Preventing Dementia? Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age
Edited by Annette Leibing and Silke Schicktanz
Berghahn Books, 2020. 268 pages
In their recently published edited volume, medical anthropologist Annette Leibing and bioethicist and STS scholar Silke Schicktanz set their focus on the “new dementia” and on related and novel approaches to dementia prevention. While the …
One of the most significant challenges to confronting and mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic concerns the manufacturing, circulation, and interpretation of what we call “contested truths.” By this term, we mean the many and varied ways in which official, institutional, and/or scientific facts and recommendations about COVID-19 are challenged, ignored, or subverted at multiple scales, from the individual to the state. …
We are an ensemble cast. As such, it is perhaps appropriate that one of the first places where we all came together as a team had at one point been a set for a Canadian television show. Now the buildings are owned by the First Nations, an Anishinaabek community, with whom we were partnered. We came together through a series …
How and with what consequences do young people push up against standardized views of “normal” and “healthy” development? To what extent can young people’s attempts to disrupt developmental norms be understood as political acts? I became intrigued by these questions while conducting long-term ethnographic research with a subset of young participants in the 1982 birth cohort study in Pelotas, Southern …
Tests for Covid-19 and the politics of big numbers
We are incessantly flooded with data on the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic. WHO and the Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource provide information on the daily number of Covid-19 cases and deaths worldwide, while national media supply details on the dynamics of the pandemic in each state, region and city. These data …
The McGill Group for Suicide Studies (MGSS) has garnered significant attention for its epigenetic models of suicide risk. These models suggest that early life adversity may set people on pathways of neurobiological vulnerability and, ultimately, suicide risk, which are correlated with distinctive epigenetic traits. While the core of this epigenetic and neuroscientific research is carried out on the donated brains …