On the occasion of the EU-Africa Summit in February this year in Brussels, several African Heads of State and public health experts were traveling to Europe. BioNTech used the opportunity to invite the presidents of Senegal Macky Sall, Paul Kagame…
Radically Good. Reformulating Healing and Care Practices in Times of Crisis
Report on the international conference “Radical Health. Doing Medicine, Health Care, and Anthropology of the Good” organized by the Association for Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM), the Medical Anthropology Working Group (AGMA) of the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA), and the Institute…
China: The Unpopular Winner of the Year in Pandemic Times. Resilience in China under COVID-19 (#WitnessingCorona)
If coronavirus is a game with all the countries as players who were dragged into it involuntarily, China seems to be the unpopular winner of the year (Spross 2021). Looking back at 2020, COVID-19 unleashed a global pandemic that swept…
Instagram as a Catalyst for Digital Gemeinschaft During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Vietnam (#WitnessingCorona)
In early 2020, news articles documenting a possible coronavirus pandemic began appearing in countries worldwide, and while concerns were rife, few could have envisaged that so many of society’s taken-for-granted routines and norms would endure the disruption so visibly…
The Militarisation of the COVID-19 Response in South Africa (#WitnessingCorona)
The imponderabilia of our COVID times As medical anthropologists well versed in the social grammar of infectious disease, the global spread of the coronavirus has pressed us to the edges of history. Writing from the centre, the ground keeps…
Emerging from Lockdown: “Moral pioneering” in Everyday Practices for Women in Europe and North America (#WitnessingCorona)
As Europe and North America begin to ease lockdown restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, this essay looks broadly at how people, especially women, assess and justify risk and the morality of social contact, and the actions they take as…