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, …
Category Archives: Web Roundups
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 …
Monthly Web Round-up
CULTURE AND NATURE
It is important to consider the role that societal and institutional factors play in the relationship between ‘natural’ disasters and the causes of social suffering. It is too simple to call natural disasters ‘natural’, as they happen in a particular social and cultural context. When attempting to understand how and why natural disasters can cause social suffering, …
Welcome New Contributors
Somatosphere is pleased to welcome the contributors who will be working on two new (or, newly regular) features: Web Roundups and ‘In the Journals…’.
Web Roundup Contributors
Four new contributors will be working on the Web Roundups. The Web Roundups feature will be a monthly posting to provide commentary on specific issues related to medicine, science and health in contemporary
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In the Bubble Chamber
A group of historians and philosophers of science at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology have recently launched a collaborative blog called “The Bubble Chamber.” As they explain in one of their introductory posts, the bubble chamber was chosen partly as a metaphor or model for the kind of …