Category Archives: Lectures

Lectures

Cues for Ethnography in Pandamning Times: Thinking with Digital Sociality in the Covid-19 Pandemic

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Covid-19 has made the world strange. For many, efforts to stall the pandemic have initiated an unprecedented enclosure of our lives within the familiar walls of our homes, while simultaneously increasing our reliance on digital media to maintain personal and professional connections. This reordering of social worlds and blurring of boundaries between our public lives and private spaces raises a …

Lectures

Practices, knowledge, and the next pandemic: a lesson from a failed participatory public health intervention

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My time doing public health work in Guatemala in the 1990s and early 2000s has shaped how I think about emergencies. Working for an underresourced health system, my sensation was that we were always trying to implement new programs in the midst of a perpetual institutional crisis. On top of that, we would have to leave everything to deal with …

Lectures

Those Who Come Early: Reflections on the Social Standing of Senior Citizens in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan

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Morning Queues

The drugstore opened at ten in the morning in a Tokyo suburb. Despite it being a cold, rainy Monday at the beginning of April, seven people were already standing in a queue waiting for the store to open. They were there to buy face masks, even though there were signs on the front wall stating, This shop will …

Lectures

By Desperate Measures Relieved?: Public Health, Prisons, and the Politics of Life

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As COVID-19 continues to claim lives and devastate economies, experts have been contemplating strategies for accelerating the development of a vaccine. A paper published in March in the Journal of Infectious Disease advocates the use of human challenge trials—which involve vaccinating a small number of volunteers and “challenging” them with a deliberate infection of the virus—in order to bypass the …

Lectures

Human rights/human capital: a hundred years of ‘universal’ health coverage as a global goal

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Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes.

“Health for All?” critically explores global moves towards Universal Health Coverage and its language of rights to health, equity, social justice and the public good. Highlighting emerging ethnographic and historical research by both young

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Lectures

What Type of Governmentality is This? Or, how do we govern unknowns

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In Le Temps, a French newspaper, anthropologist Julie Billaud wrote that the governance of COVID-19 represents “a move towards a biopolitical mode of governance that aims to manage human collectives through statistics, indicators, and other measurement tools.”[i] Others are less convinced. Social theorist Joshua Clover has written in Critical Inquiry, a French online journal,that COVID-19 represents not …