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 …

Lectures

June 23, 2020

Ayurveda, Preconception, Biological Plasticity, and the Re-conception of a Nation

By Natasha L. Rooney

Sitting in my home office in Melbourne, I attended the first ever online international conference on Ayurveda and Epigenetics. My PhD project, which began a few months ago, addresses the circulation of epigenetic and postgenomic models of life in India. An international conference on the factors ‘that bring about epigenetic changes and the tools available through Ayurveda to restore …

Lectures

May 26, 2020

What Type of Governmentality is This? Or, how do we govern unknowns

By Robert D. Smith

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

In Le Temps, a French newspaper, anthropologist Julie Billaud wrote that the governance of COVID-19 represents “a move towards a biopolitical mode of governance that aims to manage human collectives through statistics, indicators, and other measurement tools.”[i] Others are less convinced. Social theorist Joshua Clover has written in Critical Inquiry, a French online journal,that COVID-19 represents not …

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: statecraft

Ayurveda, Preconception, Biological Plasticity, and the Re-conception of a Nation

What Type of Governmentality is This? Or, how do we govern unknowns