The March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami caused the deaths of approximately 16,000 persons, left more than 6,000 injured and 2,713 missing, destroyed or partially damaged nearly one million buildings, and produced at least $14.5 billion in damages. The earthquake also caused a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s eastern coast. After reading the …
Tag Archives: Risk
Book review: Anne Pollock’s Medicating Race
Medicating Race:Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference
by Anne Pollock
Duke University Press, 2012
280 pp, US$23.95 paperback
Anne Pollock’s new book, Medicating Race, is a meditation on the history and present state of racialized (specifically African American) forms of heart disease. As a history it is particularly interesting, documenting the emergence of the concept of ‘risk …
HIV testing, neoliberal governance, and the new moral regime of gay health in Taiwan
This article is part of the series: Infected Affects, Transcriptions Series
Recent developments in global AIDS governance have focused on the need to tackle HIV/AIDS-related stigma, which is regarded as subjecting PLHA to social exclusion and hampering overall prevention efforts. Endorsed by UNAIDS and disseminated by the transnational network of NGOs, de-stigmatisation strategies, either through policy or activism, have come to mark a key aspect of the current glocal response to …
Web Round Up
An estimated 400,000 women around the world are living with breast implants manufactured by the now defunct company Poly Implant Prosthese (PIP) using industrial grade silicone not approved for medical use. The scandal has raised concerns about the regulation of medical devices in Europe and provoked debate about neoliberal approaches to the body. Anthropologyworks points out that establishing who is …
Monthly Web Round-up
CULTURE AND NATURE
It is important to consider the role that societal and institutional factors play in the relationship between ‘natural’ disasters and the causes of social suffering. It is too simple to call natural disasters ‘natural’, as they happen in a particular social and cultural context. When attempting to understand how and why natural disasters can cause social suffering, …
Chernobyl Forever
This post was contributed by Sarah D. Phillips (Indiana University, Bloomington)
For a time, it seemed as if the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster might come and go relatively unnoticed and unremarked, at least by those persons with no direct experience of it. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl (Chornobyl’ in Ukrainian) came to be seen as a …