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Grave Reverberations: Inherited Colonial Logics during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Philippines
No full textUsing the theory of reverberations, we track the dissonant transformation of sanitation regimes during the American colonial period in the Philippines, particularly during the cholera epidemic of 1902, to the mis/management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the present day. We argue that the formation, interpretation, and implementation of public health policies, especially with regards to the treatment of the dead, echo inherited colonial logics designed to exacerbate stigmas of virality and unruliness. In addition to past epidemics, responses to COVID-19 resonate with recurring episodes of terror formation, militarisation, and misinformation in the country. The enduring legacies of colonialism—rooted in themes of extraction, individualism, and hegemony, and masked under the guise of benevolence—live on in modern policies in ways that are not always readily apparent. Lastly, we see the notion of reverberations as one that allows analytical generosity in understanding the messiness of the postcolonial experience. 
Exploding all explosions: Reconfiguring art and architectural meaning, matter, and space with Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter (1991)
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In our paper, we seek to explore Cornelia Parker’s art and how it engages with exhibition making that overwrites self-referential narratives by revisioning art and architectural meaning, experience, and space. We intend to theorise how Parker’s non-adaptive and divergent architectural artforms transgress artifactual biases and disarticulate the adaptive preferences and prerogatives in exhibition practice. Instead, she offers a speculative possibility space of non-totality and the devalorisation of meaning yet retaining the ability to respond. Parker’s radical technics of installation assume an arbitrariness. Her installations, we think, disrupt meaning and genre-conforming specificities and reimagine non-essential ways to de-concretise conventional exhibition making that subsumes the totalising agencies of architectural meaning and representation which invariably arrives at dense rigidities. Parker’s large-scale installations like her Cold Dark Matter (1991) not only dislocate the essentialist ways of exhibition practice but also reimagine speculative and innovative technics of spatial and architectural manipulation that fractalises the demarcating ontologies of spatiality and perception, producing immersive and collectively attuned more-than-artifacts that move beyond transcendental dependencies with more-than-art resonances. Parker’s artform entails an architectural practice of speculative reworlding which effectuates an affective unfolding of matter and space, instead of imposing fixities or homeostatic formalisations on them. Through these deviant architectural expressions, we shall attempt to conceptualise how Parker stands out and practises a necessary artistic incompletion to destabilise and confront the architectural rigidities in exhibition making and move towards a radical and non-conformist expressivity that accentuates the untapped virtual potentialities of mind, matter and space to produce events and become something more—a fractalising multiplicity recalibrating the collective dynamics of spatiality, sensibility and perception in relation to curatorial methodologies and experiences by designing alternative exhibitions that involve a radical unbecoming in praxis
The Butt of the Joke: Humour and Queer Care at an Anal Dysplasia Clinic
No full textBased on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted at an anal cancer prevention clinic in Chicago, USA, this article considers queer camp humour as a care practice to better understand how providers and patients navigate clinical interactions centred around a stigmatised disease in a taboo body part. Humorous moments infused daily life at the clinic, and I came to see them as a critical feature of the clinic’s uniquely queer environment and a central aspect of the staff’s queer care practices. I argue the campy queer style of humour in the clinic was a vital tool for providing culturally appropriate care, and describe how humour mediated patient-provider interactions, had palliative effects, and managed dirt and bodily excess. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the importance of anthropological attention to humour and joking as forms of care. 
How to Categorise Disease? Endometriosis, Inflammation, and ‘Self Out of Place’
No full textEndometriosis is a condition where tissue similar to the uterine lining develops outside the uterus; it ‘bleeds’ during periods, forms lesions, and causes chronic pain. Despite affecting around 10% of menstruating people, its aetiology is poorly understood, and diagnostics and treatments are highly inadequate. Current efforts to reconceptualise the disease generally centre around inflammation. In this Field Note I describe my fieldwork during the pandemic, which was largely based on in-depth interviews with patients and clinicians in and around Edinburgh, Scotland. This research interrogates the socio-cultural context in which endometriosis is changing from a ‘gynaecological disorder’ to a ‘systemic disorder’ implicating the endocrine system (a ‘hormonally driven condition’), the neural system (‘neuropathic pain’) and/or the immune system (an ‘inflammatory condition’). It explores how the lived experience of endometriosis challenges ingrained ways of thinking about the body and bodily ‘systems,’ which are reflected in the design of healthcare systems. Considering endometriosis alongside changing conceptions of immune response invites thinking beyond self-versus-non-self (as in older concepts of immunity), and self-attacking-self (as in auto-immune conditions), to something like ‘self-out-of-place,’ simultaneously calling into question the suitability of our social and material relations
Singularidades tecno-culturais na região sudoeste do Planalto Central brasileiro no Holoceno Inicial
No full textThis article aims to contribute to expanding knowledge about the panoply of lithic tools present in Early Holocene archaeological sites located in the Brazilian Central Plateau. These sites have traditionally been interpreted within the context of the Itaparica tradition, whose artifacts called "slugs" or "plano-convex" were used as cultural markers. Technological research over the last twenty years on lithic materials from sites typologically attributed to the Itaparica tradition has allowed a better definition of what came to be called the Itaparica techno-complex. Due to the spectacular nature of the “plano-convex” objects identified in these ancient contexts, other artifacts are usually overlooked in research. Our proposal was, therefore, to look in more detail at the subtle incisive tools that are associated (or not) with “plano-convex” artifactual structures in the collections of two sites from the southwest region of the Central Plateau: the GO-JA-01 site (Diogo Lemes), dated from 12717 - 12143 cal. (Beta-3699), and the site MT-SL-31 (Morro da Janela), dated from 11994 - 11316 cal (Beta-78053). We could see that they are, very often, structured on other technical production principles and associated with specific operational schemes.
