How and with what consequences do young people push up against standardized views of “normal” and “healthy” development? To what extent can young people’s attempts to disrupt developmental norms be understood as political acts? I became intrigued by these questions while conducting long-term ethnographic research with a subset of young participants in the 1982 birth cohort study in Pelotas, Southern …
Tag Archives: Biosociality
Staying (at Home) with Brain Fog: “Un-witting” Patient Activism
Scene 1: It’s Sunday afternoon, around one o’clock, and a group of a dozen or so people log onto a video call from their apartments. Occasionally someone’s cat will walk into the frame, obscuring the camera, or a deliveryman will ring the buzzer, interrupting the flow of conversation. But mostly, what we see of each other are scenes of domestic …
Jonathan Xavier Inda’s Racial Prescriptions
Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life
Ashgate, 2014, 148 pages.
Racial Prescriptions provides an eloquent and theoretically-engaged account of the story of BiDil, a pharmaceutical that has become an iconic case for scholars of race in science and medicine. When BiDil was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in …
(Dis)harmonious Socialities: Deaf multi-level marketing participation in India
In this post, I want to think about what the popularity of multi-level marketing businesses among Indian Sign Language-using deaf Indians means for how anthropologists and other social scientists analyze deaf worlds. In the current political economic moment, many deaf Indians are turning to multi-level marketing businesses for both livelihood and for imagining new deaf futures. There is the sense …