Book Forum: Tomas Matza’s <em> Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia

Eugene Raikhel

Author: Eugene Raikhel

Books Features

Book Forum: Tomas Matza’s Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia

Post author Eugene Raikhel
Post date May 9, 2019

This article is part of the following series: Book forum

In Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (Duke University Press, 2018), Tomas Matza traces the landscape of “psy” disciplines, practices, and institutions across postsocialist Saint Petersburg. Writing with a distinctive conceptual subtlety and care, Matza pushes beyond a range of well-established interpretations to examine the multiple ways in which psychotherapy has provided tools for people to understand …

Tags Biopower/biopolitics, Care/caregiving, Neoliberalism, Postsocialism, Precarity, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Russia, Subjectivity

Announcements

Announcement: new Managing Editor and members of Editorial Collaborative!

Post author Eugene Raikhel
Post date March 18, 2019

There are a few exciting additions to the Somatosphere masthead that I’d like to announce. (Please note that we are working to fix up the masthead itself, and that a version with proper bios will return shortly!)

One important piece of news if that the site finally has a Managing Editor again. Talia Gordon, who has been contributing to …

Features

Respect, care, and labor in collaborative scholarly projects

Post author Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, Dominique P. Béhague, Adia Benton, Betsey Brada, Thomas Cousins, Des Fitzgerald, Michele Friedner, Frédéric Keck, Janina Kehr, Ann H. Kelly, Javier Lezaun, Tomas Matza, Ken MacLeish, Todd Meyers, Gergely Mohácsi, Cristian R. Montenegro, Neely Myers, Eugene Raikhel, Emilia Sanabria, Aaron Seaman, Lily Shapiro, Harris Solomon, Noah Tamarkin, Janelle Taylor, Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Emily Yates-Doerr
Post date July 2, 2018

As members of Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, we have been following the unfolding crisis surrounding Hau with profound concern (Agro 2018, Flaherty 2018). As others have noted, this crisis has revealed multiple structural issues that deserve intense engagement beyond the specifics of the individual case: open-access (OA), digital scholarship and publication, yes, but also academic power, precarity, and vulnerability; …

Tags Collaboration, Decolonial anthropology, Labor, Open access, Precarity, Publishing

Announcements

Welcoming our new Editorial Collaborative members!

Post author Eugene Raikhel
Post date March 28, 2018

I’m very pleased to announce that we are welcoming a group of new members to Somatosphere‘s Editorial Collaborative. Below is a list of their names and affiliations, but please see the masthead for more detailed bios.

Nayantara Sheoran Appleton is a lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Adia Benton is an Assistant Professor of …

Books Features

Book forum — Alondra Nelson’s The Social Life of DNA

Post author Eugene Raikhel
Post date January 24, 2018

This article is part of the following series: Book forum

In The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome, Alondra Nelson traces the multiple ways in which genetic testing and related technologies have become entangled in contemporary debates, projects, politics, and interventions surrounding race in the United States. This wide-ranging and incisive book manages the difficult task of being a key addition to the scholarly …

Tags Genetics/Genomics, History, Race, United States

Features

Somatosphere in 2017

Post author Eugene Raikhel
Post date January 4, 2018

As 2018 begins we pause to briefly look back at the posts that appeared in the past year on Somatosphere. Last year we were happy to publish a number of excellent series, including “Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond,” edited by Gabrielle Hecht and Pamila Gupta, “Critical Histories, Activist Futures,” edited …