Saiba Varma’s The Occupied Clinic begins with an entrance: descending from an auto-rickshaw, she walks in through the Kathi Darwaza gate into old Srinagar, on foot now, passing “imperial debris” on the way to the clinic: the Government Psychiatric Diseases Hospital, Kashmir. Inside the clinic, it’s a busy Saturday, with crowds of patients seeking appointments with the few psychiatrists on …
Scientists have pursued the origins of Covid-19 from the very beginning of the pandemic. In February 2020 the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of China’s top virus laboratories, published research comparing the SARS-Cov-2 virus to a range of other coronaviruses held in their own collection. Based on the phylogenetic comparison of genome sequences, the Wuhan Institute found …
With the world on the verge of a global pandemic, the city of Wuhan, China has become known as the “epicenter” of the coronavirus outbreak. Although often used by journalists for its dramatic effect, the concept of a pandemic epicenter has an important scientific history.
Hong Kong-based virologists Kennedy Shortridge and C.H. Stuart-Harris first adapted the concept of …
Let us consider this process of disenchantment that has been at work in Western culture for thousands of years and, in general, let us consider “progress,” to which science belongs both as an integral part and a driving force. Can we say that it has any meaning over and above its practical and technical implications?
— Max Weber, Science as …
The provocation of Theresa MacPhail’s Viral Network is her concept of Global Public Health as a “superorganism.” MacPhail distances herself from Spencer, Durkheim, and Kroeber’s conceptions of a superorganic Society or Culture autonomous from the biological or psychological (214, note 7). She draws on biologists and theorists of social networks who describe phenomena such as swarms of bees as ‘superorganisms,’ …
This article is part of the following series: The collaborative turn: interdisciplinarity across the human sciences
Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard have recently offered some advice, a normative orientation even, for those engaging in collaboration:
…“Living well in a collaborative mode is about resisting the urge to sort things out – it is about quelling the desire to be clear, at all times, on who ‘I’ am, and what ‘I’ am doing, and whether or