Lectures

April 14, 2021

“Escaping from Quarantine” from Quarantined: My Ordeal in Uganda’s Covid-19 Isolation Centers

This article is part of the series: Contested Truths

Few published works of creative non-fiction exist on COVID-19 in Africa. With the publication of QUARANTINED, Ugandan intellectual and philosopher, Jimmy Spire Ssentongo has painted a behind-the-scenes picture of how the Ugandan state handled the coronavirus disease. While the Ugandan president praised self and staff for putting the coronavirus in check through the state’s isolation centres, the people under …

Lectures

October 5, 2020

Staying (at Home) with Brain Fog: “Un-witting” Patient Activism

By Emily Lim Rogers

This article is part of the series: Reworking the Cognitive Bias

Scene 1: It’s Sunday afternoon, around one o’clock, and a group of a dozen or so people log onto a video call from their apartments. Occasionally someone’s cat will walk into the frame, obscuring the camera, or a deliveryman will ring the buzzer, interrupting the flow of conversation. But mostly, what we see of each other are scenes of domestic …

Lectures

August 4, 2020

Sanitary cordons in COVID-19: experience and the object of epidemiological interventions

By Alejandro Cerón

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

What is the object of epidemiological interventions during an epidemic? Is it the virus, the disease, the fear, the chaos, or the threat to security? And what is the objective of those interventions? Is it to eliminate the virus, to mitigate the effects of the disease, to calm the fear, to control the chaos, or to defeat the threat?

On …

Lectures

April 24, 2020

Lockdowns save, lockdowns kill: Valuing life after coronashock

By Stefan Ecks

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

The scale and severity of the coronavirus pandemic is a shock to health systems. It is a shock to economies and governments. It is also a shock to the life sciences, which were meant to anticipate a pandemic of this magnitude, but failed to do so. The “life sciences” in question are virology, epidemiology, biomedicine and pharmacology. But the social, …

Lectures

March 16, 2020

Reflecting on SARS, 17 years and two flu-like epidemics later

By Katherine A. Mason

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

On April 12, 2003, I was evacuated from my post teaching English at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, China. I packed my belongings into two suitcases and a duffle bag, got on a bus, crossed the border into Hong Kong, and flew, with my N95 mask on, back to the United States. It was the height of China’s outbreak of SARS, …

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: quarantine

“Escaping from Quarantine” from Quarantined: My Ordeal in Uganda’s Covid-19 Isolation Centers

Staying (at Home) with Brain Fog: “Un-witting” Patient Activism

Sanitary cordons in COVID-19: experience and the object of epidemiological interventions

Lockdowns save, lockdowns kill: Valuing life after coronashock

Reflecting on SARS, 17 years and two flu-like epidemics later