The anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo approaches ethnography as not just the depiction of a world but as what addresses and displaces both the writer and the reader, where ethnography itself becomes a site of transformation. Our conversations since 2014, first as she was completing revisions on her book Knot of the Soul and then as I was writing my dissertation, and …
Yesenia was born with congenital heart disease in 2000, a time in Honduras when heart defects meant certain, if not sudden, death for most children. Owing to surgical advances dating back to the 1950s, most children in more resourced countries could by then be diagnosed and treated in a timely manner, significantly improving their chances of long-term survival. In Honduras, …
The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pages.
Jasbir Puar’s second book, The Right to Maim, examines the relationship between life, debility, and death. On a spectrum between life and death, according to Puar, there is the production of the “living dead, death worlds, necropolitics, slow death, and life itself”—this is …
Bill Cosby is in prison, and Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer have been fired. Donald Trump is in office despite his own admission that he has grabbed women “by the pussy”. Roy Moore lost his race, but Brett Kavanaugh sits on the SCOTUS despite accusations of sexual assault. Academics have been in the news, too: Avital Ronell, Marcus Anthony, Ric …
The following is taken from the forthcoming book, The Police Against Itself: Reassembling French Liberalism “After the Social,” an ethnography of French police administrative reform, the vicissitudes of public life, and the ethical tensions which animate both, especially around questions of violence. This section, an interlude entitled “Time, Regained,” offers a rumination on a particular tapestry of violence and belonging …
Greenwoods is a neighbourhood in Nairobi, Kenya, dotted with diplomatic residences. At the time of my research on public-private assemblages of security provision and the reconfiguration of citizenship in Nairobi, Greenwoods’ residents association was sponsoring a security partnership between the state police and a private security company, Maximum Security.[1] The night patrol team of Maximum Security regularly hosted two …