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…
Tag: medical anthropology
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…
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…
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…
Biosocial Medical Anthropology in the Time of Covid-19. New Challenges and Opportunities.
SAHRA GIBBON, LEWIS DALY, AARON PARKHURST, CARRIE RYAN, GUL DENIZ SALALI AND ALEX TASKER As the events of the past few months concerning the coronavirus have unfolded across the globe, those of us who teach on a newly established MSc in Biosocial Medical Anthropology have become acutely aware of the immediate relevance of this unique…
“Stay Safe, Shirley. I’ll See You Shortly!”
Conducting Fieldwork with People with Dementia Before, and (Hopefully) After the Pandemic. CRISTINA DOUGLAS 12th March 2020 I look forward to Thursdays. It’s the day when Sarah and Bonnie, her Labradoodle therapet, visit the care home where I conduct my fieldwork. For the last two months, I’ve been regularly visiting Golden Age Care Home for…
Care Labour and Isolation in Italy: New Ethical Challenges Part Two
FRANCESCO DIODATI In the last post, I wrote about the effects of the COVID-19 emergency on elderly care in Italy and the new ethical challenges that emerged in one of the most aged countries in the world under the current crisis. I discussed how the main issue has become how to balance the risk of…
Care Labour and Isolation in Italy: New Ethical Challenges Part One
FRANCESCO DIODATI Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, I’ve decided to make a report on the effects of isolation politics on care labour in Italy, starting from the way the new scenario was reshaping my ethnographic research on elder care in Emilia-Romagna. Emilia-Romagna is one of the northern regions most affected by contagion and…
Stuck Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Risk Assessment and Ethical Dilemmas in the Time of Covid-19
The View From The Front Line As Osteopath/Medical Anthropologist MARIA LARRAIN A week ago, the diary started to look unusually quiet but not surprising giving how the news about coronavirus was unfolding. I had expected that we may have to close if a full lockdown was enforced and started to look into taking video consultations…
Coronavirus- Is this our Microbiopolitical Moment?
DARREN OLLERTON Despite following the early emergence of coronavirus with zeal — a combination of intellectual intrigue and morbid fascination with the science fiction potential of pandemic — it took me some time to fully digest the wholesale impact of the current contagion. I can’t deny that this may also have been somewhat facilitated by…
Same Virus, Different Temporalities: Anticipations From Mexico
LAURA MONTESI 21st of March – Oaxaca, Mexico – Day 5 of voluntary quarantine It’s the 21st of March and the official epidemiological record in Mexico reports 203 confirmed cases of Covid-19, 606 suspicious cases, and 2 deaths. Compared with the 47,021 cases of people detected with SARS-Cov-2 in Italy or the 19,980 in Spain…
Grasping for Unity in a Divided Britain: Ageism, Brexit-Era Politics & the COVID-19 ‘Boomer Remover’
REBECCA IRONS On the 19th March, the day before Boris Johnson ordered restaurants closed, I walked past the window of a packed Wagamama. The day that it had been announced that London would be facing lockdown, tube stations would be closing, and the UK had reached a state of emergency…and there, in that Wagamama, was…
Connections During Coronavirus: From Cuba to Brazil
CLAUDIA FONSECA It hit us with unexpected suddenness, just as it did most other people. José and I had been taking the public buses all that week of the Medical Anthropology conference in Cuba. We’d chosen to stay in our private hostel, located in a working-class district near the center of Havana instead of going…
COVID-19 in Cuba: Some Reflections At The Beginning Of The Crisis.
SAHRA GIBBON I have just returned from the Society for Medical Anthropology meeting in Havana which went ahead just days before the bans and restrictions on travel intensified. Going to Cuba after nearly a 12 year absence was not only an opportunity to reflect personally on the changes that have happened there since my last…
