Somatosphere welcomes you to the June edition of “In the Journals.” Scroll through our monthly round up of new research across anthropology, STS and social science journals.
Efua Prah
This paper discusses the racialized historical trajectories through which current health inequities are sustained in South Africa’s health system. While current discussions recognize these inequalities, few have recognized a missing element—disaggregated data based on racial demographic indicators—that is critical to better understanding why these inequalities persist. Drawing on maternal health data, the paper highlights how race is both ontologically and practically invisibilized in demographic health records, undermining targeted health care interventions. The absence of disaggregated statistical data that indicate racial difference regarding health outcomes hinders any meaningful gains in transforming the maternal health landscape in South Africa. By situating maternal health inequalities within a broader framework of historic violence and racialized power structures, this paper calls for a critical reckoning with how race continues to shape access to and experiences of maternal health care in South Africa.
What’s Birth Got to Do With It? Skepticism, Voice, and Race at a Midwives’ Vigil in London
Caroline Bazambanza
This paper argues that interactions between midwives and allied birth workers “off the clock” reveal diffuse processes of racialization in voice, speech, and visual signs in political spaces. Ethnographically attending to a small demonstration (“the vigil”) staged by midwives in London, England, and the preparation events, it analyzes the production of “white public spaces” that protect privilege by obscuring “negative realities” of white complicity in racism. With “incommunicability” and “raciolinguistics,” this paper provides an analysis of the words, signs, and relationships communicating the negotiation of “competing crises” on the ground. Responding to the characterization of race and racism as “silent things” in the British context, I propose skepticism as a salient register in contexts of competing knowledge or divergent points of view: It can breed uncertainties about the intent or effect of political struggles when race is sidelined or silenced.
Nils Graber & Yves-Marie Rault-Chodankar
The collaboration between the Cuban Centre of Molecular Immunology (CIM) and the Indian firm Biocon challenges conventional understandings of technology transfer. Initiated in 2003, the joint venture was a unique experiment in South–South biopharmaceutical collaboration. It brought into relation two distinct innovation regimes: Cuba’s public health–oriented model, closely tied to the state and its medical diplomacy, and India’s market-driven biopharmaceutical industry. However, both regimes were animated by postcolonial aspirations for technoscientific emergence in the Global South. The partnership ultimately dissolved, as structural tensions and divergent industrial objectives proved difficult to reconcile. But its apparent failure was also productive. For CIM, it opened access to resources lacking in Cuba and enabled clinical trials on a wider population. For Biocon, it offered research, development, and manufacturing expertise that supported its rise in the global biosimilar market. Drawing on interviews with key actors in Cuba and India, this study situates the partnership within broader debates on innovation regimes, postcolonial science, and the inequalities that shape the global biopharmaceutical economy. The article shows how South–South collaborations, even when framed as alternatives to asymmetric North–South models, remain entangled in (bio)capitalist logics while still opening possibilities for reimagining technological exchange beyond dominant North/South narratives.
The pharmaceutical commons: conceptual clarifications, a practice example, and a research agenda
Susi Geiger & Tineke Kleinhout-Vliek
Recent technological developments in the pharmaceutical sector have fuelled rapid price increases of advanced therapies, but they have also triggered renewed efforts around developing alternative modes of organizing pharmaceutical research and deployment. Examples include patient- and clinician-driven innovation, hospital-based manufacturing, and drug repurposing. While these developments offer a seam of fresh scholarship in the sociology of pharmaceuticals, they are accompanied by an increase in conceptual blurriness. We bring clarity and a consistent conceptual vocabulary to one crucial dynamic: the pharmaceutical commons. We draw together the landscape of current pharmaceutical commoning activities and some of the very fertile current commons scholarship. On this basis, we propose nine characteristics of pharmaceutical commons across three overarching aspects: (1) Property: open, mutualized, based on conditional sharing; (2) Governance: legitimized, based on bounded membership, and with a needs-driven agenda; and (3) Practices: people-led, fair in distributing (financial) risks and benefits, and accountable. In distilling scholarship and current experiments, illustrated by an empirical account of a pharmaceutical commons, we formulate a research agenda to spark a joint-up conversation on this vital topic.
Fredrik Nyman
This article explores how local patient support groups can function as sites of everyday activism within a neoliberal healthcare landscape. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with two Breathe Easy groups for individuals with chronic respiratory illness in North East England, the study examines how practices of care, peer support, and informal advocacy subtly challenge the structural marginalisation of chronically ill populations. While members do not explicitly identify as activists, their collective actions—from lobbying for local services to redistributing medical resources—demonstrate grassroots agency grounded in biosocial solidarity and relational care. Drawing on concepts such as biosociality, radical care, and everyday activism, the article shows how these groups redistribute epistemic authority not through protest, but through sustained, care-led micro-politics. Amidst austerity and healthcare reform, their efforts prefigure alternative models of community health governance and challenge dominant narratives of passive patienthood. Navigating insider–outsider roles, these groups create hybrid spaces of patient participation, community action, and informal health provision. The study offers a conceptual framework for understanding support groups as platforms for slow, collective activism operating through relational power. In doing so, it broadens understandings of activism, citizenship, and agency in the context of chronic illness and a restructuring welfare state.
Patrick Bieler
Based on long-term ethnographic research in a neighbourhood in Berlin, Germany, this article develops processes of encountering as an ecological concept for analysing the relations between urban life and mental health. Drawing on go-alongs and qualitative interviews, I show how weak and seemingly absent social relations, oftentimes elusive material elements and the inherent normativity of social situations are ubiquitous components of urban life, and highlight their importance for mental health. Processes of encountering functions as an analytical heuristic that describes how urban environments emerge in the entangling of these three components, and grasps the affective qualities emanating from these entanglements. The concept advances an ontological account of the urban and locates mental health ecologically: Rather than treating urban environments as stable entities ‘out there’ or focusing these elements as isolated variables, the concept empirically unpacks how complex urban environments are constituted, and understands mental health as an effect of these constitution processes.
Dana Ahern
This paper examines the treatment of transgender patients in the United States as they move into the complex simultaneous space of patient and consumer, exploring the emergence of the ‘difficult patient’ of transgender medicine. Described by surgeons as a disgruntled, unsatisfied customer, surgeons attempt to wrangle the ‘difficult patient’ from posting bad reviews and sharing cautionary tales, even as these same patients face medical malpractice and/or simply attempt to provide resources to transgender communities trying to carefully navigate the medical system. This paper unpacks an emerging billion-dollar industry in the U.S. that also draws international patients, as it provides and profits from an urgently needed but increasingly restricted resource. Examining discourse in medical journals, customer reviews, and professional profiles of surgeons, this paper critically challenges how the “difficult patient” of transgender medicine becomes defined through its threat to profits and to professional reputations.
Maria Temmes, Elina Helosvuori & Venla Oikkonen
An ongoing shift toward multidisciplinary pain care and growing emphasis on non-pharmaceutical treatment are reshaping the parameters of how chronic pain is assessed and treated. The article explores these ongoing changes through a chronic gynecological illness, endometriosis. Drawing on interviews with clinicians, people with endometriosis and endometriosis activists in Finland, we ask how pain is understood and its treatment envisioned in cases where the standard course of endometriosis treatment does not alleviate pain. The analysis shows that difficult-to-treat endometriosis pain is conceptualized differently at different clinical sites including endometriosis clinics, pain clinics, emergency care, and primary care settings. We demonstrate that pain treatment in endometriosis is not fixed but constitutes an object of ongoing negotiations between the patient and clinician. In particular, tensions arise when patients move between the siloed clinical sites, and their pain is re-evaluated and approached through different epistemic framings of pain and pain care.
Making pain social: developing a critical social science of pain
Jen Tarr
Recent developments in pain science, buttressed by findings from neuroimaging, have supported the view that pain is a thoroughly biopsychosocial phenomenon, one that is differentially distributed in inequitable ways. However, the social aspects of pain are still poorly articulated and understood. While pain science has struggled to make sense of what is social, social science has sometimes relied too heavily on the phenomenological experience of pain as isolating. Drawing on key insights from the developing neuroscience of pain – that pain is a response to threat, and that chronic pain can result from central sensitization of the nervous system – I argue that social scientists can productively engage with pain research by developing a critical social science of pain. This social science should engage with pain as a communicative process through which to learn about threat; understand how social inequity may produce and exacerbate pain; and look critically at how the methodologies used to measure and document pain will also shape it. This includes critical engagement with our own social science methods for knowing about pain. Undertaking this work is crucial to producing relevant and contemporary research on pain, particularly in a sociopolitical context where inequality is rising.
