Plastic litter at the outskirts of a village. Plastics in the oceans. Beaches littered with plastics. Images of whales and cows with plastics in their bellies. Calls for citizens not to litter, to throw away trash responsibly, to join clean up drives, to recycle. In the public imagination, the problem of plastics has largely become one of litter.
Plastic litter …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, air pollution and greenhouse emissions decrease, or so news reports say. The satellite images of China in lockdown provided a first striking example. In response to this, one Dutch newspaper even proclaimed ‘a winner’ in the coronavirus pandemic, namely ‘the environment’. But that is a bit too hasty. Not only are (as environmental experts warn) …
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…
It is both a vexing challenge and a special privilege to write and publish a book. To have first-rate scholars and scholar-activists carefully read, digest, and reflect upon it makes me humbled and deeply grateful. So my first comment is one of gratitude to my four colleagues who took the time and effort to engage so thoughtfully and generously with …
How do people routinely exposed to past and present hazards created by facilities such as an oil refinery, a fracking site, an incinerator, or a smelting plant, think and feel about the risks posed to their surroundings and their health? A now more than two decades-long “relational turn” in the social sciences has taught us that the true source of …
One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health
Stanford University Press, 2017, 262 pages.
Bringing children to the field can change an anthropologist’s relationship to fieldwork immensely. For University of Auckland anthropologist, Susanna Trnka, bringing her children to the Czech Republic quickly became a confronting medical experience when her nine-year-old daughter suffered her …