Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of testimony, as well as auto-ethnography, Han seeks to write from a child’s perspective, both as the daughter of parents displaced by the war and who migrate to the United States, as well …
“Should all deaf children learn sign language?” This seemingly innocuous question was the theme of a roundtable article published in the influential journal Pediatrics in 2015, which compiled responses from a range of stakeholders, including otolaryngologists, linguists, educators, and parents of deaf children. Understandably, this broad diversity also delivered a range of responses: while educator Nancy Mellon and surgeon John …
I have never lost my childhood habit of beachcombing for special rocks and shells, and I think of ethnography as involving a similar process of collecting bits of evidence. Mostly what I collect are words (interviews, quotations, or notes) that I then use to make various kinds of word compositions (descriptions, analyses, arguments, and articles). But words do also have …
I am a cultural anthropologist who conducts research with deaf children and their families in Mexico City. Echarle ganas is a Mexican colloquial expression that roughly translates to “you have to give it your all.” “Échale ganas!” or “work at it!” is often heard as a rallying cry when things are not going as desired. This saying is …
In this response we address how the recent language controversy surrounding the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must be considered as part of a broader politicisation of public health services used by women and minority groups in the US context, which has international implications given the influential position of the CDC in global health governance. Our individual areas …
Editor’s note: As part of our new series, Second Opinion (not to be confused with the SMA’s similarly titled newsletter) we ask two contributors to review the same book, respond to the same question, or comment on the same set of issues. For our first pair of Second Opinion posts, we invited two reviews of Eduardo Kohn’s new book, How …