Introduction
HIV/AIDS prevention efforts have taken many forms, ranging from pop-up stalls at LGBTQ+ Pride parades to circuit parties at popular queer venues. In this essay, we examine music artist Frank Ocean’s recent attempt to revivify the HIV prevention-access circuit party: a dance event primarily attended by gay men which emerged in cities in the United States to fundraise for …
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The lone-fieldworker model of research may still be the norm for anthropology in the United States, but this is not the case for anthropology everywhere. The European Research Council (ERC), the main funding body for anthropological research in Europe, favors team-based research. Following the model …
Encountering PrEP
I became interested in PrEP as an object of anthropological research on the L train between 1st and 3rd Avenues in Manhattan. It was the summer of 2014 and the global AIDS industry was humming with renewed biomedical triumphalism, hailing ‘the end of AIDS’ some argued PrEP and other scientific advances had made attainable (Kenworthy, Thomann, …
Introduction
Power is in the air we breathe, and no matter where we are there are always individuals with more power over others. In “An anthropology of structural violence” Paul Farmer (2004) famously described the ways systems of power operate to produce structural inequalities and forms of violence inherent within. Farmer defines structural violence as “the experience of people who …
Epilepsy is a chronic illness and disability characterized by recurrent, unpredictable seizures. Epileptic seizures are transient events during which people lose control over all or parts of body-mind function. This can result in the rhythmic twisting of a person’s wrist, sudden inexplicable feelings of joy, or involuntary spasms of the whole body. Since antiquity, epilepsy has occupied healers, philosophers, physicians, …
In this short piece, I explore how medical anthropology could be deployed through interdisciplinary collaborations in a way that is both theoretically rich and poised to positively impact health outcomes. In particular, I consider how research agendas focused on improving health care outcomes reveal certain limitations and underlying assumptions within the discipline. What types of methodological shifts might occur if …