Medical Anthropology at UCL

Advocacy Letters: Anthropological Calls for Public and Global Health Change

Series Introduction CARRIE RYAN For the next few weeks, the UCL Medical Anthropology blog will run a special series called ‘Advocacy Letters: Anthropological Calls for Public and Global Health Change.’ This series will showcase nine Advocacy Letters written by UCL anthropology undergraduates and postgraduates. In these letters, students use anthropological insights to advocate for change on a variety of health-related topics, including, for example, dental care, loneliness, and vaccine hesitancy. These Advocacy Letters…

Covid-19 and Vaccine Inequalities in South Africa: The Second Year

Lerato Coulter, Nunu Dlamini, Jonathan Govender, Sarah-Jayne Du Plessis, Ryan Harries, Khanyisile Maphalala, Dineo Mtetwa, Katso Sebina, Hannah Sunpath, Storm Theunissen and Lenore Manderson University of the Witwatersrand Twelve months after it all began here, sanitisers, physical distancing and masked guards had become just part of the everyday, and we had lost count of deaths…

“Not the Chinese, I’m a Pfizer girl!” The covert politics of pharmaceutical branding in Covid struck Hungary

ARIEL BINETH HUNGARY. The country has one of the highest death rates of COVID-19 globally.1 Hospitals are filled with ICU patients at some places outnumbering staff 5:1.2 Nurses and doctors struggle with physical burnout, infrastructural breakdown, and government crackdown. The shadow of Prime Minister Viktor Orban floats above the pandemic by obstructing statistical transparency and…

Vaccine envy and vaccine snobbery – why we look a gift horse in the mouth when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccine

MARIA LARRAIN The vaccine rollout has been well-underway in the UK since Margaret Keenan was the first person in the world to receive the Pfizer Covid-19 jab in December 2020, a week before her 91st birthday. It marked the start of what Health Secretary Matt Hancock called “the fightback against our common enemy, the coronavirus”….

Between Jab Lines and Pandemic Orientalism in Urban Sri Lanka

VICHITRA GODAMUNNE & RAPTI SIRIWARDANE-DE ZOYSA The global COVID-19 vaccination drive has been steeped in geopolitical rivalries, captured not in the least within mainstream Euro-American media narratives. Coverage of the vaccine efforts in the so-called “Global South” has been replete with orientalised visions of these countries where the same international media-predicted pandemic disorder that did…

Vaccinating vaccines: Ethnography and the info-politics of public health

DAN ARTUS What exactly can an ethnography of vaccination hope to achieve? And how could one be undertaken? Although any given individual is likely to have received multiple vaccines throughout their lifetime, the act of administering one is typically extremely quick via injection, oral drops or even a nasal spray. Moreover, it occurs in specific…

The (Anthropological) Vaccine Rush

BEN KASSTAN It would be an understatement to say I rushed to the Jerusalem Arena stadium to receive the COVID-19 vaccination last week. Rolling down my sleeve after the jab, I felt as if I’d been marked with privilege while very conscious of the entrenched global public health inequalities that prevent the same timely access…

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS – Vaccines in View: Social Science Perspectives on COVID-19 Vaccinations

Incorporating pandemic public health, social inequalities, geopolitics, conspiracies and beyond, COVID-19 vaccines find themselves at the centre of the most significant debates of our time. As anthropologists and social scientists we have important voices that need to be heard on this matter, and are once again placed in the unique position of watching noteworthy global…

Troubled Togetherness: Visually Impaired People’s Unsettling and Tiresome Journey towards Community Belonging

ANNAMARIA DALL’ANESE The word ‘community’ has heart-warming connotations of mutual support and reciprocal understanding. The sense of belonging that stems from being integrated into a social world perfused with care and empathy is seen as so universally desirable that nothing hints at the difficulties that becoming part of a specific community may entail. The focus…

Changing perspectives, Infrastructuring care

MICHELA COZZA On 21 March 2020, during the first COVID-19 pandemic peak in Italy, a group of doctors working at the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, published an article titled “At the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic and humanitarian crises in Italy: Changing perspectives on preparation and mitigation” (Nacoti et al., 2020). This title…

