…“… a deadly pestilence is in our town, strikes us and spares not, and the house of Cadmus is emptied of its people while Black Death grows rich in groaning and lamentation… Raise up our city, save it and raise it up… If you rule this land… better to rule it full of people than empty. For neither tower nor
These comments were originally prepared for the “COVID-19 and Anthropology: Disease, Social Justice, and Well Being” Webinar hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Section on April 20, 2020.
What lessons learned from past epidemics (including HIV/AIDS) could we apply to COVID-19? What lessons are there to be learned from other countries’ responses to COVID-19?
As a cultural …
Like other anthropologists who have woken up mid-career and found the countries where they’ve lived and worked awash in mass deaths (and let’s be real… that’s quite a lot of us), my initial response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was to hope that the experts had the situation under control, and bury my head in the sand.
Soon, …
Referencing a much-discussed essay in The Nation about the chronic underemployment of PhDs and the shrinking segment of the academic job-pool that represents tenure-track positions, Daniel Lende recently argued that one important solution is to consider ways in which PhDs from the social sciences can engage in intellectually rewarding work that is not necessarily in the academy.
And just to …