This article aims to reflect on how dying and the perception of death in the COVID-19 pandemic have changed in Piedmont (Italy). It explores how the relatives have been deprived of the possibility of accompanying the corpses and practicing…
Ideological Closure, Austerity and National Health Service Reforms: How do UK healthcare bureaucrats close down the political space available for ethical debate of budgets, reforms and their consequences?
For my PhD research, I spent a year doing ethnographic fieldwork in Greater Manchester, with political activists campaigning against cuts and privatisation in the National Health Service (NHS), the UK’s public healthcare system. In this blog I focus on what…
Recovery Adjourned: Curative Belonging between Cameroon and Germany
The point of departure of my fieldwork and the cornerstone of my future Master’s thesis is an event of a personal crisis. Shortly after the completely unexpected death of a close friend of my partner and me, we both tried…
CfP „Radical Health: Doing Medicine, Health Care, and Anthropology of the Good“ (Berlin, 2-4 October 2020)
In contemporary times of proliferating neoliberalization, augmenting socio-economic disparity, environmental degradation, and political struggles around identities and belonging, health and well-being are becoming increasingly fragile. Entangled economic, ecological, social, cultural, and political factors affect people’s living environments and professional worlds…
Where is my mind? Ecologies of healing and care in more-than-human worlds
With your feet on the air and your head on the ground Try this trick and spin it, yeah Your head will collapse But there’s nothing in it And you’ll ask yourself Where is my mind? Where is my mind?…
“Care in Crisis: Ethnographic Perspectives on Humanitarianism” – Conference Report
Introduction Care is an intrinsic part of ordinary everyday life and a key foundation of social belonging. Encompassing both social practices and emotional ties (Drotbohm & Alber 2015), care defines and creates relationships and, according to the new kinship studies,…