When Robert Lemelson, an anthropologist, filmmaker, and research professor at UCLA, recently visited the George Washington University to speak at a conference on how ethnographic films can help us understand torture, I had to request an interview. I confess—I have long been a fan of Lemelson’s films, which I have seen screened at meetings as large as those …
Tag Archives: Global health
Web Roundup: Technology and storytelling
Inspired by last month’s post, I decided to format this post loosely around the theme of storytelling. Storytelling is fundamental to many of our lives, both academic and otherwise, and numerous new formats for telling, collecting, and archiving stories are cropping up. This post focuses on the ways in which technology is shaping and changing the kinds of stories we …
Kin Porn
This article is part of the series: The archaeology of past futures, or fieldwork by fragments
Drive by the building. Roll down the window. Look in the opposite direction. Chat with the driver. Shoot. Several times. Keep looking elsewhere. Hide the camera under your legs. Close the window.
I took this picture of the Institut d’Enseignement Médical (IEM, Institute of Medical Education) in December 2007 in Kasa-Vubu, Kinshasa. The IEM was designed in the late fifties …
The archaeology of past futures, or fieldwork by fragments
This article is part of the series: The archaeology of past futures, or fieldwork by fragments
This series is an exercise in fieldwork through material fragments – of coming to grips with the present pasts of scientific institutions in the ‘tropics’. It is about what biomedicine leaves behind – rusted instruments, congealed and unlabeled bloods slides – and the losses, pleasures, failures, and desires these leftovers relay. It is about photographs, blueprints, monuments and archives – …
Global mental health videos
McGill University’s Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, which hosted a conference this summer on global mental health, has started a blog and posted several video interviews with participants from the conference. These are excellent short summaries of particular issues or positions around global mental health, which could very readily be used in a teaching context. In the …
Laurence Kirmayer, “Revisioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience, and Global Mental Health”
In late October my department (Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago) hosted a talk by Laurence Kirmayer of McGill University. I’m pleased to present the full video of the lecture here. The talk, titled “Revisioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience, and Global Mental Health,” is a broad and synthetic overview of Dr. Kirmayer’s thinking on psychiatry and mental …