This month’s Web Roundup is dedicated to the role that legislation and the courts have in promoting or restricting access to medical care. In particular, I will focus briefly on the passage of anti-abortion legislation in the US and a few recent court cases that are testing the limits pharmaceutical patents. While not overtly theoretical in nature, I have found …
Tag Archives: Genetics/Genomics
Top of the heap: Janelle Taylor and Hannah Landecker
This article is part of the series: Top of the heap
This is the first post in a new series we’re calling “Top of the heap”. Following the lead of Cultural Anthropology (see their “Playlists” feature) and others, we’ve asked scholars whose work we enjoy reading to tell us a little about what they’re reading or planning to read. In this first installment, Janelle Taylor and Hannah Landecker…
Book review: Anne Pollock’s Medicating Race
Medicating Race:Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference
by Anne Pollock
Duke University Press, 2012
280 pp, US$23.95 paperback
Anne Pollock’s new book, Medicating Race, is a meditation on the history and present state of racialized (specifically African American) forms of heart disease. As a history it is particularly interesting, documenting the emergence of the concept of ‘risk …
In the Journals, October 2012 – Part 2
This is the second part to what Lara Braff posted last Thursday (linked here). So without further ado…
Biosocieties has a range of articles this month, revolving around issues of citizenship, biologized or no; medical imaging and technological futures; and discursive positionality in both mass messaging and intimate interactions. In addition, there are a range of reviews of …
Web Roundup October 2012
Today I am testing the waters of the web roundups here at Somatosphere. Feel free to give feedback!
This month’s theme is data, inspired by many tweets I received on ENCODE and big data.
I was intrigued to hear that the American Anthropological Association has started an anthropological data wiki. The collection of datasets already seems pretty impressive, but …
Agency, biogenetic discourse and psychiatric disorder
In recent years, a growing (and pleasingly interdisciplinary) literature has developed around the intersecting themes of neurogenetic ‘explanatory’ narratives, largely pharmaceutically-driven processes of medicalization, stigma and socioclinical identity in the context of psychiatric disorder. In this post I aim to briefly review two of the most immediate and provocative of these publications, and then launch a more free-ranging reflection on …