As I was thinking about the task of reviewing the anthropological, bioethical, and/or STS implications of the past month of news, my mind kept returning to the introduction of Laura Briggs’ recent book How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. In Briggs’ introduction, she finds “reproductive labor” is necessary to both biological reproduction …
Category Archives: Web Roundups
Web Roundup: May 2020
The web roundup feature seeks to provide a periodical compilation of relevant content about anthropology, medicine, and society. It is fair to say that there has been an overflow of such material in the last weeks, days, and hours. The killing of George Floyd, the protests across the US, the violence, curfews in several major cities, the 911 call on …
Web Roundup: How War, Not a Pandemic, Became America’s New Normal
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
The US was not prepared for a pandemic, but it was prepared for war. When President Trump declared a national state of emergency on March 13, 2020, he transformed the coronavirus from a “hoax” into an “invisible enemy.” In his daily press conferences, President Trump has repeatedly and explicitly announced the United States’ war against the virus. Similarly, in the …
Web Roundup: What Can the Coronavirus Outbreak Tell Us About Capitalism, White Supremacy, and Climate Change?
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
In December 2019, a new respiratory virus outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei Province. A new strain of coronavirus, designated COVID-2019, belongs to a large family of viruses, causing illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe cases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The circumstances around the …
Web Roundup: Lunar Bodies
The past month has been a big one for the moon. There was a total solar eclipse across Chile and Argentina on July 2, a partial lunar eclipse visible nearly everywhere except North America on July 16, and a black supermoon on July 31 over North America. On July 22, India launched its Chandrayaan-2 space probe, marking ISRO’s second …
Web Roundup: Beyond Using More Female Rats: Gender Disparities in Biomedicine
Recently, physicians, public health experts, and anthropologists (among others) have pointed to a prevalence of gender, class, race, age, and ethnic bias in biomedical research and the specific ways in which knowledges about bodies are created and reproduced in biomedicine.
In the 19th century, when the long-standing idea of women’s inferiority was brought into question more …