Data roles: youth mental health outcome measures and the young people who defy them
Rosie Jones McVey
Health measurement shapes peoples’ political relationships with the state, with services, with one another, and with oneself. But what are the political dynamics at play when people can’t/won’t/don’t have health measurements taken? And what is the political predicament of those whose needs, values, and experiences don’t fit within the measures available? This paper presents a case study of one youth mental health service’s efforts to improve their collection of outcome measures, and reinvigorates the concept of ‘sick role’ to describe young people as defying the ‘data roles’ expected of them. The concept of data roles draws attention to the political dynamics of measurement on two interlinked scales: the interpersonal, embodied measurement encounter; and the systemic care-measurement assemblage. In the case reported here, measures are hard to collect given the ‘routinized intimacy’ required, and the restrictive, normative, individualised understandings of need inscribed within available measures. Yet defying measurement equates to a marginalised, precarious political position for young people and for the services that support them. In sum, the data roles expected of young people ask too much of them, and do too little for them.
The Erin Brockovich Chemical and the Construction of Toxic Uncertainty in Norman, Oklahoma
Daniel Mains
In 2010, the Environmental Working Group announced that Norman, Oklahoma’s tap water had the highest levels in the nation of what it called the “Erin Brockovich Chemical” – hexavalent chromium. Erin Brockovich famously investigated Pacific Gas & Electric’s contamination of drinking water with hexavalent chromium. For many Norman residents, the Erin Brockovich Chemical immediately established a narrative of industrial pollution, cancer clusters, and government coverups. The encounter between the Erin Brockovich Chemical narrative and the city of Norman’s struggles with hexavalent chromium complicates scholarly understandings of toxic uncertainty. Scholars have documented the intentional production of toxic uncertainty – the creation of doubt about the health implications of contaminants that companies rely on for profit. The Erin Brockovich Chemical narrative, however, reveals an additional dimension of uncertainty that is rooted in expectations of contamination. The Norman case demonstrates that NGOs, bloggers, and environmental activists also contribute to toxic uncertainty by advancing powerful narratives about industrial contamination. City of Norman employees advanced a counter-narrative, noting that Norman’s tap water meets Environmental Protection Agency regulations and hexavalent chromium occurs naturally in the local aquifer, but this did little to create confidence in the city’s tap water. As I researched Norman’s water supply, I increasingly struggled to reach any form of certainty regarding the toxicity of hexavalent chromium in the tap water. The film Erin Brockovich offers surprising clues about how to alleviate this uncertainty by drawing attention to how toxic uncertainty is related to the struggle to care for others. In a context of late industrialism in which trust in state expertise has significantly eroded, Erin Brockovich demonstrates that access to care can provide the time to research, organize, and engage in policy debates.
Collaborer pour quelles transformations de santé et de société? Tensions situées, négociations des postures et hybridité des savoirs
Collaborating to bring which changes to healthcare and society? Situated tensions, negotiation of postures and hybridity of knowledge
Ibtissem Ben Dridi et Rose-Anna Foley
Au croisement d’enjeux sociaux, professionnels, politiques et scientifiques, les expériences collaboratives se multiplient dans le champ de la santé. Ce numéro d’Anthropologie & Santé questionne les formes de collaboration entre chercheur·se·s en sciences humaines et sociales, des professionnelles de différents domaines et des usager·ère·s en santé. À l’heure où les postures critiques engagées tendent à remplacer les approches interprétatives en sciences sociales, il s’agit d’analyser les collaborations à la lumière des visées de justice épistémique et des dispositifs de co-construction des connaissances au sein de la recherche. Les articles de ce numéro tentent d’appréhender, de manière réflexive, les effets de telles approches sur la manière de faire de la recherche en sciences sociales et sur les pratiques des sciences de la santé. Ils cherchent à cerner quels positionnements émergent dès lors qu’il est question de faire tant de la recherche « avec » des chercheurses et professionnelles d’autres domaines que de la recherche critique et/ou participative « au service de » populations invisibilisées et défavorisées. En définitive, ce numéro interroge ce que les collaborations permettent de produire comme types de connaissances et de récits, les juxtapositions et intégrations de savoirs hybrides, les liens entre savoirs (expérientiels, professionnels, scientifiques) et production, ou encore, les transformations sociales proposées voire « recommandées » relatives aux soins et à la santé, y compris lorsque des chercheurses de différentes disciplines travaillent séparément sur des questions similaires avec des approches jugées inconciliables.
At the intersection of social, professional, political, and scientific issues, collaborative initiatives are on the rise in the field of health. This issue of Anthropology & Santé examines the forms of collaboration between researchers in the humanities and social sciences, professionals from various fields, and healthcare users. At a time when critical stances are increasingly replacing interpretive approaches in the social sciences, the aim is to analyze these collaborations in light of the goals of epistemic justice and mechanisms for the co-construction of knowledge within research. The articles in this issue attempt to reflectively examine the effects of such approaches on the practice of social science research and on health science practices. They seek to identify the positions that emerge when it comes to conducting research “with” researchers and professionals from other fields, as well as critical and/or participatory research “in the service of” marginalized and disadvantaged populations. Ultimately, this issue examines the types of knowledge and narratives that collaborations enable, the juxtapositions and integrations of hybrid knowledge, the links between forms of knowledge (experiential, professional, scientific) and production, as well as the transformations proposed or even “recommended” in relation to healthcare and health, including when researchers from different disciplines work separately on similar issues using approaches considered irreconcilable.
Neither fully inside nor fully outside: Making sense of interdisciplinarity between health, humanities and social sciences
Niels Ulrich, Milena Maglio, Livia Velpry, Bernard Pachoud et Margot Morgiève
L’interdisciplinarité entre sciences humaines et sociales et médecine, voire avec des disciplines qu’on catégoriserait comme relevant de la santé, est aujourd’hui largement promue dans la recherche de ces domaines. Mais quels effets a-t-elle sur les parcours des chercheur·se·s qui s’engagent dans des collaborations interdisciplinaires ? En s’appuyant sur les résultats d’une enquête mobilisant des méthodes qualitatives, cet article met en lumière différents effets de l’engagement dans des collaborations interdisciplinaire sur les trajectoires des chercheur·se·s. L’étude de trois parcours contrastés permet de penser la diversité des configurations d’« entrée » dans l’interdisciplinarité. Parmi les modalités concrètes de construction des collaborations, la co-construction des projets de recherche agit comme un élément déterminant de l’engagement dans les collaborations interdisciplinaires, parmi d’autres rapports de pouvoir et de légitimité. Les engagements interdisciplinaires transforment les rapports que les chercheur·se·s entretiennent avec leur discipline d’origine, entre continuités revendiquées, déplacements assumés et zones de tension. Ces différents enjeux, pouvant parfois créer des situations d’inconfort, sont cependant moteurs de créativité dans la recherche pour celles et ceux qui s’y engagent.
Interdisciplinarity between the humanities, social sciences and medicine is now widely promoted in health research. But what impact does it have on the careers of researchers who engage in interdisciplinary collaboration? Based on the results of a research project using qualitative methods, this article highlights the different effects of involvement in interdisciplinary collaborations on the career paths of researchers. The study of three contrasting trajectories provides an insight into the diversity of configurations of ‘entry’ into interdisciplinarity. Among the concrete ways in which collaborations are constructed, the co-construction of research projects acts as a determining factor in the commitment to interdisciplinary collaborations, among other relationships of power and legitimacy. Interdisciplinary involvement transforms the relationship that researchers have with their original discipline, between asserted continuities, assumed displacements and areas of tension. These different issues, which can sometimes create uncomfortable situations, are nonetheless a driving force for creativity in research for those involved.
“Fitting square pegs into round holes”: Social sciences and humanities in the service of health research in French Guiana
Claire Gatti, Leslie Alcouffe, Théo Blaise, Carlotta Carboni, Diane-Mica Malivert, Loïc Epelboin, Alice Tosi et Marc-Alexandre Tareau
La Guyane, territoire français d’Amérique du Sud, se situe au carrefour de multiples systèmes de soins – biomédecine, phytothérapies et ethnomédecines – qui se complètent, se chevauchent et s’opposent. La santé s’y pense ainsi au-delà des seules approches biologiques ou épidémiologiques, en tenant compte des représentations socioculturelles qui orientent les comportements de soin.
Cet article explore les effets de l’intégration croissante des sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) dans la recherche et les pratiques de santé, à partir des savoirs expérientiels mutualisés d’un collectif de chercheur·se·s ayant exercé en Guyane entre 2021 et 2025. Portée par l’UA 17 « Santé des Populations en Amazonie » du CHU de Guyane, l’étude mobilise observations, retours d’expérience et échanges interdisciplinaires afin d’identifier et discuter collégialement des thématiques récurrentes.
Les résultats montrent que l’intégration des SHS favorise le dialogue thérapeutique et prolonge les approches biomédicales, en éclairant les logiques sociales et culturelles du soin. Plusieurs obstacles persistent toutefois : prédominance des méthodologies quantitatives, difficultés de reconnaissance institutionnelle et biais épistémologiques. La recherche en santé en Guyane s’attache précisément à documenter et dépasser ces limites en structurant le dialogue entre les savoirs. Si ces dynamiques sont particulièrement pertinentes localement, elles constituent aussi un laboratoire d’initiatives pour repenser, à l’échelle nationale, les cadres de recherche et les pratiques cliniques vers davantage de pertinence et d’efficience.
French Guiana, a French territory in South America, lies at the crossroads of multiple healthcare systems – biomedicine, phytotherapies, and ethnomedicines –which complement, overlap or sometimes conflict. Health is therefore examined beyond purely biological or epidemiological perspectives, taking into account the cultural and social representations that shape health behaviors.
This article explores the effects of the growing integration of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) into healthcare practices and health research, drawing on the shared experiential knowledge of researchers working in French Guiana between 2021 and 2025. Led by the Institute of Health and Population in Amazonia at the University Hospital Center of French Guiana, the study mobilizes observations, feedback from field experiences, and interdisciplinary exchanges to identify and discuss recurrent issues in dialogue with international literature.
Results show that SSH integration enhances therapeutic dialogue and extends biomedical approaches by clarifying the social and cultural logics shaping care practices. However, several challenges remain, including the dominance of quantitative frameworks, institutional recognition issues, and epistemological biases. Ongoing initiatives in French Guiana seek to overcome these limits by strengthening dialogue across knowledge systems. While particularly relevant locally, these dynamics also provide a laboratory for rethinking research frameworks and clinical practices at a national scale toward greater relevance and effectiveness.
Considering epistemic hierarchies in context : Ecology of knowledge and cognitive justice in co-construction processes within health and social care
Baptiste Godrie
Cet article analyse les concepts d’écologie des savoirs et de justice cognitive comme analyseurs des processus de co-constructions des interventions sociales et des soins de santé. La première partie de cet article problématise ces concepts en situant leur origine dans des réflexions Nord-Sud et leur pertinence pour penser des enjeux d’actualité, notamment la participation des personnes usagères et patientes de services de santé, en empruntant des exemples de l’intervention sociale et de la santé. La deuxième partie interroge les contextes favorables à l’émergence d’écologies des savoirs, la perspective sur la justice cognitive invitant à se demander de quels points de vue ces différents savoirs et expériences sont appréciés. La troisième partie tire des conséquences de ces réflexions du point de vue de l’action : si l’écologie des savoirs rejette les hiérarchies de savoirs issues des systèmes de domination anciens et actuels, elle propose une action portée par le souci des conséquences qui permet de reconsidérer la hiérarchie des savoirs en contexte.
This article analyzes the concepts of knowledge ecology and cognitive justice as analyzers of co-construction processes in social intervention and health care. The first part of the article problematizes these concepts, situating their origins in North-South reflections and their relevance to thinking about current issues, notably the involvement of users and patients, using examples from social intervention and health care. The second part looks at the contexts conducive to the emergence of knowledge ecologies; the cognitive justice perspective invites us to ask from what points of view these different types of knowledge and experience are valued. The third part draws consequences from these reflections from the point of view of action: while knowledge ecology rejects the hierarchies of knowledge arising from old and current systems of domination, it proposes a hierarchy of knowledge in context that enables action driven by a concern for consequences.
Building community to promote health? Knowledge co-production and tensions within a mixed research community in France: the Capdroits initiative
Camille Carpentier, Hélène Chiron, Audrey Parron, Paul Véron, Chantal Bruno, Hind Maalal, Marie-Hélène Audier, Samir Boudrahem, Marika Lefki, Jean-Philippe Cobbaut, Arnaud Béal, Sandrine Amare et Benoît Eyraud
La démarche Capdroits s’est constituée en communauté mixte de recherche (CMR) réunissant personnes concernées par des situations de handicap ou de maladie, professionnels et chercheurs. Cet article analyse les dynamiques de co-production et de circulation des savoirs qui s’y développent. À partir d’un corpus documentaire et d’entretiens, il montre que la CMR s’appuie sur une pluralité de dispositifs participatifs, notamment les groupes locaux d’enquête et les Cap’Lab, organisant la mise en dialogue de savoirs hétérogènes, notamment par la pratique du récit. L’analyse met en évidence des processus de reconnaissance des savoirs expérientiels et des tensions liées à l’hétérogénéité des acteurs, à la fois entre et à l’intérieur des groupes d’appartenance. La CMR est discutée comme une communauté épistémique en mouvement, susceptible de produire des effets en termes d’empowerment et de santé.
Capdroits has been established as a Mixed Research Community (MRC) bringing together people living with disabilities or illness, professionals, and researchers. This article analyzes the dynamics of co-production and knowledge circulation that have emerged within this community. Drawing on a collection of documents and interviews, it shows that the MRC relies on a variety of participatory mechanisms, notably local research groups and Cap’Labs, which facilitate dialogue between diverse forms of knowledge, particularly through storytelling. The analysis highlights processes of recognition of experiential knowledge and tensions linked to the heterogeneity of actors, both between and within the groups to which they belong. The MRC is discussed as an epistemic community in motion, capable of producing effects in terms of empowerment and health.
Collaborative research and disability: challenges to be addressed and expectations to be avoided. Conflicts and debates between researchers and civil society in Morocco
Alvar Jones Sánchez
Dans le cadre d’une recherche dite « collaborative » menée au Maroc, nous avons expérimenté des conflits et des malentendus récurrents entre les différents acteurs engagés. Nous nous proposons dans cet article, de mener une analyse critique du processus collaboratif mis en œuvre. Revenir sur cette expérience nous permettra de détailler certains enjeux sociaux, idéologiques et institutionnels qui structurent et divisent le champ du handicap au Maroc. Le récit des différents conflits sera surtout l’occasion d’interroger les tensions et les écueils finalement assez fréquents de la démarche participative et de se questionner sur le rôle de la conflictualité dans ce type de recherche.
In the context of a so-called “collaborative” research project conducted in Morocco, we have experienced ongoing conflicts and misunderstandings between the various actors involved. In this article, we propose to conduct a critical analysis of the collaborative process implemented. Looking back on this experience will allow us to detail some social, ideological and institutional issues that structure and divide the disability field in Morocco. Recounting these conflictual situations will be an opportunity to examine the tensions and pitfalls that are ultimately quite common in participatory approach, and to question the role of conflictuality in this type of research.
When the knowledge of incarcerated people emerge: Intervention research in public health as an ethical space for reflexivity and negotiation
Clément Picot-Ngo, Léa Loubet, Morgane Michel, Joëlle Kivits et Karine Chevreul
Cet article examine la reconnaissance des savoirs d’expérience des personnes détenues dans le cadre du projet de recherche interventionnelle Tabapri, conduit entre décembre 2019 et décembre 2024. Son objectif était de réduire les méfaits liés au tabac au sein des établissements pénitentiaires français. À partir d’une étude qualitative reposant sur des entretiens semi-directifs avec des personnes détenues et des professionnel·le·s, puis des focus groupes de co-construction, il explore la manière dont les personnes incarcérées participent à repenser les interventions de santé publique dans le contexte contraint de la détention. En mettant en lumière les tensions entre logiques disciplinaires et objectifs de santé, l’article défend une approche située de la production de savoirs, attentive aux réalités vécues, aux capacités d’agir et aux aspirations des individus. Il suggère de considérer la recherche interventionnelle comme un espace éthique de négociation, permettant de préserver une dignité et une réflexivité collective malgré les contraintes du milieu carcéral.
This article examines the recognition of experiential knowledge among incarcerated individuals within the Tabapri interventional research project, conducted between December 2019 and December 2024, whose objective was to reduce tobacco-related harms in French prisons. Based on a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with incarcerated persons and professionals, followed by focus groups to co-construct the intervention, it explores how prisoners participate in rethinking public health interventions within the constrained context of detention. By highlighting the tensions between disciplinary logics and health objectives, the article advocates for a situated approach to knowledge production, one that is attentive to lived realities, the capacities for action, and the aspirations of individuals. It suggests considering intervention research as an ethical space for negotiation, allowing for the preservation of dignity and collective reflexivity despite the constraints of the carceral environment.
Se décaler du décalage ? La critique sociologique à l’épreuve de « terrains exemplaires »
Rethinking critical distance: Sociological critique and “exemplary field sites”
Iris Loffeier et Sébastien Saetta
La sociologie dans les champs de la vieillesse et de la psychiatrie donne généralement à voir des établissements repoussoirs, traversés par des mécanismes de domination. À partir du croisement de deux recherches de type ethnographique (l’une sur des établissements psychiatriques, l’autre sur des établissements pour personnes âgées), cet article porte, au contraire, sur les enjeux épistémologiques et politiques de l’enquête auprès de « terrains exemplaires ». Ces terrains reposent notamment la question des attentes vis-à-vis des opérations de décalage – critique ou non – propres à la perspective sociologique et des sciences humaines et sociales plus globalement. L’article vise à définir la notion d’exemplarité tout en mettant en évidence les spécificités de chacun des terrains d’enquête. Il revient sur les manières de « faire terrain » en lien avec la construction de l’objet, la spécificité des données recueillies ainsi que le parcours et les conditions de travail des chercheur·e·s. Il aborde enfin les dilemmes rencontrés par les auteur·e·s qui, tout en cherchant à satisfaire aux normes académiques, ont procédé à des déplacements épistémologiques propres à la relation à ces terrains exemplaires.
Sociological research in the fields of ageing and psychiatry generally tends to portray institutions as undesirable places shaped by mechanisms of domination. Drawing on the intersection of two ethnographic studies — one conducted in psychiatric institutions and the other in facilities for older adults — this article instead examines the epistemological and political stakes involved in conducting research in “exemplary field sites.” These field sites notably reopen the question of expectations regarding the distancing operations — whether critical or otherwise — that are characteristic of sociological perspectives and, more broadly, of the social sciences and humanities. The article seeks to define the notion of exemplary field sites while highlighting the specific features of each research site. It reflects on fieldwork practices in relation to the construction of the research object, the specific nature of the data collected, and the trajectories and working conditions of the researchers. Finally, it discusses the dilemmas encountered by the authors, who, while while remaining attentive to academic standards, also engaged in epistemological shifts shaped by their relationship to these exemplary field sites.
Navigating in between: Finding a distinct place for research within health and medico-social institutions
Silvia Rochet
L’article examine les enjeux liés à l’ambiguïté de la position ethnographique dans les sciences sociales, et plus particulièrement dans le champ de la santé, en s’intéressant à la manière dont cette position distincte et singulière – façonnée par les tractations et décalages qui se produisent dans le rapport à chaque terrain – a été négociée dans deux Centres thérapeutiques résidentiels (CTR) en addictologie. Cette ethnographie comparée présente les choix opérés entre refus des rôles assignés, mise en jeu et mise en partage, pour affiner une position caractérisée par un engagement dans « l’entre-deux » – importante dans des institutions travaillant auprès d’individus considérés comme déviants. Après avoir analysé les places (objectives) et les postures (subjectives) que j’ai pu construire sur les deux terrains au contact des attentes des divers enquêtés, j’entends montrer que l’expérience d’enquête n’est pas incompatible avec des formes de collaboration impliquant l’ensemble des protagonistes des institutions de soin.
This article examines the challenges associated with the ambiguity of the ethnographic position in the social sciences, more specifically within the field of health, focusing on how this distinct and context-specific place – shaped by the negotiations and shifts that occur in relation to each field site – was negotiated in two french residential treatment centers for substance use disorders (CTR). This comparative ethnography explores the choices made between rejecting assigned roles, engaging oneself, and sharing that engagement, in order to refine a stance characterized by a commitment in the “in-between”– a stance particularly important in institutions working with individuals commonly regarded as deviant. After analyzing the (objective) spaces and (subjective) stances I was able to establish in both field sites in response to the expectations of the various participants, I seek to demonstrate that the research process is not incompatible with forms of collaboration involving all key actors within healthcare institutions.
Amades, acteur historique de l’anthropologie de la santé francophone. Un retour pour le futur
Amades, a key historical actor in francophone medical anthropology. A look back to move forward
Alice Desclaux et Aline Sarradon-Eck
À l’heure où les institutions académiques sont menacées par les coupes budgétaires, les initiatives associatives sont attendues pour porter une part de la transmission des savoirs et du renouvellement de la réflexion qui assurent la vie scientifique d’une discipline. Mais le peuvent-elles dans la durée ? La question se pose pour l’association Amades (Anthropologie médicale appliquée au développement et à la santé), créée il y a 38 ans. Pour soutenir cette réflexion à un moment critique de son existence, nous présentons ici un retour sur la vie de l’association afin de suivre l’adage : « Savoir d’où l’on vient, permet de choisir où l’on va. »
At a time when academic institutions are threatened by budget cuts, grassroots initiatives are expected to play a role in the transmission of knowledge and the renewal of thought that sustains the scientific life of a discipline. But can they do so in the long term? This question arises for the Amades association (Medical Anthropology Applied to Development and Health), founded 38 years ago. To support this reflection at a critical juncture in its existence, we present here a retrospective of the association’s history, guided by the adage: “Knowing where you come from allows you to choose where you are going.”
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
Too Black for Care: Clinical Apperception, Anti-Blackness, and Narrative Aporia
Roy Cherian
In this essay, I read Seth Holmes and Maya Ponte’s work on “en-casement” alongside Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to argue that faculties of biomedical apperception cultivated through clinical training are symptomatic of an orientation to sensational experience developed within Enlightenment philosophy. Characterized by the negation of subjectivity, en-casement is an expression of the anti-Black tendency to dehumanize and dominate the other in ways that render the biomedical paradigm of healing impotent with regard to the redress of Black suffering. I problematize narrative medicine as an intervention to resist en-casement by drawing on Afropessimism to elaborate limits and failures derivative from its assumptive logic of a free, agentive, autonomous, and sovereign subject capable of dramatizing suffering. Insofar as paradigmatic social death renders Blackness as a site of absolute dereliction on the level of the Symbolic, Black suffering is aporetic to narrative in ways that make even the humanist intervention no less impotent as a mode of redress. Given that the totalizing violence of anti-Blackness forecloses the redress of Black suffering within humanist paradigms of healing writ large, from the biomedical to the narrative, I consider the unmet demand for ante-anti-Black forms of care from the framework of abolition medicine.
Exploring Barriers to Recovery Amongst Women with Psychosis: A Qualitative Secondary Analysis
Chizara Lock, Anna Lavis, Rosina Pendrous & Sheila Greenfield
Experiencing psychosis can impact all areas of a person’s life, causing significant changes to thoughts, perceptions, mood, behaviour, and sense of self. Details of the specific barriers to recovery experienced by women with psychosis and how these barriers may relate to both sex and gender remain unknown. To identify and conceptualise barriers to recovery, a qualitative secondary analysis was undertaken of 31 semi-structured interviews from a primary anthropological study focused on women’s lived experiences of a first episode of psychosis. Participants were recruited from Early Intervention Services in England, UK, between 2010 and 2015. Reflexive thematic analysis demonstrated various barriers to recovery, including internal conflicts with identity, the constraining of moral agency, inadequate support to address past traumas, structural factors, and stigma. Each of these barriers intersects with both sex and gender norms in a number of ways. Barriers to recovery must be addressed within mental health services to ensure that women have the best chance of moving forward with, and finding new meaning in, their lives after psychosis. Consideration of past experiences as well as normative gender roles, and other structural barriers is needed. Future research should develop and evaluate sex- and gender-specific interventions and consider integrating these into clinical practice.
Secular Mysticism: Entanglements of Science and Religion in Psychedelic Medicine
Aidan Seale-Feldman
Psychedelic medicine is a rapidly growing, billion-dollar industry poised to transform mental health care by incorporating spiritual experiences into clinical psychiatry. However, while the blending of psychiatry and mystical experience has long made this field unique, the blurred boundaries between science and spiritual practice have sparked increasing public debate. What does the entanglement of science and religion in psychedelic medicine reveal about the concerns, anxieties, and yearnings of our contemporary social and political moment? This article draws on an analysis of public discourse alongside ethnographic and qualitative research within a psychedelic church, a psychedelic-assisted therapy training program, and psychedelic science conferences in the United States. Through stories of the intertwining of science and religion, psychotherapy and mysticism, and attempts to distinguish between drugs, medicine, and sacraments in both clinical and non-clinical spaces, I argue that the mainstreaming of psychedelic medicine is not only shifting paradigms of mental health care but also creating new forms of secular mysticism in an age of disenchantment.
Anais Ogrizek & Arthur Felix
The French West Indies, particularly Martinique and Guadeloupe, are grappling with high rates of violence, particularly among youth, which might be deeply rooted in historical trauma from slavery. A significant portion of the population has experienced abuse and violence in early life, prompting researchers to explore the connection with attachment theory. The transatlantic slave trade tore families apart and disrupted the secure attachments that are essential for healthy emotional development. Children raised without stable caregivers often develop insecure attachment styles, which may have been passed down through generations. These unresolved attachment wounds often manifest as violence or self-destructive behavior. Without nurturing figures, both parental and societal, individuals may feel unworthy and angry. France, seen as the “abusive stepmother,” failed to provide meaningful support after emancipation to replace lost parental figures. Consequently, the population oscillates between a desire for recognition and a fear of further rejection. This emotional paradox mirrors the turbulence of adolescence, where independence is both craved and feared.
Daisy Couture
Functional disorders index the phenomenon in which someone is seriously ill—seizures, paralysis, complex pain—and yet no pathophysiological cause can be found. Traditionally, psychiatry has approached these disorders as instances of psychic distress manifesting through the body; however, multiple explanations currently compete within North American biomedicine and profound uncertainties, in diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis remain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with clinicians and patients with suspected functional disorders at a Canadian neuropsychiatric clinic, this paper approaches medicine as an epistemological, psychic, and affective space. Focusing specifically on the role of fluctuation in these disorders, I explore how transience becomes a problem in the clinic, sticking to patients and instigating both ethical and epistemological crises. Following the anxieties and desires of both patients and clinicians, I argue that, in the unease surrounding functional disorders, a cultural fantasy of medicine as a space of certainty emerges. I describe this fantasy as a collective imagination of medicine as a place that can, and should, provide access to objective answers and stable truths. Despite the inescapable uncertainties of medicine, I suggest that this fantasy haunts the clinic, fundamentally shaping the conditions of possibility for affliction and care, especially for patients with contested illnesses.
Phenomenology of Subjective Anomalous Experiences in People with Schizophrenia
Orlando Mondragón-Benítez, Lina Díaz-Castro, Fernando Corona-Hernández & Héctor Cabello-Rangel
Current diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia overlook the patient’s subjective experience, offering a simplified view. To describe the subjective anomalies in the personal experience of the “lived world” in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia via the EAWE interview (Examination of Anomalous World Experience). A qualitative study was conducted between January and May 2024. Semistructured interviews were conducted with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, using the thematic axes of the EAWE as a framework. Also, the interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis using ATLAS.ti.v24 software. We interviewed five patients, three men and two women, aged between 18 and 46. The main narrative focused on religious and sexual delusions involving God, the Virgin Mary, or the Holy Spirit, within the context of “Existential Orientation.” Sexual experiences were identified as an emerging category in the interview content. In the “Space and Objects” domain, participants reported hallucinations and blurred vision. The “time and events” domain showed a perception of slowness. The “Other Persons” domain included hypoattunement and paranoia. The “Language” domain revealed disorganized thinking. The “Atmosphere” domain covered déjà vu and emotional emptiness. Conclusions: Individuals may experience their place in the world and their intimate relationships in ways that significantly differ from usual.
Naru Fukuchi
Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, children in affected regions exhibited everyday behaviors that challenge conventional psychological interpretations. Drawing on ethnographic field observations conducted in schools, shelters, and temporary housing in Miyagi Prefecture between March 2011 and March 2012, with follow-up observations from 2012 to 2013, this study examines five vignettes of children’s post-disaster behaviors: hiding shoes, experiencing perceived scarcity related to school lunches, impulsive spending, giving away sweets and supplies, and engaging in silent play in communal spaces. The study aims to explore how these behaviors function as culturally and developmentally meaningful adaptations to disaster rather than as indicators of psychopathology. Analytically, these behaviors are interpreted through Japanese cultural frameworks—particularly group harmony (wa), reciprocal obligation (giri), and tacit social negotiation—alongside developmental theories of moral and cognitive growth in middle childhood. The findings suggest that these behaviors represent symbolic efforts by children to reassert moral agency, reconstruct temporal coherence, and restore social belonging in disrupted environments. The study concludes that culturally grounded, interpretive approaches are essential for understanding children’s post-disaster responses and for developing psychosocial interventions that recognize children as active agents in communal recovery.
Obafemi Jegede
Global mental health initiatives increasingly replace indigenous diagnostic categories with neuropsychiatric frameworks, framing this as anti-stigma progress. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic research with traditional healers in southwestern Nigeria and my position as both researcher and practitioner, this paper examines wèrè—the Yorùbá term for mental illness—to reveal fundamental ontological incommensurability between Western personalistic medicine and Yorùbá ecological-cosmological healing. Through linguistic analysis, micro-phenomenological interviews, and participant observation, I demonstrate that wèrè (wé = weave; ìrè = misery) diagnoses not individual brain dysfunction but unraveling of interconnections across bodily, environmental, ancestral, and spiritual domains. Yorùbá language grammatically locates cognitive processes beyond the brain—fear in chest (ayá), happiness in stomach (inú), focus in liver (ẹ̀dọ̀)—while recognizing environmental agents (rivers, trees, earth) as cognitive beings with agency requiring ritual attention. Therapeutic protocols operationalize “totalness” (gbogbo àyè), addressing not only persons but ecological-cosmological fields where disequilibrium occurs. Replacing wèrè with àrún ọpọ̀lọ (brain illness) constitutes epistemic violence, imposing personalistic ontology where ecological-cosmological ontology operates. Global mental health must recognize ontological pluralism: multiple valid healing sciences operating in incommensurable realities.
Dementia Diagnosis in Postapartheid South Africa: Providers’ Perspectives in Ethnographic Context
Casey Golomski
This article situates perspectives of South African social service and health care providers on older adults who live with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in ethnographic context. A review of findings from multi-year field research on long-term care and service provision for older adults in peri-urban Mpumalanga shows: racial disparities in accessing formal dementia diagnoses; aggression, forgetfulness, and wandering as the most reported symptoms of presumed dementia; and provider-reported ethno-racial differences in families’ diagnostic- and care-seeking practices. Findings corroborate evaluative research showing structural barriers to diagnosis and care. Hansen’s concept of diagnostic apartheid is expanded to explain how making sense of dementia is a sometimes partial, unequal, and racializing process; how older adulthood is reproduced as a structurally vulnerable position; and how historical consciousness of violence informs understandings and non-integration of neuropsychiatric and other models of dementia.
Sarah Memchout
Algeria’s mental health system still bears the scars of a colonial asylum regime that delegitimized indigenous cosmologies and ruptured ties among self, family, community, and the sacred. Drawing on psychological, anthropological, historical, and Islamic literatures, this article reframes those ties as a relational nucleus composed of three interlinked processes: persistent colonial mistrust, the level of dialogical safety that clinicians and communities can co-create, and the degree of spiritual consonance between therapeutic methods and local moral worlds. This article proposes an integrative framework that partners evidence-based psychology with Qur’anic ethics, Amazigh and maraboutic healing, and legal safeguards for patient rights. By rooting assessment and intervention in the relational nucleus, the model aims to deliver epistemic justice, cultural legitimacy, and clinical efficacy, positioning decolonized mental health care as both a therapeutic and societal imperative in postcolonial Algeria.
Pharmacological Microcontroversies and Civilizational Grammars Around ADHD in Chile
Esteban Radiszcz, Hugo Sir & Juan Pablo Pinto
This article examines pharmacological microcontroversies (PMC) surrounding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in Chile, based on a comparative, multisited ethnography in four educational contexts with differing socioeconomic and territorial profiles. Drawing on science and technology studies, microcontroversies studies, and Norbert Elias’s sociology of interdependence, the study conceptualizes ADHD as a situational configuration in which diagnosis and treatment emerge from interwoven relations among children, caregivers, educators, and health professionals. Data were collected through focused ethnography, open interviews, discussion groups, and triangular groups and analyzed via emergent content and sociological discourse analysis. Two axes structure PMC: (i) desired effect—stillness versus performance, and (ii) normative model—external conduct versus internal capacities. Across sites, pharmaceuticals were embedded in distinct “civilizational grammars” linking bodily regulation, moral expectations, and educational aims: from medication as protection against criminality to a “concentration pill” enabling hidden potential. These grammars mediate acceptance, rejection, or ambivalence toward medication crossed by other vectors as class and gender. ADHD-related debates thus constitute territorially situated normative arrangements, revealing how local trajectories and interdependencies shape diagnoses and the production of children’s interiority.
Paula Muhr
This paper examines how integrating clinical video recordings into the diagnostic encounter shapes a patient’s experience of functional seizures, a contested neurological condition historically known as hysterical attacks. Drawing on James Gibson’s theory of affordances and de Haan et al.’s account of how individuals perceive affordances based on their needs and concerns, the study analyzes a single in-depth interview with an 18-year-old patient recently diagnosed with functional seizures. It explores what viewing seizure videos with a doctor offers the patient—in clinical, epistemic, emotional, and experiential terms. The interview was subjected to a close reading, attending to how video-mediated communication of diagnosis intersects with the patient’s prior illness history, sociocultural context, and understanding of self. The analysis identified three positive (epistemic insight, diagnostic validation, trauma recollection) and three negative affordances (shame, vulnerability, resignation). These affordances emerged not only from what the videos showed but also from how they were viewed, framed, and interpreted during the diagnostic encounter. The study concludes that the videos’ affordances cannot be separated from an individual patient’s interpretive resources and biography. Clinical video viewing can generate meaningful diagnostic insights, but it also risks harm unless embedded within a carefully structured dialogical process that attends to the patient’s specificities.
Psychiatric Care and Legal Residency for Japan’s ‘Non-legal’ Immigrants
Selim Gokce Atici
This article examines the role of psychiatric care in the passage of unstably documented migrants and asylum seekers in Japan from detention-bound, dispossessed non-citizens with no recognized voice to medically certified claimants whose documented distress opens legal pathways to social protection. Psychiatric care is the only medical welfare provision in Japan for those without residential registry, who are required to verify severe mental illnesses to maintain provisional release permits (PRPs) that may defer detention and potential forced repatriation. Drawing on multisited ethnography through 18 months of fieldwork in Hanami Clinic—a neighborhood-based psychiatric clinic—and Tsunagi Shelter—a refuge for individuals lacking formal registration—I explore the intersection of clinical intervention, legal procedures, and everyday experiences of mental illness. Through these psychiatric care practices, multi-ethnic PRP holders cultivate new ways to articulate their detention experience and legal predicament, discursively broadening narratives about their psychological distress along with its potential for documentability. My argument is that psychiatric medicalization is helping create an important conceptual space for psychiatric legitimization of access to basic rights. Through its constitutive role in legal documentation and PRP justification, psychiatric mediation provides new discourses that legitimize moral claims to legal resolution.
Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine
Galia Plotkin-Amrami & Talia Fried
Building on research on the critical role of laypeople in medicalization and the multi-dimensional character of this process, this study explores the effects and meanings of the ADHD category for mothers and teachers of diagnosed children. Based on interviews with 27 schoolteachers from two different schools and 42 mothers of children diagnosed with ADHD, we show that despite the growing acceptance of ADHD as a medical diagnosis, it exhibits only minor narrative, institutional, and moral effects in school and family arenas. The diagnostic label attributed to children does not resolve blame games and uncertainty about the source of children’s difficulties and does not provide many pragmatic benefits for either mothers or teachers. We argue that these limited narrative, moral and institutional effects are shaped by the moral positionings available to mothers and teachers, the institutional status of ADHD as a category of disability, and educational policy. We distinguish medicalization’s institutional and interpersonal dimensions and explore their complex interrelations. Our analysis resonates with recent moves in medical sociology toward more pragmatic and practice-based analyses of the effects of medical categories, particularly when enacted outside traditional healthcare settings.
When health changes everything: The disruptive side of identity shifts in people with CF
Noa Tal-Alon
Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a severe genetic disorder historically associated with low life expectancy. The introduction of CF transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) modulator drugs like Trikafta has dramatically improved health outcomes for many people with CF (pwCF), shifting their lived experiences in unexpected ways. This qualitative study explores the psychological and social consequences of such improvements, focusing specifically on identity disruption and emotional adaptation. Utilizing a phenomenological approach, in-depth interviews were conducted with CF patients who had used Trikafta for at least 2 years, alongside an analysis of publicly available blog narratives. The findings reveal two central themes: identity disruption and ambivalent loss. Participants described profound challenges in adjusting to their new health status, including difficulties in redefining their identity after years of viewing themselves as chronically ill. Additionally, they reported a paradoxical sense of loss, grieving aspects of their previous illness experience, such as a sense of urgency in life decisions and strong connections within the CF community. While participants also shared hopeful and forward-looking narratives, this study centers on the less-explored emotional complexities that emerge when long-standing illness-based identities are disrupted. The findings underscore the need for comprehensive psychological support systems to help PwCF process identity shifts and sustain a sense of continuity in their lives.
Aleksa Owen
In 2011, noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) disrupted clinical screening and testing paradigms. While concerns have been raised over public and patient-oriented NIPT usage, providers’ views of NIPT remain understudied. This is significant because providers offer pre-test counseling to pregnant patients. This study sought to better understand how prenatal care providers view NIPT in the context of risk and uncertainty. After obtaining institutional ethical approval, semi-structured interviews were conducted with certified nurse-midwives and obstetrician-gynecologists (n = 20). Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and coded using abductive analysis. Providers perceived chromosomal risk as an ever-present uncertainty that they worked to help patients make sense of, and providers perceived NIPT as a binary risk assessment tool to decrease uncertainty and increase patient knowledge. These results indicate that while providers may be more likely to use NIPT as a way to limit uncertainty, the social consequences of this move are that providers may inadvertently offload decisional responsibility onto patients, impacting respect for patients’ autonomy.
Martina Skrubbeltrang Mahnke
The exploratory study examines how patients in Denmark experience health data on the eHealth platform sundhed.dk. The study takes its starting point in the communicative process taking place between patients as platform users and the eHealth platform as a communicative agent. In dialogue with literature at the intersection of eHealth and communication studies, it develops the analytical lens of affective gaps, connecting Peters notion of communicative gaps with Lupton’s concept of affective atmospheres. Empirically, the study unpacks the complex, often conflicting experiences that arise when patients attempt to make meaning of and engage with their health data. Building on 24 in-depth, purposefully sampled interviews, the article presents a thorough thematic analysis, showing that patients need to simultaneously deal with states of being (1) informed and insecure, (2) confident and frustrated, and (3) in control and in doubt. Receiving health data on eHealth platforms is a complex and often challenging process for patients, provoking profound and at times unsettling experiences, oftentimes creating vulnerabilities. While gaps and uncertainty have always been a part of health communication, eHealth platforms amplify and reconfigure these dynamics, thus presenting novel challenges for patient-healthcare professional communication. In conclusion, the article calls for further research into the communicative user-platform relations that shape patient experiences with health data, positioning patients as the primary receivers of eHealth communication.
Femtech in context: A critical conceptual (re)view
Danica Facca, Jodi Hall, Gail Teachman , Joanna Redden, and Lorie Donelle
Emerging as a commercial category in 2016, ‘femtech’ has been publicly celebrated as a category of consumer-based digital health technologies designed to support the unmet and systemically marginalized health needs of women in areas such as menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause, through data-driven apps, wearables, and self-diagnostic tools. Since its emergence, the term femtech has become culturally significant and has taken on a life of its own across commercial, public, and healthcare discourses. Despite the growth of femtech scholarship, clarity is lacking on how different disciplines have challenged the assumptions about sex, gender, health, technology, and innovation that shape dominant understandings of ‘who’ femtech is for (i.e. fem) and ‘what’ it constitutes (i.e. tech). Motivated by this research gap, a critical conceptual review was conducted to provide new entry points into critical debates. This article novelly adapts ‘diffractive reading’ as a methodological approach to bring disciplinary perspectives on femtech into conversation with one another across anthropology, computer science, cultural studies, gender studies, information studies, law, media studies, medicine, and science and technology studies. This article focuses on insights drawn between critiques of femtech which trouble the ideologies, discourses, and practices that shape dominant understandings of ‘fem’ and ‘tech’. In thinking through and with the conceptual boundaries of femtech, this review underscores the ongoing need to examine femtech’s role in shaping global dynamics of reproductive, labor, and environmental justice, in addition to neoliberal approaches to healthcare more broadly.
Problems of equity in US HIV integrated planning, 2015–2021: Enacting a bounded justice continuum
Stephen Molldrem, Nivan Wadhawan, Alec Manning, and Justin D. Edwards
The US HIV/AIDS response is notably worse than those of other high-income countries. The country’s epidemic is marked by low viral suppression rates, high incidence, lacking coordination, and entrenched disparities along lines of sexuality, race/ethnicity, gender, class, and other factors. In 2010, the National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States (NHAS) was launched, centering an equity-oriented vision that prioritized marginalized groups. NHAS implementation required states to create HIV integrated plans to better coordinate services and meet populations’ needs. We used Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” approach to analyze 20 jurisdictions’ plans, focusing on how they incorporated equity-oriented principles articulated in NHAS’s vision statement and other factors such as plans for integration across HIV care, surveillance, and prevention programs. Building on Melissa Creary’s concept of “bounded justice,” we show that integrated plans enacted a “bounded justice continuum,” wherein some states pursued more equity-oriented strategies than others. We argue that this reflects constraints planners faced and the structure of US federalism, where implementing jurisdictions operated in variously restrictive or enabling conditions related to state-level politics, available public health infrastructure, and other factors. Our approach and the bounded justice continuum concept can be useful for scholars studying the rollout of equity-oriented policies in federal systems where local implementations will vary widely. We ultimately arrive at a positive assessment of US HIV integrated planning. However, we also advocate for more transformative reforms to ensure that people living with and affected by HIV can access universal healthcare, social services, housing, and employment.
Elin Margrethe Aasen, Marianne Kjelsvik, Lindis Katrine Helberget, and Elisabeth Dahlborg
The definition of specialised rehabilitation in Europe has changed from a focus on patients’ bodily functions and work tasks to a patient-centred focus prioritising patients’ wishes, allowing patients to actively collaborate and set their own goals. This study aimed to explore interprofessional healthcare teams’ discursive practice regarding the implementation of patient participation in specialised rehabilitation units in Norway. Data were collected from three focus groups with seven different health professions, totalling 18 healthcare professionals. A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis outlined by Fairclough was used to analyse the data. Three interdiscursive discourses based on different and opposing ideologies were found: (1) the discourse of standardisation, in which healthcare professionals used international models for rehabilitation goal setting; (2) the discourse of interprofessional experts, in which healthcare professionals constructed themselves as experts; and (3) the discourse of patient responsibility, in which the patients were constructed as having rights and autonomy. The sociocultural practice of implementing patient participation in specialised rehabilitation in Norway highlighted a hegemonic struggle between standardisation; paternalistic and autonomy ideologies; ethical dilemmas between healthcare professionals’ knowledge and use of standardised goals; and patients’ autonomy, knowledge, and will.
Clara De Ruysscher, Oona Moeyaert, Jessica De Maeyer, Florian De Meyer, Ottar Ness, and Marius Veseth
This study explores young people’s perceptions of citizenship and recovery for individuals with severe mental health challenges using the story completion method. In this qualitative approach, participants were invited to complete an open-ended story stem about a fictional character, Billie, whose journey of recovery unfolds through their narratives. We analyzed 47 stories, with lengths ranging from 65 to 598 words (M = 253 words), applying both horizontal (thematic) and vertical (narrative progression) analyses. The findings reveal that participants often framed Billie’s recovery in terms of social roles—such as student, friend, or worker—emphasizing the fluctuating and relational nature of recovery. At the same time, the narratives also reflect societal expectations and implicit biases surrounding mental health and citizenship. Broader systemic factors, such as rights, resources, and societal responsibilities, were less frequently addressed. The results suggest that young people’s perspectives on mental health recovery are largely shaped by relational contexts but may lack a critical awareness of structural barriers to inclusive citizenship. This study underscores the potential of the story completion method as both a research tool and an educational intervention, fostering dialog on stigma, inclusion, and mental health recovery.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Autopsy, deathways, and intercultural healthcare in the southern Peruvian Andes
David M.R. Orr
While death remains a popular topic for anthropology, relatively few ethnographic accounts consider the modern bureaucratic processes accompanying it. One such process is public health autopsy, which scholars have largely taken for granted. Existing analysis has regarded it as a form of ‘cultural brokering’ and autopsy reluctance in communities is seen, within both medical and cultural models, as a matter of ontological difference between incommensurable scientific and spiritual cosmologies. This article presents an ethnographic case study of the disagreement between a biomedical practitioner and the bereaved family on the death of a teenager who died of an unknown illness. The family’s wish to hold a wake, as is customary in the rural Peruvian Andes, clashed with the doctor’s mandate to determine the cause of death through autopsy. However, the details of the disagreement and the wider context of the deceased’s health-seeking itinerary suggest that ontological contradictions alone do not adequately explain the disagreement, but must be considered alongside the social relations in which these actors were embedded. Administrative state processes of certification, often overlooked by the anthropology of death in favour of more striking responses and rituals, are shown to be analytically vital to how communities negotiate mourning and grieving.
Michael Crawley, Uroš Kovač
This article argues that the current way of thinking about ethics in sport in primarily biomedical terms, and in particular in terms of the presence of particular pharmaceutical substances, fails to account for broader notions of sporting ethics and fairness in the Global South. Ethnographic material from Ethiopia and Cameroon on attitudes towards doping, ‘spiritual doping’, and age tampering demonstrates that athletes themselves are far more concerned with issues of global inequality and the fair distribution of resources. Current statements on sporting ethics are revealed as at once too narrow (focusing only on individual responsibility and biological factors) and too abstract (without accounting for specific social and economic realities). We extend the notion of ‘athletic citizenship’ to go beyond ‘biological citizenship’, and argue that the current biomedical model of sporting ethics works to obscure the structural and racialized inequalities that define global sports. Beyond sport, our analysis also demonstrates that the boundaries of citizenship are today often policed through hybridized formations that are not limited to the legal systems of individual countries or to straightforward processes of regulation, but which extend to quasi-legal, transnational entities that police specific kinds of bodies.
Nishtha Tewari
Through an ethnography of exertion, this article adds to anthropological literature on the actions and interpretations of marginalized groups in response to social hardship and suffering. It argues that, against a reduction in social and state-support mechanisms in Eastern Uttarakhand, north India, women consciously used physical exertion to achieve household stability. Exertion manifested as arduous paid labour, which strengthened household positions and prospects, alongside unpaid physical service, which sustained inter-household and extended social relationships. Women’s most reliable resource towards reproducing a collective future was their continuous physical labour – which led them to intentionally deprioritize their immediate, individual health concerns. Caste and class networks shaped the possibilities and risks of exertion. Despite women’s efforts, exertion had its limits and was sometimes fallible. Women responded to these limits by adopting self-reliance as a discursive measure to calibrate their exertion. In contrast to a focus on women’s moral and kinship strategies in response to health-driven distress, I foreground women’s exertion as an embodied strategy they adopted to safeguard households as a whole. Attending to exertion adds a new dimension to understanding women’s practices in response to hardship – that of using their health to pursue long-term outcomes they value, in this case household reproduction.
Tears in the taiga: alcohol, agency, and more-than-human relations in northeast China
Richard Fraser
This article explores the complex entanglements of alcohol, human agency, and more-than-human relations among Ewenki reindeer herders of northeast China. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Da Xing’anling Mountains, I examine how alcohol is both a potent cultural substance and a site of existential tension. I show how alcohol mediates social relations, reinforcing friendship, status, and gendered identities, while simultaneously underpinning ritualized engagements with reindeer, spirits, and ancestral presences. At the same time, alcohol has been implicated in cycles of violence, self-harm, and premature death, linking personal and communal suffering to broader historical and political processes, including forced relocation and a hunting ban. By juxtaposing these dimensions, I highlight the paradoxical roles of alcohol as both a medium of connection and a vector of harm. Central to this analysis is a phenomenological approach that foregrounds embodied experience and sensory engagement, attending to how Ewenki navigate, give meaning to, and inhabit these entangled worlds through drinking. In doing so, the article contributes to anthropological understandings of substance use, more-than-human relations, and coping practices, offering insight into how alcohol functions as a relational and existential technology within a marginalized Indigenous world.
Pandemic Memes and Tamil Health Narratives
Haripriya Narasimhan, Shriram Venkatraman & Venkata Ratnadeep Suri
This article analyses the Tamil COVID-19 memes as artifacts of humor and social commentary during Tamil Nadu’s first pandemic wave. Drawing on a corpus of WhatsApp memes, cross-verified on Facebook and Instagram, we trace how Tamil cinematic iconography and anthropomorphism articulated health anxieties and negotiated therapeutic authority between Siddha and biomedicine. Using visual ethnography, we identify two narrative logics, namely, dissonance (skepticism, satire) and congruence (pragmatic coexistence). Framed by encoding and decoding, carnivalesque inversion, and performative health communication, we argue that memes do not merely reflect sentiment, rather, they actively stage reasoning about care and pluralist health imaginaries.
Multi-Modal Sensoriality and Online Community-Based Support in the Long Covid Choir
Gavin Robert Walker
Long covid involves diverse chronic physical and cognitive symptoms with poorly understood mechanisms and limited treatment options. Many affected individuals turn to community groups for support. Drawing on ethnographic research with the Long Covid Choir, a patient-run online singing and support group, in this paper I examine how participants use overlapping sensory experiences to cultivate belonging, foster biosocial solidarity, structure care, and counter isolation. Through shared auditory and visual practices – collective breathing, guided mindfulness, and gentle stretching – the choir cultivates multi-sensory connection. These activities foster digitally mediated social intimacy for individuals who face significant barriers to in-person participation.
Almudena Mari-Saez & Frédéric Le Marcis
In 2021, an outbreak of Orthoebolavirus occurred in Nzerekore (Guinea). Following the declaration, diagnostic and containment actions were triggered, framing the outbreak as an extraordinary event. Yet, outbreaks are embedded in the everyday of social life and generate embodied memories that shape interactions between local populations and outbreak response teams. We examined locally the tension between the community’s everyday and the exceptional in the outbreak response. We argue that the bodily imprint of such extraordinary events plays a critical role in shaping preparedness, yet it remains unseen by the global health technocracy.
Dads and Digital Devices: Embodied and Spectral Presences in Diabetes Care in Greece and Denmark
Maria Athena Campbell & Hanne Overgaard Mogensen
Fathers to children with type 1 diabetes increasingly engage with digital technologies that monitor and regulate their child’s condition, yet the embodied and emotional dimensions of this care remain underexplored. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece and Denmark, we show how diabetes technologies mediate new forms of paternal attunement, aligning care work with technological competence and culturally valued masculinities. Through routine device work and remote monitoring, fathers cultivate embodied and spectral forms of presence while navigating moments of connection and disruption.
Letizia Bonanno
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Athens’ social clinics of solidarity, I explore how the volunteers redefined pharmaceuticals as they moved from state-licensed pharmacies to households and into the grassroots voluntary sector. Therefore, I trace how their value, status and meaning shifted in the process: medicines were no longer seen as commodities but treated as sociable objects of care. In showing how state policies and market forces made pharmaceuticals increasingly central to social relations and care practices in times of austerity, I argue that pharmaceuticalization can develop alongside and even arise from grassroots, collective efforts to pool and redistribute medicines.
