This book forum brings together seven scholars to discuss Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke 2019), a story of what grows alongside “growth” and the price of “a good life.” Botswana offers lessons that are peopled and elemental; lessons that tug between the local and the global. Livingston shows how water, food, transportation…
Amidst almost unstoppable contagion, many have hung their hopes on heat and humidity as a potential defence against contracting Covid-19. In the early months of the pandemic studies of SARS-CoV-2 suggested that the virus is transmitted less efficiently in higher temperatures or at higher rates of humidity, leading to encouraging newspaper headlines around the world, from London to Jakarta. …
As I was thinking about the task of reviewing the anthropological, bioethical, and/or STS implications of the past month of news, my mind kept returning to the introduction of Laura Briggs’ recent book How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. In Briggs’ introduction, she finds “reproductive labor” is necessary to both biological reproduction …