An estimated 400,000 women around the world are living with breast implants manufactured by the now defunct company Poly Implant Prosthese (PIP) using industrial grade silicone not approved for medical use. The scandal has raised concerns about the regulation of medical devices in Europe and provoked debate about neoliberal approaches to the body. Anthropologyworks points out that establishing who is responsible for …
Category Archives: Web Roundups
In the journals and on the web in 2011
I was happy to learn that Somatosphere made the list of top 10 (really 12) anthropology blogs — the result of a survey put together by Jason Antrosio at Anthropology Report. Thanks to Jason for putting this together. We’re in great company on the list, with excellent sites such as Savage Minds, Neuroanthropology, John Hawks Weblog and …
Web Roundup
The WHO Release of their World Report on Disability
On September 12th and 13th, the World Health Organization and World Bank hosted a two-day symposium on the outskirts of DC to discuss the U.S. launch of their new joint World Report on Disability. The two day panel discussion should be posting soon on the University at Buffalo’s Center for …
William Garriott on narcopolitics
My colleague William Garriott of James Madison University’s Department of Justice Studies was recently interviewed by the website Left Eye on Books about his recently published monograph Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America (NYU Press: 2011). In the interview Garriott discusses the concept of narcopolitics, the particular role ethnography has to play in understanding an emergent phenomenon like methamphetamine, …
Monthly Web Round-Up
On July 20th the food crisis in the Horn of Africa was officially declared a famine. In David Keen’s 1994 book The Benefits of Famine he argues that famines are “naturalised” as “disasters”, and that this naturalisation obscures the processes which cause hunger, the “identifiable forces within the province of rational human control” Susan George wrote of in her 1974 …
Monthly Web Round-up: Bodies/borders
Frontpage news over the past month has repeatedly returned to the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, in which prominent French politician and development affairs guru Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) was arrested after being accused of sexually assaulting a hotel worker in New York City. The accusation, emerging at the end of May, sparked an international scandal that many speculate will impact the outcome …