PHOTO ESSAY: SHELTER IN PLACE

AMANDA NESCI For many, home is seen as a place you come back to, retreat, relax, decompress. How does this relationship change when our homes become our whole world? Due to the shelter in place orders as result of the COVID-19 outbreak, our homes have become much more: offices, gyms, classrooms, studios, bars. Windowsills become…

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Consciously (Re)Quarantined

As nations across Europe find the inevitable domino of new national lockdowns knocking into them, we may all approach ‘this time’ differently from the last. During the interim a lot has happened to reconfigure our realities, both politically and pandemically: Black Lives Matter, the US elections, the French terrorist attacks…sparks are flying, and we all…

Bioethical and Biopolitical Considerations Concerning Racism and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chile

RAÚL VILLARROEL Given the great shockwaves caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which in recent months has shaken the whole world, there is cause to suspect that this may have led to the perceptual error that the pandemic is exclusively a health-related issue. Given that this perceptual error is not insignificant, it must be addressed…

Bioethical Guidelines of ‘Extreme Triage’ Under Covid: The Question of ‘Possible Lives’ in Latin America

ABRIL SALDAÑA Assuming a shortage of medical resources to treat patients with Covid-19, many countries in Latin America have discussed or established bioethical guides for limited resource allocation in the case of a public health emergency or what is known as ‘extreme triage’. Under a principle of social justice, these guides propose to allocate resources…

Bioethics as a Mediator in Times of Pandemic

CARLA ALICIA SUÁREZ FÉLIX During the last months, as the world has been marked by the pandemic, there has been much discussion about the role that bioethics could have as a guide for decision making at times when human life is in crisis. Among the flow of academic reflections on the current state of humanity…

Complex Bioethics and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Alterity and Otherness as a Necessary Framework for Thinking About New Social Relationships in a New Post-Pandemic World LUCAS FRANÇA GARCIA AND JOSÉ ROBERTO GOLDIM In Brazil, the first identified case of the new coronavirus was traced to February 26, 2020, in the city of São Paulo, capital, and on March 17, 2020, the first…

When Coronavirus Meets an Armed Conflict

Death and Dying in Colombia During the COVID-19 Pandemic MARÍA FERNANDA OLARTE-SIERRA Not all dead bodies are the same, just as not all deaths are equal. Some dead bodies are more uncomfortable than others. The COVID-19 pandemic has rattled socio-cultural, biomedical, forensic, and funerary customary dealings of death and dead bodies. We are confronted daily…

Problemas bioéticos ¿emergentes o persistentes? expuestos por la pandemia COVID-19

JOSÉ RAMÓN ACOSTA SARIEGO El escenario de una catástrofe anunciada. La pandemia COVID-19 ha mostrado en toda su crudeza las falencias, vulnerabilidades, injusticias y desigualdades que aquejan al entramado económico, social, cultural y político contemporáneo. Una vez más ha quedado expuesto que las determinantes de la salud individual y colectiva rebasan con mucho el ámbito…

Values Revealed: COVID-19 in Cuba

CARLOS JESÚS DELGADO DÍAZ The first case of COVID-19 was reported in Cuba on March 11, 2020. Since then, 2291 patients have been confirmed to have had the disease, with 1893[1] recovering and being discharged from hospital, and 84 deaths. 240 are currently hospitalized and another 516 suspected cases are in isolation due to epidemiological…

Introduction to Series: COVID-19 voices from Latin America and the Caribbean

ABRIL SALDANA By August 2020, Latin America and the Caribbean has become the epicentre of the pandemic with more than 5.4 million COVID-19 cases confirmed and 210,000 fatalities. Coronavirus cases keep rising sharply, especially in Brazil, with more than 3 million confirmed cases, followed by Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru. As under testing seems to…

Something Old, Something New

Embodied Practices and Production of Mobility in Moscow Public Transport during Covid-19 YANA BAGINA “… then I realized it is not hysteria, it’s just reality” (description of the pandemic from an interview with a 45 y.o. woman) The COVID-19 pandemic brought attention to the moving body that has been perceived as a source of the…

Subway: a silver lining of the COVID-19 quarantine in Moscow

VARVARA KOBYSHCHA AND KSENIA SHEPETINA The text is based on the data collected within the project “Everyday practices of public health: (Non)Following sanitary rules at Moscow public transport during the coronavirus pandemic” funded by Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the bachelor thesis of Ksenia Shepetina defended at the Faculty of Social Sciences of HSE…