We based our research on the Techno-functional Approach. This approach allows us to identify the coherences that are established within a volumetric structure (a specimen) in terms of its structuring subsets -minimally, the transformative edge(s) and the possible prehensive unit(s) - in light of their functional potential. Furthermore, it allows us to think about the technical meaning of artefactual structures by reinserting them into the set of which they are part (a population), providing data on the techno-functional consistency of the collections. In methodological terms, the identification of the operational schemes was carried out based on the diacritical analysis of the negatives present in the artifact, with the production modes being highlighted based on the technical principles of affordance, debitage and shaping.
We were able to group the sharp tools from these collections into five techno-functional categories: unifacial shaped tools from normalized blanks (limaces); unifacial shaped tools on regularized blanks; tools shaped on blanks of cobble; tools with restricted modification; regularized and non-regularized blanks. We were also able to identify in the collections the representative occurrence of unexhausted cores with the presence of small negatives, which led us to infer the production of even smaller blanks which, however, were not detected in the collection. Furthermore, we identified the presence of discoid D-type debitage related to some of the tools. These technological details obtained with the investigation of the aforementioned archaeological sites of the Central Plateau, when considered in the light of spatial, chronological and paleoenvironmental information, allow us to consider the scenarios concerning the population dynamics of that period. The tools categories evidenced in this paper, added to the techno-cultural particularities found in other Central Plateau sites and expands the Itaparica toolbox. They bring about a greater understanding of the Techno-cultural diversity of the technical memories of the human groups that occupied the extensive area of the Central Plateau, enabling further investigations into the connections of technical knowledge between regions.Este artigo visa contribuir para a ampliação do conhecimento sobre as panóplias de ferramentas líticas presentes em sítios arqueológicos do Holoceno Inferior localizados no Planalto Central brasileiro. Esses sítios têm sido tradicionalmente interpretados dentro do contexto da Tradição Itaparica, cujos artefatos denominados de "lesmas" ou "plano-convexos" foram identificados como marcadores culturais. Os avanços nas pesquisas nos últimos vinte anos sobre as características técnicas, tecnológicas e tecno-funcionais de materiais líticos tipologicamente atribuídos à Tradição Itaparica permitiram uma melhor definição daquele que veio a ser denominado de complexo tecno-cultural Itaparica Lourdeau (2010:59). A partir da coleção lítica de dois sítios, pesquisados inicialmente por Oliveira (2014) e Oliveira (2019), provenientes da região sudoeste do Planalto Central, o sítio GO-JA-01 (Diogo Lemes), com datação mais antiga de 12.717 - 12.143 cal. (Beta-3699), e o sítio MT-SL-31 (Morro da Janela), de 11.994 - 11.316 cal (Beta-78053), buscamos criar condições heurísticas para que desses contextos antigos pudessem emergir um aporte de expressões culturais de baixa visibilidade técnica. Tais expressões são usualmente preteridas por estarem associadas a materiais cuja estrutura artefatual é caracterizada pela alta normalização e/ou pela padronização. Objetivamos, assim, olharmos com mais detalhamento para as ferramentas incisivas sutis que estão associadas às estruturas artefatuais “plano-convexas”.
