Lectures

March 25, 2022

“Nothing About Us Without Us!” Really?: The Unequal Value of Lives in Harm Reduction NGOs

By Catherine Larocque, Thomas Foth and Wendy Gifford

This article is part of the series: Reducing Harm Responsibly

Canada, like most capitalist societies of the global North, faces “an unprecedented and devastating wave of overdoses” and overdose deaths (Wells, 2017), intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic (Government of Canada, 2021). In the summer of 2017, activists including people who use drugs (PWUD), allies, and nurses in Ottawa responded to this wave of overdoses by establishing the city’s first unsanctioned …

Books

May 21, 2019

The limits of medical heroism: reflections on Getting to Zero

By Alice Street

Getting to Zero: A Doctor and a Diplomat on the Ebola Frontline

By Sinead Walsh and Oliver Johnson

Zed Books, 2018. 352 pages.

It is midnight and my five-month-old son, who has been sick with diarrhea for two days, is finally breathing evenly beside me. I should be sleeping. Instead, I am fretting, turning over the intimate logics of medical responses to …

Books

September 19, 2018

Ramah McKay’s Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique

By Britt Halvorson

Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique

Ramah McKay

Duke University Press, 2018, 256 pages

The study of medical humanitarianism has grown tremendously in the last decade. Notable work has analyzed the debated ethical practice of Médecins sans Frontières (Redfield 2013), state uses of illness diagnosis as a pathway to citizenship (Ticktin 2010) and the way …

Features

August 13, 2016

Humanitarianism in the Anthropocene

By Sverre Molland and Darryl Stellmach

The decade has been conceptually rich for anthropologists. From multi-species ethnography to the practice of care, the past several years have seen a flourish of analytical concepts and theoretical preoccupations. Two key developments among these emergent and often-interlinked topics are anthropology’s focus on international humanitarianism and the Anthropocene. To date these two important research streams have not been linked. This …

Books Features

September 25, 2015

Book Forum — Richard Keller’s Fatal Isolation

By Todd Meyers

This article is part of the series: Book forum

Richard Keller’s Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 is a careful accounting of the toll the heat wave took on those most vulnerable in the neighborhoods surrounding Paris. The book is about the shape of vulnerability and its amplification over time — in fact, Fatal Isolation requires us to pause on the ideas of risk, vulnerability, …

Announcements

August 18, 2015

Limn issue no. 5: Ebola’s Ecologies

By Todd Meyers

This article is part of the series: Ebola fieldnotes

We’d like to help spread the word about the recent issue of Limn, edited by Andrew Lakoff, Stephen J. Collier and Christopher Kelty, now in print.

From the editors:

“This issue of Limn on “Ebola’s Ecologies” examines how the 2014 Ebola outbreak has put the norms, practices, and institutional logics of global health into question, and examines the new assemblages …

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: Humanitarianism