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Rediscovering community again and again and again!
No full textCommunity is everywhere it seems. Again. This time round, it seems to have been rediscovered as the ultimate solution to the public disorder seen in various parts of the UK in recent times, though not so far in Scotland. The leader of Edinburgh District Council at the time no doubt had his fingers crossed when he talked about \u27[strengthening] our will to preserve the great community spirit and resilience we enjoy across our capital city\u27. Even King Charles, that well-known communitarian, has spoken of how he has been greatly encouraged \u27by the many examples of community spirit that countered the aggression and criminality from the few\u27. Of course, there are many who would dispute the basis and sources of these and many other contemporary claims about the veracity of community. As Marj Mayo (1975) summed it up nearly half a century ago:
It is not just that the term [community] has been used ambiguously, it has been contested, fought over and appropriated for different uses and interests to justify different politics, policies and practices
From Rhetoric to Reality: Tackling Poverty and Inequality Through a Just transition in Scotland
No full textThis article examines the intersection of poverty, inequality, and climate policy in Scotland. It argues that the shift to a low carbon economy offers a transformative opportunity to address structural social injustices that have persisted for decades. Drawing on government frameworks, civil society research, and comparative policy examples, the paper contends that Scotland’s just transition must embed social equity from the outset. It identifies income security, gender-responsive care infrastructure, participatory democracy, and fiscal justice as essential pillars of an inclusive transformation. The analysis demonstrates that poverty is a consequence of political design rather than individual failure, and that only a whole-economy approach can deliver both environmental and social sustainability
Embodied Ecologies: How We Sense, Know and Act to Reduce Cumulative Chemical Exposures in Our Everyday Lives
No full textOur worlds and lives are awash with industrially-produced chemicals. This dizzying array of chemicals includes compounds, interactions, and health effects that are poorly, if at all, understood. While the vast majority of both natural and social science research continues to focus on the toxicities of single compound or classes of compounds, we propose a theoretical and methodological framework to attend to cumulative toxicities—known, unknown, interacting and in flux—in everyday life. Our approach builds on the empirical, methodological, and theoretical work of urban political ecology (UPE), anthropology of embodiment, and science and technology studies (STS), and uses radical cartography and ethnographic methods to gain insight into urban pollution’s complex and uneven entanglements, which are inseparably chemical, social, and ecological. We are developing this approach in three phases: ethnographically attending to the sensorial experiences and embodied knowledges of those most affected; creatively and cartographically producing representations and evidence; and identifying and supporting existing modes of action and harm reduction practices. Currently transitioning between the first and second phase, here we also share fresh insights from our recently wrapped grand tours of collective explorations
Fixing Unfixable Bodies: Expectations and Metaphors of the Body Among Patients and Surgeons in Elective Orthopaedic Surgery in Denmark
No full textIn this article we examine how patients of elective orthopaedic surgery might transform the understanding of their body’s fixability over time. The article builds on an ethnographic fieldwork at an elective orthopaedic unit in Denmark and follow-up interviews with two patients eighteen months after their surgery. Through the affective theoretical framework of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, we discuss how the patients experience the part-loss of functionality. We trace the transformations in their expectations of their body through their use of metaphors. Drawing on Alan Bleakley’s division of the metaphors of the body into ‘body-as-machine’ and ‘body-as-ecology’, we argue that patients end up describing their bodies through both these metaphors, and come to understand their bodies as not being fixable, but as being in ongoing process.
‘Health Data Saves Lives’, But Which Lives?: The Non-Imagination of Ecological Peril in Precision Medicine
No full textPrecision medicine is a field of future promise. Its imaginary is that ‘health data saves lives’. But which lives and at what costs? In this position piece, we direct attention to how non-imagination (Prainsack 2022) operates in the field of precision medicine. We argue that central actors in the field, along with social scientists researching it, non-imagine the relevance of environmental collapse to the pursuit of precision medicine, despite its huge energy consumption and focus on prolonging human lives in places that contribute the most to climate change. This non-imagination raises questions about how we as medical anthropologists approach and theorise the ‘life politics’ at the centre of anthropological studies of the life sciences. In light of the current ecological peril, we advocate for extending the discipline’s focus from the governance of life in politics, labs, and clinics to the governance of ‘earth-life’
Haunting Biology : Book Forum
No full textEmma Kowal’s Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity (2023) investigates the history of biological and medical research about Indigenous peoples in Australia. This book forum invited contributors to provide nuanced insights that engage the book’s central contributions to debates in medical anthropology about decoloniality and racial science. Bringing together medical historians, anthropologists, and scholars of science and technology Trevor Engel, Beth Greenhough, Frederic Keck, and Ros Williams, the forum’s contributors highlight the profound utility of Kowal’s insights and the necessity of attending to the spectral presence of the colonial-era ghosts that haunt the ground on which contemporary biological science, including genetics and epigenetics, is practised. The forum contributors draw out the multivalent affects that ghosts provoke, brought to presence through Kowal’s ethnographic observations and rich archival research. They engage ghostly characters like British scientist Baldwin Spencer, who sits out of sight but not out of mind in a museum storeroom, and surgeon and Australian anatomist Sir William Colin Mackenzie, who haunts the dreams of Goenpul Indigenous filmmaker Romaine Moreton. Each contributor shows the productive tension gained by following Kowal’s directive to listen to these and other ghosts around us, and gesture towards the possibilities of decolonial scientific practices.
