Miracle babies. The microscopic enchantments of embryos. The image of a woman holding that much-desired infant. In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is replete with awe-inducing imagery, often bordering on the near religious. Kylie, an embryologist I interviewed in Cape Town described the images of IVF as part of the inspiring stories that drew her into the field: “I watched a …
Tag Archives: Bureaucracy
Encounters of Violence and Care: Central American Transit Migration through Mexico
A polarized emphasis on origin and destination in international migration studies has left the process of transit itself relatively under-theorized. Taking transit as a site of inquiry moves us as migration scholars beyond the binaries of push/pull factors and origin/destination countries. As medical anthropologists, we are interested in the analytical implications of studying zones of transit for the way we …
Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge and Kafka’s The Demon of Writing
Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
Duke University Press, 2012, 224 pages
The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork
Zone Books, 2012, 208 pages
by Ben Kafka
Ben Kafka and Lisa Gitelman, colleagues at New York University, have both written books about the intricate nature of paper as a medium. While …