This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
These comments were originally prepared for the “COVID-19 and Anthropology: Disease, Social Justice, and Well Being” Webinar hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Section on April 20, 2020.
What lessons learned from past epidemics (including HIV/AIDS) could we apply to COVID-19? What lessons are there to be learned from other countries’ responses to COVID-19?
As a cultural …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
As the pandemic of SARS-CoV2 (the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19) unfolds it continues to impact contemporary forms of sociality and community, health, care, governance, and global interconnectedness. These changes and the myriad challenges they pose are critical fodder for anthropologists of health and medicine, and we are called upon now to document lived experiences, reflexively use social theory and …
Introduction
Power is in the air we breathe, and no matter where we are there are always individuals with more power over others. In “An anthropology of structural violence” Paul Farmer (2004) famously described the ways systems of power operate to produce structural inequalities and forms of violence inherent within. Farmer defines structural violence as “the experience of people who …
This article is part of the following series: The First Thousand Days of Life
I met Libby on a cold winter morning at the clinic. She was a short woman with a strong voice and slow walk. Libby was 35 years old and taken by surprise at being pregnant again. She had one child, a son who was already 17 and whose presence filled the two hour conversation as Libby returned to stories of …
I was doing chest compressions on a 29-year-old woman who had just come up from the Emergency Room, and I was trying not to look at her face. She was gravely sick, intubated, and we had no idea what was wrong with her. When she went pulseless, we started the American Heart Association’s Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) algorithm for …
What role should mental health care professionals play in helping heal psychical wounds exposed in the aftermath of Ferguson and New York?
This question lies at the heart of calls that emerged from within psychiatry, psychology, social work, and other mental health professions over the weeks since grand jury deliberations ended, and protests began, in cities across the country. Professional …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology