“Should all deaf children learn sign language?” This seemingly innocuous question was the theme of a roundtable article published in the influential journal Pediatrics in 2015, which compiled responses from a range of stakeholders, including otolaryngologists, linguists, educators, and parents of deaf children. Understandably, this broad diversity also delivered a range of responses: while educator Nancy Mellon and surgeon John …
Tag Archives: Communication
Re-enacting memories
One way to ‘think with dementia’ is to phenomenologically shift from ‘memory’ to ‘remembering’ and to mine ‘remembering’ for its qualities and potentialities as socio-culturally limned experience. Whereas ‘memory’ invokes static mappings of representation and world, ‘remembering’ is temporally emergent. Whereas ‘memory’ invokes individual capacities, ‘remembering’ is a situated, genre-ed activity that invites co-participation. ‘Remembering’ exudes qualities of performance, not …
Breaking news! Big Shift in Biomediatization from “Swine Flu” to H3N2 to the Trump Administration’s Attack on Breastfeeding
The H3N2 epidemic didn’t really take off until early January 2018—at least as far as US media coverage is concerned. A crucial marker was the New York Times‘ publication of an op-ed by a prominent germ cold warrior, Michael Osterholm, along with Mark Olshaker, co-author of Deadliest Enemy: Our War against Killer Germs. Osterholm, extensively profiled by Andrew …
Digital Food Activism – a book review
Tanja Schneider, Karin Eli, Catherine Dolan and Stanley Ulijaszek (eds.)
Routledge Series in Critical Food Studies, 2018, 234 pages
A Swiss academic scans the barcode on her plastic water bottle. The bottle touts itself as ‘Swiss mountain water’, but the app that decodes the barcode quickly dispels that image: the company is a subsidiary of …
Texting Like A State: mHealth and the first thousand days in South Africa
This article is part of the series: The First Thousand Days of Life
What does making a new life look like from the perspective of a mobile phone?
For the phone of a woman using the public health care system in Cape Town, South Africa, in all likelihood involves a series of WhatsApp conversations with a partner, with friends and kin. The phone helps with “Googling” questions about health and childcare, maybe about …
Beyond “Banned Words”: The CDC, Trump’s Anti-Science, and Anthropological Outrage
This article is part of the series: Language, public health, and #CDC7words
I am delighted that anthropologists joined the debate unleashed by a story published in the Washington Post on 15 December 2017, in which health reporter Lena Sun and politics correspondent Juliet Eilperin suggested that “The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases … in official documents …