Sitting at a table in his home in Snowflake, Arizona, Steen reads a book encased in a clear, plastic box. The front of the box is fitted with two holes to which latex gloves have been attached. Steen inserts his hands into these gloves and demonstrates how he turns the book’s pages using wooden pencils inside the box. When asked …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
“COVID is the thing that works differently. It’s not our experience of the illness that works differently.”
A recent observation by Hannah Alcock
We both spend a lot of time in hospital Emergency Departments (EDs). We know the moods, the smells, the human tableaus played out in a loop with each new intake, each new shift. As a medical …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Mild
‘[A] large portion won’t notice that they have it’. ‘Another substantial portion will have very, very mild symptoms’. ‘A small portion will have a very significant reaction’. So runs UK’s Home Officer Deputy Science Advisor Rupert Shute’s assessment, in April 2020, of what the 80% of the UK public he says are predicted to get Covid-19 will experience (Ahmed, 2020).…
Aleksandra Bartoszko and Marcin Ponomarew
Project Supported by Foreningen for Human Narkotikapolitikk (FHN) and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial 4.0 International License. 2016. 48 pages.
The Virus (2016), a graphic ethnography written by social anthropologist Aleksandra Bartoszko and drawn by Marcin Ponomarew, begins with a not uncommon insight from people who inject drugs and …
We know that illness can be narrated but can it be shown?
Feminist artists have been amongst the first to show the sick female body. Jo Spence used photography during the 1980s to document her breast cancer diagnosis and the impact of the treatments on her body. Spence’s projects, such as “The Picture of Health?” and “Narratives of Disease,” have …
Every two years the Medical Anthropology at Home network organises a conference to present and discuss recent work. The ninth conference, held in June 2016 in Northern Norway, was organized by Mette Bech Risør from The Arctic University of Norway and Nina Nissen from the University of Southern Denmark. To address the theme of Configurations of diagnostic processes, practices and …