On the tendency to periodise capitalism through the event of the global pandemic

JAKUB CRCHA & SHACHI MOKASHI The coronavirus, by the virtue of its novelty, sudden unexpected appearance, and the scale of consequent disruption, has been easily incorporated into the pervasive tendency of mythologising what seems too ungraspable to theorise. The virus’ emergence has captured the theoretical imagination of many political projects; in fact, there is a…

The Pandemic Push to Rethink the Field Site

New Intimacies and De-Masking in Medical Anthropology and Global Health. A Reflective Blog CLAIRE SOMERVILLE The concept of fieldwork, and its’ physical manifestation, the “field site”, has been described historically as ‘the single most significant factor determining whether a piece of research will be accepted as “anthropological”’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Its primary purpose delineates…

Mapping out the Affect of Covid-19 on Cancer Care in the UK: Reflections on a Changed Landscape

CLARA FABIAN-THEROND As a medical anthropology PhD student my plan was to start ethnographic research, examining the socio-cultural impact of personalised therapeutics in the NHS colorectal and ovarian cancer treatment setting, in late spring. The arrival of coronavirus in the UK, however, halted this planned start date. Instead, over the last three or so months…

From Transmutation to Strangeness: The House under Scrutiny

MARÍA FLORENCIA BLANCO ESMORIS La Matanza, Buenos Aires, Argentina I woke up, changed, and my partner made mate[1]. I looked at my cell phone and I had at least 18 new e-mails. The routine began. The transmutation of the house that was part of the beginning of this physical isolation experience in Argentina started to…

The Making of a Paper Crisis: Coexisting with COVID-19 in Indonesia

GEGER RIYANTO The COVID-19 pandemic is certainly far from over in Indonesia. In fact, as I write this piece (June 6th), the COVID-19 infections are constantly escalating. Each day we set a new record of infection numbers. However, many people do not feel like we are approaching a critical juncture of the pandemic. The public,…

The Case Against The ‘Singularity’

GRAHAM WILKES The definition of a ‘Singularity’ is something with ‘an unusual or distinctive manner or behaviour’. Something, or an event, that is ‘out of the ordinary’. Something that can be perceived to be so rare that it doesn’t warrant serious consideration, even though its impact may be devastating. So, does that mean that we…

Caring in the times of Corona

PARAS ARORA How does one write about social isolation, mental health issues, and care work-induced fatigue in a local context already scarred with abandonment, loneliness and chronic caregiving? In what ways has the pandemic entered these contexts and what can we gain by attending to the pandemic’s mode of entry into already fragile lives? In…

The Virus And Fear: How Will We Deal With These Two Pandemics?

MARTA ABATEPAULO DE FARIA Considered the most severe respiratory syndrome since the Spanish flu (an H1N1 pandemic) in 1918, which killed between 20 and 50 million people worldwide[1], the Covid-19 pandemic has been spreading fear and uncertainty in the population. Ornell et al. (2020)[2] e Schmidt at al. (2020)[3] discourse about how efforts to contain…

Lives and Deaths with Dementia During Covid-19: Our Shameful (But Hopefully Transformative) Post-Pandemic Legacy

CRISTINA DOUGLAS “How do I escape from here?” The question took me by complete surprise. “This is a care home, Muriel. Your daughter brought you here because it’s safe for you.” Little did I know at that time, only about two months ago, that this will change so dramatically in a matter of weeks. Muriel…

It’s More Than A Juxtaposition: On Discussing Black Lives Matter Demonstrations in the ‘Land of the Free’ and the COVID-19 Pandemic

TIFFANY LOERA No te preocupes hija, estamos bien, my mom says reassuringly to me over the phone as we discuss the current state of the United States. As nations around the world begin to ease their lockdown restrictions, the U.S. reports over 100k deaths from the COVID-19 outbreak (McCarthy and Singh 2020). Other sources report…

Pain and Plight of People with Disabilities during COVID-19 Pandemic: Reflections from Nepal

OBINDRA B. CHAND Recently, in a public forum Lindsay Lee, a WHO Technical Officer with expertise in disability issues, mentioned, “What worries me perhaps more than anything is just the existing barriers that people with disabilities face. I can speak for this myself, personally. Lindsay further explained that health care access is already difficult for some people with disabilities,…

