Image 1: Hélène’s home office.The pandemic has revealed the fragility of our lives and the vulnerability of our bodies. It has also revealed the importance of fleshy connections that drive our energy, and our fundamental dependence on others, humans and non-humans, without which we couldn’t survive. Hélène Mialet has been exploring such themes in her work, most notably in …
Is long Covid disseminated by newspapers?
On April 14th, 2021, the British journalist and writer George Monbiot published an article entitled “Apparently just by talking about it, I’m super-spreading long Covid.” (Monbiot, 2021). Monbiot had learned that during a recent public presentation Michael Sharpe, professor of psychology at Oxford University and founder of a clinic specialized in the …
When a person with dementia moves into a nursing home, he/she is not only physically transferred from one location to another; the relocation also involves a reconfiguration of everyday and intimate relationships of care. Whereas everyday life before the placement is primarily shared between persons with dementia and family members (1), care professionals and other residents now become the ones …
“I will never return to that Zone of Death! You too should try to follow this diet to nurture life.” Aunt Minh[i](Fieldwork notes, February 2018)
We first met Aunt Minh and Aunt Khai a few days after the Vietnamese Lunar New Year in early 2018 during our first field research trip to “Xóm sống vui” (“Happy life village”) …
Every two years, a letter from the Gastroenterology unit drops into Maria’s mailbox. It is a call to attend her regular surveillance colonoscopy to check for potential precancerous polyps which are very likely to grow in Maria’s colon. Maria has Lynch Syndrome, an inherited genetic mutation in one of the mismatch repair genes (MLH1, MSH2, MSH6 and PMS2) that significantly …
On a cold January afternoon in 2018, 18-year-old Sara locates me in the crowd at the train station. Together we take the bus to her home in a small village in rural Denmark. Sara tells me that she is excited to be training for her driver’s license. However, she is worried that her application for the license will be scrutinized …