The Difficult Art of Parenting: Social Change and Parent-Child Avoidance in a Painted Account from Nepal
Get PDFConducting fieldwork among middle-class families in Bhaktapur, Nepal in 2018-2019, I found that local parents are concerned with teaching their children the notion of ‘moral measure’. At the same time, a strategy of avoidance, rather than open negotiation, is preferred to maintain harmony and preserve kinship networks. Focusing on the case study of Dor Bahadur and his children Sita and Vishnu around a contested birthday celebration, in these visual works in gouache, acrylics, and oil colors, I explore and analyze the role that parent-child interactions play in the making of moral selves among middle-class people in Nepal. Through layers of colors, I convey the sense of the conflictual processes that the protagonists of this story experience, and the concomitant ‘opacity of minds’ established between their existential perspectives
Choosing Open Access for Books: Author Agency and the Open Book Collective
Get PDFThe Open Book Collective (OBC) brings together libraries and small-to-medium OA scholarly books publishers from across the world via a unique consortial funding model to enable the publication of OA books with no fee. Judith Fathallah is the Research Lead for the OBC and an academic author who decided in 2023 to publish her third monograph Open Access with a small, scholar-led, innovative press whose director is an expert in the field of media studies. In the first part of this talk Judith explains how she came to this decision, leaving behind the cachet of traditional publishing names, and why she would urge other academics to do the same. Academics cannot be asked to bear all of the risk of transition to a sustainable open access landscape for scholarly books – but, as we stand to benefit from this transition as educators, readers, authors and human beings, she contends that even precariously employed scholars such as myself we must bear some. Open Access Engagement Lead Kevin Sanders then briefly introduces the Open Book Collective\u27s funding model, and the range of small-to-medium scholarly publishers who are currently members of the OBC. We encourage authors, librarians and educators to explore these high quality publishers as options to work with and support. The OBC supports presses to move away from inequitable, unsustainable Book Processing Charges, towards an OA fairer, more inclusive and more diverse landscape for OA books. The options are available to us: now the time has come for authors and scholars to take up a more active role as key stakeholders in this change. See www.openbookcollective.org and www.openbookcollective.pubpub.or
Discovering and Confronting Bias Head on in Behavioural Neuroscience – My PhD Experience
No full textIn 2017, I began a PhD in nutritional neuroscience aiming to investigate how high-fat diets impaired cognition, using dietary and behaviour experiments in mice. During the first few months of my PhD, I was aiming to replicate the finding that high-fat diets do in fact impair some types of memory in mice, which should have been an easy task. At first, my results looked ideal, but I had performed them unblinded to dietary group, and I had an inkling this was a problem. Despite this being perceived as a waste of time, I measured and plotted blinded scores – and my ideal results vanished. When considering possible next steps, it was suggested that the best thing for my PhD would be to repeat the experiment until I successfully replicated it, and could proceed from there. This was not the approach I took. This talk discusses how I confronted an issue in my own research, and used it to shape my future research trajectory. I discuss my experiences learning about reproducibility in research, how I tried to use my own experience and my learnings to inform and guide other researchers, and why I ultimately transitioned into a career in meta-research, leaving behind bench research for good
AWEN: When Data Meets Nature
Get PDFCan a mobile phone app help us rediscover our connection to the natural world? In 2021, as the world grappled with lockdowns and virtual interactions, The New Real team created ‘AWEN’ – a data-driven walking experience that would lay the groundwork for more ambitious explorations of how technology might help us understand environmental change via local, embodied experiences