I met Ahmet, a disabled young man, during a visual ethnography I conducted in Istanbul, Turkey (2009), where I worked with people with disabilities related to rheumatoid arthritis – a chronic, painful disease, affecting the joints. During our interview, I ask Ahmet what type of toilets he prefers, knowing that in Turkey, toilets are typically squat and hardly ever accessible. …
Tag Archives: Performance
Comics and the Medical Encounter
Editor’s Note: In March of 2013 the Annals of Internal Medicine added the Graphic Medicine series as part of their medical humanities features. As they describe, “Annals Graphic Medicine brings together original graphic narratives, comics, animation/feature, and other creative forms by those who provide or receive health care.” Most often the stories are from a physician’s own experiences and …
No Judgments: Fieldwork on the Spectrum
Spectrum:a broad range of varied but related ideas or objects, the individual features of which tend to overlap so as to form a continuous series or sequence. (Dictionary.com)
The presence of disability in American public culture is at once increasingly visible and yet still segregated and rendered invisible. In our multi-sited ethnographic research on Disability, Personhood, and “the New Normal” …
Script
On January 17th 2014, Catherine Eagles, a federal judge for the Middle District of North Carolina, struck down as unconstitutional a portion of North Carolina’s 2011 Women’s Right to Know Act. The portion in question would have required abortion providers in the state to perform an ultrasound and display and describe the images presented to every woman seeking an …
The Dance – Medicine and the Idea of Movement
I have been conducting research on the experiences of women with mental illness in India in an effort to understand how everyday relationships shape medical practice and enliven the subjectivities clinical life makes possible. Like any ethnographer, I am interested in what people say. Ethnographic methods privilege speech: we seek narrative, memories, and a good interview; we hope to overhear …