government announced ‘a war of the wananchi’[2](“a people’s war”) against the virus through a series of incremental measures. …

Lectures

How Whiteness Works: JAMA and the Refusals of White Supremacy

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In late February, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an episode of its JAMA Clinical Reviews podcast titled, “Structural Racism for Doctors—What Is It?” In an accompanying tweet, the journal offered this eye-popping teaser: “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?” The answer, they promised, was in JAMA’s “user-friendly podcast,” a …

Lectures

Becoming Intergenerational in Birth Cohorts: kinship and the remaking of participation

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This article is part of the series:

In recent years birth cohorts have become an invaluable context, resource, tool and ‘technology’ of an emerging terrain of biosocial science, given the unique opportunity they provide to study how the life course is intergenerationally shaped. As many contributors for this series have highlighted, the what and how of biological and social transmission between kin are of central concern in …

Lectures

Contested Truths over COVID-19 in Africa: Introduction

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This article is part of the series:

One of the most significant challenges to confronting and mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic concerns the manufacturing, circulation, and interpretation of what we call “contested truths.” By this term, we mean the many and varied ways in which official, institutional, and/or scientific facts and recommendations about COVID-19 are challenged, ignored, or subverted at multiple scales, from the individual to the state. …

Lectures

The Future of (Academic) Conferencing

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From the 4th to the 6th of March 2021, close to 500 medical anthropologists, sociologists, STS scholars and more participated in the Chronic Living conference, yet never at the same time as one collective group of participants. The conference had been originally planned to take place in Copenhagen in April 2020 leading to a last-minute cancellation and …