Nossa pesquisa fundamentou-se na abordagem Tecno-funcional (Boëda 2013:39), a qual permite identificar as coerências que se estabelecem no interior de uma estrutura volumétrica (um espécimen) nos termos de seus subconjuntos estruturantes - minimamente, o(s) gume(s) transformativo(s) e a(s) unidade(s) preensiva(s) - à luz de seu potencial funcional. Ademais, ela permite pensar o sentido técnico das estruturas artefatuais ao reinseri-las no conjunto do qual fazem parte (uma população), fornecendo dados sobre a consistência tecno-funcional das coleções. Em termos metodológicos, a identificação dos esquemas operatórios foi realizada a partir da análise diacrítica dos negativos presentes nos artefatos e dos modos de produção evidenciados com base nos princípios técnicos de afordância, debitage e façonagem.
O ordenamento estrutural entre as porções transformativas e possíveis porções preensivas, nos possibilitou agrupar as seguintes categorias tecno-funcionais:
1) “Instrumentos com façonagem unifacial a partir de suportes normalizados (limaces)” - apresentam estrutura técnica estável, caracterizada por um suporte alongado e volumoso em uma de suas faces. A simetria das laterais e o plano de seção foram obtidos por façonagem, o(s) gume(s) delineados por confecção e podem compor de uma ou mais unidades transformativas. Algumas peças são altamente normalizadas apresentando recorrentemente uma unidade tecno-transformativa, localizada na porção apical. Outras são menos normalizadas, sua estrutura funciona como um suporte onde se instalam mais de uma unidade transformativa. São peças de arenito silicificado e sílex.
2) “Instrumentos com façonagem unifacial com suportes regularizados" - o suporte não é normalizado, os perfis e as laterais são assimétricos. Os princípios da afordância, façonagem e debitage atuaram na estrutura da ferramenta, podendo compor uma ou duas unidades transformativas. São peças de arenito silicificado, quartzito e sílex,
3) “Instrumentos produzidos sobre suportes de seixos” - os seixos foram selecionados por critérios técnicos de afordância, seguidos de façonagem e confecção de gumes, em contornos diversos. São peças de arenito silicificado e quartzito.
4) Instrumentos com modificação restrita” - foram identificados três tipos de estruturas de suportes: algumas pouco regularizadas, provenientes da debitagem tipo C; outras normalizadas, provenientes da debitagem tipo D-discöide; e ainda as de "cadeias operacionais ramificadas" (Bourguignon et al. 2004), derivadas de lascas de façonagem. Os gumes são definidos por retoques ou traços de uso. São peças de arenito silicificado, sílex, basalto e quartzo.
Também pudemos identificar na coleção a ocorrência representativa de núcleos pequenos, não esgotados com presença de negativos de pequenas dimensões, o que nos levou a inferir a possibilidade de produção de suportes ainda menores, contudo, estes não foram detectados na coleção.
Compreendemos que a onipresença dos instrumentos comumente denominados de limaces, presentes na maioria dos sítios do Planalto Central, nos leva a considerar o compartilhamento da estrutura técnica dessa ferramenta, entre diferentes grupos humanos ao longo de pelo menos 4.000 anos. A proposição sobre a dispersão e possíveis conexões desta cultura técnica está mais alinhada com uma perspectiva interativa do que com uma convergência técnica (Chevrier 2012). A variabilidade técnico-funcional dessas peças está associada à temporalidades distintas, isto reforça a ideia de movimento e potencial de mudança nas tradições culturais (Sahlins 1997).
Também destacamos a presença marcante do princípio da afordância (Boëda & Ramos 2017) entre as ferramentas do sítio MT-SL-31, possibilitando a supressão da fase de debitagem. Compreendemos que isso não encurta o tempo da cadeia operatória, neste caso o maior investimento estaria no critério técnico de seleção dos suportes (seixos) visando produzir a futura ferramenta. Neste movimento, entendemos que as categorias natural e cultural são complementares. Desvelam também o enredamento dos grupos humanos com suas cercanias, fazendo-nos considerar não apenas o sítio, mas também o entorno como participantes do projeto cultural.
Os instrumentos de baixa visibilidade foram caracterizados, não necessariamente pelas suas dimensões reduzidas, mas principalmente por sua estrutura técnica ter sido pouco modificada, tornando-as ferramentas de difícil identificação se utilizarmos somente o critério “forma”, sem o desenvolvimento de análises tecnológicas. Incorporar e elevar essa categoria tecnográfica ao contexto da presente discussão, as emparelhando às demais presentes no tecno-complexo de Itaparica, significa dar visibilidade a um conjunto de objetos ainda pouco considerados nas análises tecnológicas da região sudoeste do Planalto Central. Isto, por sua vez, instiga os estudos a irem além do \u27formal\u27, do normalizado, seguindo o desafio da arqueologia aplicada ao tempo profundo em termos de se afastar do preconceito que equipara uma maior quantidade de negativos a um maior nível de complexidade tecnológica complexity (Maigrot & Plisson 2006).
