One tweet asks for help finding a hospital bed in Delhi, India’s capital. Another asks where to find oxygen. These tweets joined a sea of similar pleas for assistance over social media amidst India’s second-wave surge of COVID-19 in the spring of 2021, which led to oxygen and hospital bed shortages across the country. People tweeted asking for help for …
Tag Archives: social media
Handling Contested Truths in Times of Crises: Ghana’s COVID-19 Experience
This article is part of the series: Contested Truths
As the pandemic ravages the rest of the world, the casualty rate in Africa remains a mystery to those who predicted doom for the continent. Given African countries’ past experiences with infectious diseases, public health officials at the United Nations, aid agencies, media, and some experts predicted that the continent would be the most vulnerable and susceptible …
Cues for Ethnography in Pandamning Times: Thinking with Digital Sociality in the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Covid-19 has made the world strange. For many, efforts to stall the pandemic have initiated an unprecedented enclosure of our lives within the familiar walls of our homes, while simultaneously increasing our reliance on digital media to maintain personal and professional connections. This reordering of social worlds and blurring of boundaries between our public lives and private spaces raises a …
Digital Food Activism – a book review
Digital Food ActivismTanja Schneider, Karin Eli, Catherine Dolan and Stanley Ulijaszek (eds.)
Routledge Series in Critical Food Studies, 2018, 234 pages
A Swiss academic scans the barcode on her plastic water bottle. The bottle touts itself as ‘Swiss mountain water’, but the app that decodes the barcode quickly dispels that image: the company is a subsidiary of …
Things Which Have Once Been Conjoined: Science Fiction, Contagion, and Magic in the Age of Social Media
This article is part of the series: Speculative Health
There are many interesting formations that might be called networked phenomena. Homophily and the tendency towards triad closure. Scott Feld’s Rule (I’m more likely to make friends with someone who has more friends than me). Small world phenomena (those 6 degrees of separation). “The Strength of Weak Ties” (reportedly the most cited sociology paper in history). In all, a series …
Web Roundup: Public Health
I assume everyone is, like me, tired of (and stressed out about) the US election, so let’s take a break from that to take a quick look around at some interesting recent public health stories.
According to data released last month by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the maternal mortality rate in the …