Helen was telling me about her day while I poured tea. Suddenly, the double doors swung open and a middle-aged man in a worn grey jacket briskly walked in. He looked at us, pointed to the room behind us, and blurted out, “Ear acupuncture?”
“Yes,” Helen said. “Have you been here before?”
The man nodded and walked past us into …
The Neuroscience and Society Network, based at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM), organised a workshop titled “Memory / Habit / Addiction” on 28 November 2019 in collaboration with the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London (KCL).
Research on addiction shows that habitual behaviours are intimately tied into specific contexts, objects, …
When I did my second shift of volunteering at the Hostel[1], new rules were already in place: ‘stay-at-home’ orders had been issued and were enforceable (if not necessarily enforced) by police all over the UK. I arrived to prepare dinner for all the guests and was surprised to see so many people in the Lounge, the main hang-out area for everyone at the Hostel, waiting …
As the pandemic of SARS-CoV2 (the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19) unfolds it continues to impact contemporary forms of sociality and community, health, care, governance, and global interconnectedness. These changes and the myriad challenges they pose are critical fodder for anthropologists of health and medicine, and we are called upon now to document lived experiences, reflexively use social theory and …
In a 2013 essay in American Anthropologist, Andrea Muehlebach summarized the concept of “precarity” as “a shorthand for…the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails.” Indeed, the last month has seen a collection of events, acute and ongoing, that characterize the precariousness of the historical present. In the U.S., July 26 marked the court-imposed deadline …
In April, an article in the New York Times caused a stir with the headline, “Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit.” The piece begins with a young woman who “would hunch over the kitchen table, steady her hands and draw a bead of liquid from a vial with a small dropper.” Over a period of months of trying …