Category Archives: Lectures

Lectures

The Two Singapores: Rethinking Migrant Domestic Care Work in COVID-19

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This article is part of the series:

“The Two Singapores” is an ongoing interview miniseries run by Somatosphere to interrogate Singapore’s COVID-19 response, in particular in its handling of the explosion of cases among migrant workers living in cramped dormitories. The series aims to shed a light on Singapore’s reliance on cheap migrant labor in maintaining its image as a glitzy, cosmopolitan city-state, and aims to offer …

Lectures

Needles to needles: how ear acupuncture can work for substance use recovery

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This article is part of the series:

Helen was telling me about her day while I poured tea. Suddenly, the double doors swung open and a middle-aged man in a worn grey jacket briskly walked in. He looked at us, pointed to the room behind us, and blurted out, “Ear acupuncture?”

“Yes,” Helen said. “Have you been here before?”

The man nodded and walked past us into …

Lectures

The Two Singapores: Spectacle and Twin Realities

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This article is part of the series:

Early on in the global fight against COVID-19, Singapore’s response to the pandemic, centered around aggressive contact tracing and quarantining close contacts, was the subject of praise and admiration among the global community. However, much of this international sentiment had died out by April, as Singapore saw steeply rising infection rates in migrant worker dormitories around the country. Today, low-wage …

Lectures

Reworking the Cognitive Bias – a Brainstorm

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This article is part of the series:

Can we change the way that we think about thinking? Can we rework our thoughts about thought? If so, what would reworking thought open up, analytically and ethnographically? Those were the provocations we started with, an invitation to draw together early career researchers working on diverse ways of conceptualizing thinking and not-thinking, cognizing and not-cognizing. 

Even asking these questions raises …

Lectures

Science Skepticism as a Veneer for Nationalistic Humor

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This article is part of the series:

Recently we saw a splash of headlines about the Russian Covid-19 vaccine, as Russia became the first country to register a vaccine and governmental officials shared plans for starting mass vaccinations in October. This news was shared all over my social media, with the commentary hewing to repetitive jokes, the humor value of which was based on an implied shared …

Lectures

Standards and urgency in times of pandemics: hydroxychloroquine as a pharmaceutical and political artefact

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This article is part of the series:

Separated by two meters of water from the crowd, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, infected by COVID-19 and wearing his mask, rallied up his supporters, “If by chance your mother or grandfather catches it, will they take chloroquine or not?”

“They will!” shouted back the crowd in unison, across the narrow strip of water.

Hydroxychloroquine has turned from being a commonly …