Trauma is a concept with wide-ranging impact, moving out of limited psychiatric fields into the popular imagination and policy (Fassin 2009). Psychologists now accompany medical doctors in the wake of disasters, ranging from wildfires to war, bringing with them instruments to diagnose, measure, and treat victims. Feeding into neuropsychiatric research on the effects of trauma, epigenetic studies have established yet another …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
What is the object of epidemiological interventions during an epidemic? Is it the virus, the disease, the fear, the chaos, or the threat to security? And what is the objective of those interventions? Is it to eliminate the virus, to mitigate the effects of the disease, to calm the fear, to control the chaos, or to defeat the threat?
On …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Note: I wrote this for anyone trying to “teach the virus,” something I will soon be doing myself. The question in the title is meant to signal that this is an open-ended dialogue. Most of the sources are in English and are easily available, meaning that students can use them as evidence, read other scholarship, and develop their own (counter) …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Thirty-eight days have passed since the publication of Somatosphere’s COVID-19 Forum II. In the course of these days the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the globe has risen from 1.1 to 4,3 million, with coronavirus-related deaths rising from 60,000 to 294,997. While some countries, like Italy and Germany, have started relaxing their lockdowns, epidemic control measures in …
Translated by Christos Lynteris*
“No.” The response of the French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe to a viewer of the Journal de 20h programme of the France 2 TV channel was indeed “terrible to hear.” No, she could not attend the funeral of her friend, who had passed away two days earlier. It was now forbidden by the law. Albeit “very …
This article is part of the following series: Histórias of Zika
For Luganda click here.
In early 2016, people across the United States became aware of a new threat—Zika virus. A New York Times article that April featured a description of the discovery of Zika virus in “a remote Ugandan lab” in the 1940s.[1] But while that story acknowledged the contributions of scientists in Uganda, it mistook the laboratory …