Lectures

April 2, 2021

From Mink to the Wild: COVID-19 through the Mirror of Sylvatic Plague

By Jules Skotnes-Brown and Christos Lynteris

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

Even as pandemic response is focused on understanding, controlling and preventing COVID-19 among humans, a ghost haunts epidemiological concerns about the disease: reverse-zoonotic sylvatic Covid. Or, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to spill-back from humans to domestic or farmed animals, and from there to wild-life, where the virus can establish ineradicable disease reservoirs. This scenario is not far-fetched: the case of …

Lectures

April 29, 2020

Silent Spring in Europe calls for a New Social Ecology

By Tanja Bogusz and Frédéric Keck

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

Deserted streets in Rome, empty dance-halls in Berlin, died-out tourist attractions in Barcelona, and a lonely Eiffel-Tower in Paris: Europe is experiencing its first locked-down spring. It marks an experiential as well as a paradoxical break in our everyday lives. On the one hand, Covid-19 has emerged as a brutal, tragic and unquestionable fact within world society. On the other …

Features

March 17, 2016

Making Cases for a Technological Fix: Germany’s Energy Transition and the Green Good Life

By Jennifer Carlson

This is a story of women who invoke another woman’s psychosomatic distress to make a case for the green good life and its possibilities. Hailing from a northern German village transformed by sustainable development projects, the people in this story weigh the promises of the Energiewende, Germany’s “energy turn” from nuclear to renewable energy, through the experience of one woman …

Features

October 27, 2014

Tolerance

By Warwick Anderson

“Tolerance” never made it into Raymond Williams’ Keywords, a rare mistake: it should have been a tempting subject for his critical sensibility.[1] By the late-eighteenth century, the word often had come to substitute in English for the older “toleration,” meaning forbearance, patience, and indulgence of the opinions of others. Later, physiologists took up its connotation of the endurance …

Somatosphere

Science, Medicine, and Anthropology

A collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.

Tag Archives: Ecology

From Mink to the Wild: COVID-19 through the Mirror of Sylvatic Plague

Silent Spring in Europe calls for a New Social Ecology

Making Cases for a Technological Fix: Germany’s Energy Transition and the Green Good Life

Tolerance