Goethe wears a mask against COVID-19

INAYAT ALI Did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—the eminent German intellectual of the modern era—wear a mask in his lifetime? Although the question is interesting, the answer is unknown. Nonetheless, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Goethe is wearing a mask–on his statue on Vienna’s renowned Ringstrasse (Ring Street), near to Austria’s National Opera House. Masks are…

Patterns of Contamination: From Fukushima to COVID-19

MAXIME POLLERI In the spring of 2016, I was invited to witness the work of citizen scientists in Fukushima. These citizen scientists were mostly farmers attempting to revitalize the sociocultural life of their region, which had been heavily affected by residual radioactivity in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. At 5:30 on a…

Vectors And Viruses: What Coexisting With Mosquitoes Can Teach Us About Living With Coronavirus

ROSIE SIMS My mask is green with zebras on it, a feeble attempt to liven up the veil of cotton protecting me from others, or others from me. An artefact of a new era. Interaction with other humans reduced to deciphering expressions conveyed by eyes and crinkling foreheads, voices muffled by layers covering mouths. A…

‘Maybe When All This Is Over Jesus Will Come Back’: Crisis, Post-Crisis And Millenarian Time

GARETH BREEN The Pursuit of the Millennium is an influential book by Norman Cohn. In it, Cohn shows quite precisely how in Medieval times millenarian movements periodically rode and arose from within waves of social, political and economic unrest. The book has been influential upon our understandings of why Protestantism took hold in China at…

How Our Behaviour Affects Virus Evolution

DR GUL DENIZ SALALI COVID-19 is caused by the novel coronavirus (Sars-Cov-2), but coronaviruses have been among us for years. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, and different strains (genetic variants) choose different species as their hosts. Many people may have first heard about coronaviruses during the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, when a strain was…

Cowboys and Coronavirus: Protesting Covid-19 in ‘The Land of the Free’

ROSIE MATHERS Over the last couple of weeks protests have broken out across America against lockdown measures imposed to reduce the spread and contraction of Covid-19. Rallies across Northern and Southern states have seen demonstrators take the streets to call for an end to quarantine, an urgent reopening the economy, and the return of over…

God’s Daily Briefings: Religious Leadership in a Global Pandemic

TILAK PAREKH The Voice of God Religious leaders possess immense power and influence. Believers may listen to government ministers or public health officials, but, above all, they place their faith in the religious elite. For many religious people, their quotidian lives are determined almost entirely by their faith. From mundane, banal activities such as what…

Memes, Migrants, And The Epidemiological Imagination

JOSH BABCOCK As COVID-19 escalated to officially pandemic proportions early this year, Coronavirus-prevention advice began circulating via Facebook and WhatsApp in Singapore. Mostly in English and Mandarin, the advice ranged from speculative antiviral uses of onions—“Slice an onion and leave it in the middle of the room overnight so it absorbs all the viruses”—to more…

Pandemic Predictions- The World Post-Covid-19 for Indian Females

DEVASHREE JUVEKAR As the entire world is grappling with the novel coronavirus pandemic, many experts and researchers have predicted a number of social and economic changes that the world would undergo post-pandemic, ranging from an increase in nationalism and decrease in globalization to changes in food choices and a global hunger crisis. I am going…

Mental Health Avenues Amidst A Global Pandemic: Conceptualising The Biosocial Medical Framework Within Urban ‘Green Spaces’

TIFFANY LOERA Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. This is my morning mantra. As I lay in my bed in the early hours of the morning, I am aware of the limited capacity I have to walk the short distance to my workspace. Like clockwork, the strict schedule I have carefully designed for maximum productivity, relentlessly and…

Sociological Reflections In Times Of Change And Uncertainty: Managing Risk, Trying To Adapt And Being Creative

CATARINA DELAUNAY Covid-19 crisis is not democratic in the sense that it affects everyone equally regardless of age, gender, class, ethnicity or geographic area where one lives, as some try to defend. Containment measures were imposed based on the life style and living conditions of the middle class, without considering those with less capacity and…

Sociological Reflections In Times Of Change And Uncertainty: Surveillance, Control And Punishment

