The Fukushima nuclear disaster took place nine years ago, but the current situation does not allow us to put it behind us completely. The site is producing up to 750 tons of contaminated water every day, pressuring the capacity of the holding tanks. The decommissioning of the plants is still ongoing and is expected to take decades to complete (…
Tag Archives: Neoliberalism
Book Forum: Tomas Matza’s Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia
This article is part of the series: Book forum
In Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (Duke University Press, 2018), Tomas Matza traces the landscape of “psy” disciplines, practices, and institutions across postsocialist Saint Petersburg. Writing with a distinctive conceptual subtlety and care, Matza pushes beyond a range of well-established interpretations to examine the multiple ways in which psychotherapy has provided tools for people to understand …
Melinda Cooper’s Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
MIT Press, 2017, 416 pages.
Neoliberal policy in the United States sometimes seems internally contradictory. Why oppose the estate tax if you support a meritocracy based on how the market values individuals? Why oppose universal health coverage or public education if you want everyone to have an equal …
The De-socializing of Jim Kim?
The 12th president of the World Bank Group, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, is arguably the most powerful anthropologist in the world. As the co-founder of the groundbreaking NGO Partners In Health, the former president of Dartmouth College, the former head of the World Health Organization’s 3 by 5 Initiative, and longtime champion of “the science of …
Michele Friedner’s “Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India”
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
Rutgers University Press, 2015, 216 pages
An Indian coffee shop franchise advertises their practice of hiring deaf baristas – “silent brewmasters” – to work their espresso machines. A Bangalore tech company boasts that it hires “physically challenged” workers only (118-121). Meanwhile, deaf adults in Bangalore complain that adult education at …
William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things
The Fragility of Things: Self-organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism
Duke University Press, 2013, 256 pages.
In The Fragility of Things: Self-organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (2013), political theorist William Connolly delivers us into a chaotic world: “a world of becoming in which multiple force fields set on different tiers of chronotime …