The heated public debate about poverty, inequality, and discrimination that filled the news and social networks after the protests in Baltimore paints a full picture of just how many possible explanations we have for these problems, yet how little we know about how to change them. This month’s Web Roundup provides a very brief look at the discourses and narratives …
Tag Archives: Scientific Research
Book Forum––Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay’s “Intolerant Bodies”
We are happy to present a book forum organized around the release of Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay‘s Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Here, a “short” history should not be mistaken for one that is “thin” – Anderson and Mackay masterfully navigate a terrain populated as much by bodies as ideas. …
Open access, open data, open science…what does “openness” mean in the first place?
Recently, the research community has been flooded with encouragement to make things “open,” meaning: freely and easily accessible, in a variety of ways, and to a great variety of audiences. This impetus to be open has taken the form of debates over “Open Source” software licensing, “Open Access” to the published results of research[i], …
Confusion, Truth, and Bureaucracy: A reply to Fitzgerald and Callard
This article is part of the series: The collaborative turn: interdisciplinarity across the human sciences
Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard have recently offered some advice, a normative orientation even, for those engaging in collaboration:
…“Living well in a collaborative mode is about resisting the urge to sort things out – it is about quelling the desire to be clear, at all times, on who ‘I’ am, and what ‘I’ am doing, and whether or
Book Forum––Introduction, Jeremy Greene’s “Generic”
This article is part of the series: Book forum
Welcome to our inaugural “Book Forum.” Our aim is simple: to promote lively exchange between a group of scholars and an author, allowing for experimental and inventive engagements that are not so much about evaluation but rather draw on concepts and shared commitments. It’s probably worth noting that Somatosphere will continue to feature book reviews, which have been a mainstay …
Ilana Lӧwy’s Preventive Strikes
Preventive Strikes
Women, Precancer, and prophylactic Surgery
by Ilana Löwy
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 344 pages
In April 2014, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association identified a disturbing correlation between cancer screening and “overtreatment.” Mammography, it turns out, may result in some women enduring grueling therapies that they do not even need. In fact, some …