Is ethnographic research analogous to a gold mine project, an extractive industry that makes a social and material landscape knowable, and hence governable? Is knowledge construction a veil for narrative extraction, where knowledge is a commodity to be reassembled for productive gain? I ask these questions as a way to tease out the tensions experienced between me and my collaborators …
Tag Archives: Activism
Daniel Defert’s Une vie politique (A Political Life)
This article is part of the series: Foreign correspondents
Une vie politique [A Political Life]
Interviews with P. Artières and E. Favereau, with the collaboration of Joséphine Gross.
Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2014
On 25 September 1984, Daniel Defert wrote a letter to his friends proposing that they create a non-profit organization to address an emerging disease: AIDS. “In face of a medical crisis and …
Knowledge of living
It is time we anthropologists of biomedicine broaden our analytical scope. If it is the case that there is more to life than DNA, cells, tissues and organs; that there is more to disease than mutations, dysregulations and dysfunctions, then how is it that social studies of medicine have attained such a bio bent in recent decades? Of course, medicine …
From saving lives to cutting costs? Challenges for a new era for activism
This article is part of the series: Keywords, Transcriptions Series
In 2011 South Africans witnessed a series of animated exchanges between Western Cape Premier Helen Zille and AIDS activists on the question of ‘sexual responsibility’ and the criminalization of HIV positive people who knowingly infect others[1]. Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) political opposition, argued that those who behave sexually irresponsibly do not deserve their free …
Transcriptions – Broadsheets – After AIDS 2012
Tracking AIDS Conference 2012
“Overwhelming” was the common descriptor for AIDS 2012 from delegates who I encountered, as well as those reflecting upon the conference on-line. With 23-25,000 attendees, and between the events, constituencies, protests, networking, and the literature and other material passed out, it proved difficult to find anchors at this five-day gathering. Despite this, there were particular ideas …
Broadsheets: Run-Up to the 2012 AIDS Conference
Broadsheets will keep track of and report on the International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) in Washington D.C. between July 22-27. Reports will rely upon the chatter around the venue, and circulating news in social and popular on-line media. We will specifically pay attention to the presence of the organizations whose websites we have been tracking.
Starting with them, tracked sites …