On the morning of 23rd February 2021, I boarded a bus from my home in northern Taiwan to a nearby military training center. There I joined another four hundred draftees for our compulsory military service in the Republic of China (ROC) Armed Forces – or simply Guojun (“national army”). Along with the other draftees, I was first given a …
Tag Archives: Military
‘Silicon health’ for Africa: Understanding the rise and impact of drone logistics
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, are on the rise. During the ongoing corona crisis their potential to either monitor curfews or to provide contactless deliveries is increasingly featured in various media outlets and discussed in policy circles.[1] A focus on health-related issues harkens back to earlier attempts to render drones – a military technology – productive …
Enlisted Laborers of Public Health: overlaps in the work of soldiers in historical perspective
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
In April, a friend relayed her experience of getting a test for COVID-19 at a drive-through site at a university in Rhode Island, describing “dozens of camouflaged National Guard soldiers directing grim-faced drivers.” After more than 12 days of persistent fever and two conversations with her doctor, she reported as instructed, alone in her car, and held her ID up …
Zoë Wool’s “After War: The Weight of Life At Walter Reed”
After War: The Weight of Life At Walter Reed
by Zoë Wool
Duke University Press, 2015, 264 pages.
In After War: The Weight of Life At Walter Reed, Zoë Wool shares her experience working with some of the most grievously wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During a year of research from 2007-2008, Wool conducted fieldwork …
Michal Shapira’s The War Inside
The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain
2013, Cambridge University Press, 284 pages
Between September 1940 and May 1941, the Luftwaffe dropped nearly 50,000 tons of bombs over Britain. In 1940, at the height of these air raids during World War II, the celebrated British poet Edith …
Top of the heap: Ken MacLeish
This article is part of the series: Top of the heap
In today’s “Top of the heap,” Ken MacLeish, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, takes us into the world of war (and post-war) memoir, fiction and ethnography, also introducing us to some conceptual texts he’s been thinking with.
Ken MacLeish
Danny Hoffman, The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia…