This is the most recent version of a graduate course in medical anthropology theory that I teach. The main caveat is that this is the second in a set of three theory courses students are required to take, so it presumes the students have already taken the first course, which covers an extensive range of contemporary medical anthropology. My hope …
Tag Archives: Biopower/biopolitics
Foucault Across the Disciplines: A Special Issue
The October 2011 issue of History of the Human Sciences is a special issue entitled “Foucault Across the Disciplines.” The eight articles which compose the issue, along with guest editor Colin Koopman’s introduction,
“demonstrate the enormous gain in critical potential that can be realized by taking up Foucault’s own posture as a cross-disciplinary or counter-disciplinary thinker. One of the signal
…
William Garriott on narcopolitics
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, …
Book Review Essay: Nguyen’s The Republic of Therapy
This article is part of the series: From the Somatosphere archives
The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS.
By Vinh-Kim Nguyen.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Pp. 256. ISBN 9780822348740. (Paperback, US $ 22.95)
Reviewed by Betsey Brada (Princeton University)
In The Republic of Therapy, Vinh-Kim Nguyen traces responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Francophone West Africa between 1994, when effective …
Book Review: Erica James’ Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti
Erica James. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 384 pages; $24.95
Review by Hanna Kienzler (McGill University)
“Supported by a rich cultural heritage, the Haitian people retain a capacity for hope, faith, and resilience that remains a tremendous resource for any efforts to rehabilitate the nation and its people” …
Chernobyl Forever
This post was contributed by Sarah D. Phillips (Indiana University, Bloomington)
For a time, it seemed as if the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster might come and go relatively unnoticed and unremarked, at least by those persons with no direct experience of it. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl (Chornobyl’ in Ukrainian) came to be seen as a …