Across the United States, legislators continue to devise new ways to target parents who use drugs through a variety of state systems. In the past twenty years, the number of states penalizing substance use during pregnancy has doubled. Ostensibly a response to rising rates of opioid-related overdose deaths, such state laws almost universally endanger those already at greatest risk. …
Tag Archives: Collaboration
Writing Life No. 9: An interview with Danya Fast
It is 11 am in Vancouver. Danya sits at a desk beside a large window that looks out onto tree tops and electrical wires. Rain pools in the gutters and on sidewalks, and everything is shades of grey and green. In Winnipeg, it is 1 pm. Rob is behind his laptop and surrounded by stacks of papers and books. He …
Emergent Anthropology: Reimagining U.S. Medical Anthropology in Theory and Practice
The American Anthropological Association website identifies four subfields of anthropology (archaeology, biological, cultural, linguistic) and reserves a separate section for “applied and practicing anthropology.” In our collective experience, we have found this division between ostensibly “academic” and “applied” anthropology problematic, as it limits the possibilities of a broadly conceptualized and enacted medical anthropology that is more continuous than categorical. We …
Writing Life No. 3: An interview with Janelle Taylor

The conversation began on a summer day in a 13th Century chateau, with a moat, on the outskirts of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Janelle Taylor was leading a writing workshop with Jeremy Greene and Rachel Prentice, as part of a larger event for the ERC-funded project Making Clinical …
Respect, care, and labor in collaborative scholarly projects
As members of Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, we have been following the unfolding crisis surrounding Hau with profound concern (Agro 2018, Flaherty 2018). As others have noted, this crisis has revealed multiple structural issues that deserve intense engagement beyond the specifics of the individual case: open-access (OA), digital scholarship and publication, yes, but also academic power, precarity, and vulnerability; …
Book review: Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
Paul Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, and Noémi Tousignant, editors
Intellect Ltd./University of Chicago Press, 2016, 256 pages, 500 color plates
The first reaction to an encounter with Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa is likely to be …