A Reframed (and Reflexive) Conference Report
Organized and Edited by Tess Lanzarotta and Sarah M. Pickman
After a conference ends – after the last paper coffee cup has been tossed into the trash, after the adaptor cable has been disconnected from the podium laptop, after the speakers have rushed out to catch trains and flights homeward – what then? …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …