As the United States began closing its borders in March 2020, Americans with diabetes, already under threat from the coronavirus, faced another pandemic hazard: pharmacies were regularly running out of insulin. As Americans emptied store shelves of toilet paper, cleaning detergents, and canned foods, they also stocked up on the prescriptions they needed to obey stay-at-home orders. Health insurance companies …
Introduction
Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (2018) is a masterful undertaking on the anthropology of disaster and its everydayness. An ethnographic portrayal that is prismatic in its attention, the book combines numerous elements––place, civic performance, history, political economy––to bear on the lead poisoning epidemic in Montevideo, Uruguay at the turn of the 21st…
This article is part of the following series: Top of the heap
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Alexander I. Stingl, who is a sociologist and a research consultant for Medical Humanities and Social Sciences with the Institute for General Medicine (IAM) of the University Clinic of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.
On dancing with the smarts: Cleanse and repeat!
My current …