This article is part of the following series: Reducing Harm Responsibly
In 2019, Sebastian Kaleta, a member of the Polish parliament associated with the ruling Law and Justice party, published a report denigrating Warsaw-based organisations working in the fields of LGBTQ+ rights and harm reduction. The report alleged that these non-governmental organisations and informal groups spend public money to de facto ‘affirm’ the use of psychoactive substances and ‘promote’ non-heteronormative sexual …
Preventing Dementia? Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age
Edited by Annette Leibing and Silke Schicktanz
Berghahn Books, 2020. 268 pages
In their recently published edited volume, medical anthropologist Annette Leibing and bioethicist and STS scholar Silke Schicktanz set their focus on the “new dementia” and on related and novel approaches to dementia prevention. While the …
This article is part of the following series: Reducing Harm Responsibly
Philadelphia is the poorest of the ten largest cities in the United States and has one of the highest rates of fatal opioid-related overdoses in the state of Pennsylvania. Faced with a limited landscape of social services and community-based support, and the responsibility of keeping their defendants alive, judges and attorneys in Philadelphia have begun to use probation and incarceration …
On the morning of 23rd February 2021, I boarded a bus from my home in northern Taiwan to a nearby military training center. There I joined another four hundred draftees for our compulsory military service in the Republic of China (ROC) Armed Forces – or simply Guojun (“national army”). Along with the other draftees, I was first given a …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
“Constrained to exist in public spaces, the homeless are constant targets of regulation, criminalisation, expulsion and erasure.” – Randall Amster
On April 3, 2020, Californian Governor Gavin Newsom announced the implementation of Project Roomkey: the state’s initiative to aid those in situations of homelessness amidst the COVID-19 crisis. As growing fears of coronavirus contagion became more prevalent, it …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
This essay is about paying respect. In 2018, after my first summer of preliminary fieldwork in the Artibonite region of Haiti, I returned disappointed and disillusioned. With the intention of studying local health related issues in the port city of Saint-Marc, the projects that were seemingly possible for me were ones I wanted to avoid. As a typical graduate student, …