“As Americans, we grieve…”[1]
Mass shootings in contemporary American society have emerged as events of profound political and cultural symbolism; indeed, the news media has often attributed to them the label of “crisis.”[2] They have a singular status in the modern American collective consciousness, one not occupied by other forms of violence. Mass shootings have attained this status, …
Duke University Press, 2015, 328 pages
addicted.pregnant.poor is the sort of ethnography you start reading and don’t put down again until it’s finished. From its opening pages—where Knight recounts the story of trying to get into the hotel room of Ramona, her extremely high, heavily pregnant and possibly comatose informant—to the last, this is a …
Richard Keller’s Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 is a careful accounting of the toll the heat wave took on those most vulnerable in the neighborhoods surrounding Paris. The book is about the shape of vulnerability and its amplification over time — in fact, Fatal Isolation requires us to pause on the ideas of risk, vulnerability, …
What role should mental health care professionals play in helping heal psychical wounds exposed in the aftermath of Ferguson and New York?
This question lies at the heart of calls that emerged from within psychiatry, psychology, social work, and other mental health professions over the weeks since grand jury deliberations ended, and protests began, in cities across the country. Professional …
From rape as a tool of terror in situations of war and armed-conflict, to the largely unchecked epidemic of sexual assault on and off college campuses, “rape” finds its way into our collective political and social (and popular and legal and cultural and aesthetic) consciousness. In a study that is exhaustive, intimate, and exacting, Sameena Mulla’s The Violence of Care: …
Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied
Stanford University Press, 2013; 328 pages.
Scholars of social and cultural memory in the post-Soviet space are well aware of the Memory at War project—the international collaborative effort to understand battles over memory as they were waged in postsocialist Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. …