CATARINA DELAUNAY On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on Covid-19. Several countries, across the world, including Portugal, declared a state of emergency, and have been taking several measures, with a strong impact both on people’s daily lives, and in various sectors of the economy and society. Being a…

The ‘Invisible Enemy’: A Critical Look at the Use of Military Metaphors and Anthropomorphisation During The COVID-19 Pandemic

JAMES FOTHERBY In mid-March, before becoming infected with Coronavirus, Boris Johnson declared that his government must act like “any wartime government” while facing a deadly “enemy”. During Johnson’s admission to the Intensive Care Unit in early-April, Michael Gove stated that the Cabinet Office would continue to “marshal all the resources of government in the fight…

Trench Warfare of Mindsets in Switzerland’s Approach to The COVID-19 Pandemic

HÜSLER SAMIRA-SALOMÉ & PYTHON ANNICK MARIA ILDIKO On 26 March 2020, the Federal Council declared an extraordinary situation in accordance with the Epidemic Act and issued a set of measures, including the closure of all the shops, restaurants, bars and other leisure facilities. Businesses at which the recommended distance cannot be maintained (e.g. hairdressing salons)…

COVID-19 Stories: How PhD Students are Experiencing Disruption And Uncertainty During The Pandemic

VAS PAPAGEORGIOU, WILL KENDALL AND LIDIA LUNA PUERTA We are graduate students at an extraordinary time. At the early stage of our careers, we were still learning how to live and work in the world of academia. Now, as the COVID-19 outbreak unfolds across the world, students globally are having to adapt to yet another…

Equine PPID Connectivities and Covid-19: 2020 Journal Reflections

KIM CROWDER March 8th. I book a routine vet visit for my geriatric rescue pony’s annual vaccinations and hormone-monitoring test. March 22nd. In line with pandemic protocols the vet cancels all non-emergency equine visits. March 24th. It’s suddenly warm. The pony looks unwell, overheating in his super-shaggy winter coat. The grass is growing fast, flushed…

“In Beijing They Eat Snakes And Then Pig Out”: Xenophobia, Geopolitics, and the Role of the Italian Far-Right in Covid-19 Constructions of China

FRANCESCO FLORIS Well before the high rate of infections grew and lay citizens became affected by COVID-19 in Italy, fear, news from China, fake news, and the statements of some politicians, were already circulating. These circumstances lead to a growing wave of diffidence towards the Chinese communities in the country, culminating with acts of racial…

Why do we talk about Eurobonds? Or: The Big Division in the Euro Area

INGA AENNE FELDMANN The corona virus health crisis sent many countries of the world in a lock down to protect their elderly and vulnerable from severe illness and death. With the pandemic epicentre reaching Europe in March 2020, also the European Union (EU) Member States (MS) shut down – but while most of them are…

A Lesson In Composure: Learning From Migrants In Times Of Covid-19

CHRISTIAN UNGRUHE The Covid-19 pandemic teaches a number of painful lessons. Many people, persistently deprived from access to adequate health care, housing, education or jobs, pay a devastating price for structural inequalities. For some, think of refugees on the road or holding out in camps, political measures such as lockdowns may even worsen their already…

“Getting Closer” Through Art: Facebook and Turning to Art in The Time of Covid-19

MANUELA PELLEGRINO How to feel close when physically distant? This is, of course, not a new dilemma in itself; indeed, people who live far from their loved ones have long relied on technological solutions: video-calls with multiple participants, for instance, re-establish a ‘visual’ connection, albeit deprived of tactile sensory perception. Social distancing, however, has become…

In The Midst Of COVID 19, The Search For The Missing In Mexico Continues

CAMILA RUIZ SEGOVIA Night had fallen at the coastal state of Veracruz, Mexico, when a group of men kidnapped Luis Guillermo, 29. He was an independent businessman by day and a DJ by night, according to Lucía, his mother. The date was June 28, 2013. Nearly seven years after he went missing, his whereabouts remains…

Experiencing Corona Virus in the Andes

LUCIA STAVIG A mix of huaynos, cumbia, and bird song still greet the sun in the Andean community in which I am riding out the month-long quarantine. At first glance, it might seem that not much has changed for this community in the age of COVID-19. Women in polleras still take their pigs and sheep…