As minúcias tecnológicas obtidas com a investigação dos sítios arqueológicos supramencionados, quando consideradas à luz de informações espaciais, cronológicas e paleoambientais, permitem ponderar sobre os cenários concernentes às dinâmicas populacionais desse período. As categorias de ferramentas evidenciadas neste artigo, somadas às particularidades tecno-culturais encontradas em outros locais do Planalto Central, ampliam o conjunto de ferramentas de Itaparica. Proporcionam uma maior compreensão da diversidade técnico-cultural das memórias técnicas dos povos que habitaram a extensa área do Planalto Central brasileiro, possibilitando investigações mais aprofundadas sobre as conexões entre os conhecimentos técnicos presentes em diferentes regiões da América do Sul
The Golden Thread: Strengthening Community Education professionals\u27 practice in Higher Education through Shared Principles and Values
No full textAbstract:
The community education team at the University of the West of Scotland engaged in a critical planning day that sparked rich dialogue and critical debate. This article reflects on the insights and evaluations from this session, aiming to unify the community of practice in higher education around core principles and values. The goal is to establish a consensus on these shared values and principles, supporting future co-production, scholarship, and the development of the programme at UWS.
Central to our identity are the shared values of social justice and human rights, aligning with both community education policy and the civic engagement principles of the University. This paper highlights our commitment to these \u27ideals\u27 and their influence on our teaching, learning, and assessment practices. Our work is grounded in theoretical foundations from John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci, and Paulo Freire, emphasising community, democracy, cultural hegemony, and critical consciousness. These principles guide our critical civic praxis and our collective approach to teaching and community engagement.
Higher education plays a crucial role in promoting diversity, social inclusion, and community. By fostering grassroots activism, we aim to empower and engage in democratic processes and challenge regressive ideologies. Our objective is to inspire students to embrace these values and sustain movements for social change
Britain in Fragments: why things are falling apart Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever: Publisher: Manchester University Press 2023
No full textThere is little doubt that Britain is grappling with monumental economic and social challenges. The re-energised capitalism agreed between capital and labour after the Second World War has clearly failed to deliver in the manner key actors, including politicians and policy makers, thought and believed it would
Labile Bodies: A Hospital Ethnography of Medical Professionals’ Struggles in Deceased Organ Donation
No full textThis article presents an ethnographic study of the donor body in deceased organ donation. Drawing on the science and technology studies’ incitement to study bodies being enacted and acted upon in situated practices, I explore the body being done and becoming undone in the practices of organ procurement at a Catalan hospital. The hospital has uniquely high rates of organ donation and transplantation, and deceased organ donation has become routinised and integrated into everyday hospital activities. I attend ethnographically to the medical professionals’ accounts of and interactions with bodies and organs in their work dealing with both donors after brain death diagnosis and uncontrolled donors after circulatory death diagnosis. During fieldwork, I followed the struggles of the transplant coordination team grappling with unruly bodies under different maintenance technologies. The body being done in these hospital practices is an active and unstable materiality that must be contended with: a labile body, or a fragile assemblage of interdependent functions, requiring multiple interventions provided by a host of dedicated hospital practitioners. The article shows that staying close to the medical professionals’ situated accounts is a valuable route to gaining novel understandings of the donor body
The Madness of Metrics and Possibilities of Pause in Open Research
Get PDFIn July 2022, Marisa de Andrade wrote (what she thought was) an important book about knowledge (in)justice in the academy and in the world. Public Health, Humanities and Magical Realism: A Creative-Relational Approach to Researching Human Experience published by Routledge, was born partly out of frustration after years of questioning ‘the system’ of public health evaluation and measurement through her programme of research Measuring Humanity, which questions the very nature of evidence (and reality).
In May 2023, this book was awarded Joint Winner for the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Book Award noting it was “paradigm-shifting text that espouses important messages about relationality, research practice, and well-being”. At its core, it argues that so-called ‘traditional’ methodologies and conceptualisations of metrics, data and knowledge have the potential to exacerbate (health) inequalities by excluding and misrepresenting minorities.
It unpacks the way we think about, do and promote research about inequalities and puts different ways of knowing (epistemology) and different ways of being (ontology) under the microscope to show how to design studies, make recommendations and adapt services that are aligned with views and experiences of those living on the margins and beyond. As such, it has been dubbed an essential read for public health researchers and students.
There’s only one catch. The hard cover book costs £135. And the people it was essentially written with and for, can’t afford to buy it and apply it.
Whose knowledge matters? How can metrics be used to explore how and who is benefiting from research? What can open research teach us about equity, impact and activism? And where does pause—and the meaning of pause—fit into all of it when we’re told high numbers (usually linked to high access fees) will get you promoted?