Lectures

January 31, 2022

Viral Waste, or Covid Down the Toilet: Post-Colonic Pandemic Biopolitics

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

Within days of discovering SARS-CoV-2, laboratory scientists and epidemiologists were speculating on whether the virus might take fecal passage, and thereby spread through contamination with bodily waste. But the fecal-oral route of transmission quickly proved a dead end, an etiological cul-de-sac. The pressure to inquire into shit, however, is always difficult to resist. Before long, experts in wastewater …

Lectures

April 19, 2020

Flipping the Script of the Disaster Flick

By Elizabeth Durham

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

For Cameroonians faced with the realities and stereotypes of their country’s armed conflict, watching COVID-19 hit New York City before Yaoundé is cinematic catharsis.

The WhatsApp messages started to arrive in March:

Hey, how are you coping with Covid-19 crisis?

How are you there Elizabeth???

Hallooo Elizabeth, please be careful there, I heard some news about corona virus in …

Books Features

May 2, 2019

Book Forum: Crystal (Cal) Biruk’s Cooking Data, Ramah McKay’s Medicine in the Meantime, and Noémi Tousignant’s Edges of Exposure

By Marlee Tichenor, Marissa Mika and Damien Droney

This article is part of the series: Book forum

In this book forum, we review three ethnographies of critical global health – Crystal (Cal) Biruk’s Cooking Data, Ramah McKay’s Medicine in the Meantime, and Noémi Tousignant’s Edges of Exposure – and ask the authors to reflect on the nature of labor, the public-private, and race in critical global health, as well as the future of the field. …

Books Features

April 18, 2019

Book Forum: Saida Hodžić’s The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life After NGOs

By Erin V. Moore

This article is part of the series: Book forum

Saida Hodžić’s The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs (University of California Press, 2017) illuminates the myriad state and non-state actors collaborating on campaigns against “Female Genital Mutilation” (FGM) in Ghana, where genital cutting was already on the decline. From a uniquely multi-scalar perspective, Hodžić reveals how cutting emerged as a problem to be shared by African …

Features

March 25, 2019

Lateral Solidarity

By Raphaëlle Rabanes

This article is part of the series: Disability from the South: Toward a Lexicon

It was the afternoon of December 31st. Dinner had been served in the bedrooms of the rehabilitation clinic, but Ms. Dats decided that hers could wait: She had been in Guadeloupe for a month already, but hadn’t sat outside much. That night, she’d rather watch the sky and chat for a bit. At home, she used an electric wheelchair and …

Features

October 8, 2018

Exploring anthropologies of medicine and health across borders at 4S 2018

By Aadita Chaudhury

This year’s annual meeting for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) had an intriguing new component: an exhibition on the histories of STS in flux internationally, befitting the theme of transnational STS around which the conference was developed. The exhibition represents the various turns and epistemological orientations towards the critical studies of science and technology in locations decidedly …

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: Postcolonial