Modalities of Enfleshment: Albinism and the Limits of Biosociality in Tanzania
Giorgio Brocco
Media and humanitarian discourses surrounding violence against people with albinism in Tanzania have fostered forms of biosocial relatedness and public recognition. Yet albinism does not consistently consolidate into a stable biosocial identity. Drawing on ethnographic research with Farida, Baraka and other interlocutors with albinism, this article ethnographically develops the concept of “modalities of enfleshment” to attend to how albinism is lived through shifting interpretations and embodied experiences. In this paper, I argue that the condition offers a case study for understanding how bodymind differences are continually revalued across and shaped by biomedical, disability, socio-cultural, economic, political, and institutional domains and practices.
Neil Krishan Aggarwal
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has introduced its concept of culture for the sixth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-6). However, these articles do not cite recent work from cultural psychiatrists trained in anthropology or anthropologists of mental health. In this article, I analyze the APA’s proposed culture concept, review recent culture theories from cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists in prior DSM revisions, and suggest ways for anthropologists to engage the APA.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Mariam Florence Yusuf, Washington Onyango-Ouma, Ruth Jane Prince, Paul Wenzel Geissler
Drawing on ethnographic research in Dudi village in Western Kenya, this article explores how the lingering legacies of the 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped local perceptions of, and responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic and related vaccine controversies. Focusing on the lives of young women living with HIV, the article traces how their experiences of navigating HIV care, stigma, and gendered expectations intersected with anxieties around COVID-19 vaccination. These narratives are embedded within a broader historical and social landscape marked by grief, moral judgement, and structural exclusion. Past experiences with HIV are shown to inform contemporary fears around vaccination, reigniting multi-layered forms of stigma and casting women’s bodies as sites of risk, suspicion, and control. By situating these responses within the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic, the article highlights how disease, memory, and gendered moralities continue to shape health experiences and interventions in deeply unequal ways.
Living a “good death”: Caring for solitary deaths in Japan
Hiroko Kumaki
How do public health metrics of “good death” shape care and everyday life? Concerns over dying alone has become prevalent worldwide. In Japan, social anxieties over solitary deaths (kodokushi) have intensified in a rapidly aging society. In response, care practices have emerged to keep people social in life and death. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a tsunami-affected town in Miyagi, I examine how post-disaster care has been reorganized in response to fears of kodokushi. Care workers improvised their activities to reconcile bureaucratic demands for “statistics of sociality” with survivors’ shifting needs and desires. These activities demonstrate the impact of standardized scripts of “good death” on the quality of life and care of those they aim to protect. At the same time, they reveal the potential for care that embraces the indeterminacy and situatedness of what constitutes a good death, allowing for diverse ways of living and dying well.
Victoria L. Brown, Lindsey Kaufman, Sienna Ruiz, Clarissa Gaona Romero, Janet Njelesani, Siobhan Sutcliffe, Jean Hunleth
While US cancer survival rates have improved in recent years, the rising incidence of early-onset cancers means cancer is shifting younger, imposing new generational challenges for survivors and their families. This article explores the experience of a cancer diagnosis during one’s re/productive years by analyzing how parents with dependent children maintain a future amid heightened economic precarity (e.g., loss of stable employment, downward mobility, and a degraded public sphere). By linking physical survival with the social conditions necessary for post-treatment quality of life, we develop a more collectivistic notion of survivorship, where parent-survivors’ efforts to stay employed during treatment serve as an extension of family caregiving in austere times. Reflecting on how the lead authors’ own experience of work and cancer emerged in interviews with 12 parent-survivors, we intervene on traditional team science methods, making space for the autoethnographic voices that underlie interpretations of illness.
Enduring and the horizon of repair: French Caribbean post-stroke rehabilitation amid health inequity
Raphaëlle Melissa Rabanes
Drawing on ethnographic research with patients and therapists in post-stroke rehabilitation, this article explores how Guadeloupeans strive to exist on their own terms amid postcolonial health inequities, forms of marginalization and institutional disrepair. I argue that French territorial health inequities must be understood in relation to colonial health inequities and reveal the long history of socioracial stratification in the French Caribbean. I then turn to the experience of a patient to examine how she confronts the limitations of her life chances. As she and other Guadeloupean stroke survivors push back against the contours of life delineated by systemic issues, they exist in close engagement with the horizon of life, in a movement I propose to call enduring.
The Promise and Perils of Online Abortion in Brazil
Alejandra Marks
This article examines the experiences of Brazilian women as they navigate digital abortion-aid spaces. It sheds light on the role that social media plays in connecting abortion seekers with abortion-pill sellers. As in other unregulated spaces where unofficial caregiving thrives, activist-caregivers seek legitimacy in Brazil’s abortion black market by showcasing their knowledge and by providing emotional support to their clients throughout their procedures. At the same time, women seeking abortions often fall prey to scammers, profit-seekers, and sellers lacking training and compassion. In this online, anonymized context, making clear-cut distinctions between the real and the fake, the aid and the scammer, proved difficult for my interlocutors. Nonetheless, these online spaces offer deep hope in that they extend the possibility of abortion care to vulnerable Brazilian women who are otherwise deprived of reproductive agency.
Scientific Ritual: The Institutional Review Boards for Human Clinical Trials in Israel
Hedva Eyal
This ethnographic study analyzes Israeli Institutional Review Boards (IRBs’) main practices and discourses. I describe IRB operations as bureaucratic rituals derived from idealized scientific values, with physician-scientist members serving as gatekeepers who perform boundary work to preserve professional independence. The findings show how temporal-spatial bureaucratic rituals separate scientists from nonscientists across different phases of the review process and limit ethical and scientific discussions within the IRBs that authorize clinical trials. The scientific discourse is constrained to administrative compliance, and ethical discourse is reduced to procedural form-checking. The work of IRBs thus redefines the relationship between bioscience and society as a hierarchical rather than a shared system, thereby preserving the myth of science as beyond external scrutiny and maintaining scientific autonomy despite IRBs’ formal role as boundary organizations.
Aging affordances: Navigating expectations of dementia prevention for aging adults in Canada
Cynthia Lazzaroni, Annette Leibing
Dementia prevention now focuses on individual lifestyle choices as loci of intervention in the hope of delaying or preventing cognitive impairment in aging. Drawing from interviews with dementia experts and middle-aged adults in Canada, we discuss how prevention expectations compete with adults’ experiences, showing that enacting prevention is not simple but rather fraught with tensions. Addressing the troubles of prevention, we propose aging affordances as the particular ways mid-life adults construct, make sense of, and act toward their aging process, including how they navigate expectations of prevention amidst tensions that fashion their relationships with their environment. We take the environment in a broad sense to include social and cultural systems of values and discourses, such as dementia prevention recommendations. It allows us to turn the preventive focus on its head, looking not at its normative behavioral prescriptions but at the range of possibilities mid-life adults strive for as they age.
Kate Lyle, Gabrielle Samuel, Anneke Lucassen
Contemporary healthcare systems generate vast volumes of data, with algorithmic interrogation promising disease prediction, improved diagnoses, and optimised treatment. Despite significant investment, biases in data used for algorithmic interrogation persist, leading to inequities in health outcomes. Scale alone cannot address these biases. Rather, considerations of the contextual dimensions of data need to be reflected upon. Nevertheless, calls for more data to ‘iron out’ such issues are common. Drawing on qualitative interviews with UK-based health data researchers, we use Lucy Suchman’s concept of configuration to explore how sociotechnical imaginaries of ‘big data’, which lead to calls for more data, are sustained, operationalised and enacted in everyday research practice. Specifically, we identify three interconnected processes that sustain these imaginaries: (1) risk-oriented narratives that organise research around calculable futures; (2) decontextualising translation processes that align data with algorithmic requirements and (3) a persistent gap between algorithmic capacity and data availability. We conceptualise this third mechanism as a productive gap, as it continually renews commitments to scale by attributing limitations to insufficient data. We argue this gap represents a critical juncture for reconfiguration, revealing where assumptions about decontextualisation might be challenged to create space for more situated approaches to health data research.
Losing one’s voice as a physician
Masayoshi Ide
Total laryngectomy permanently deprives patients of their vocal apparatus. While the communicative consequences of voice loss have been widely discussed, its implications for professional identity remain underexplored when the patient is a practising physician. This paper presents an autoethnographic account of a physician who returned to clinical work after total laryngectomy, relying on text-to-speech technologies, written communication and embodied interaction.
Although artificial voice and digital tools enabled effective informational exchange, they did not fully restore a sense of authentic medical practice. The absence of one’s own voice generated a persistent unease, experienced as a form of self-alienation when a technologically mediated self was presented as the speaking physician. This tension became particularly salient in one-to-many settings such as public lectures, where vocal authority traditionally underpins professional legitimacy.
In everyday clinical practice, additional compensatory strategies emerged. Despite the adequacy of mediated communication, face-to-face encounters were intentionally maintained, allowing tacit modes of collaboration to develop organically. Drawing on an ethnomethodological perspective, these practices are interpreted as the formation of ‘our ways’ of working together—locally produced methods sustained through bodily co-presence rather than formal protocols.
Although artificial voice and digital tools enabled effective informational exchange, they did not fully restore a sense of authentic medical practice. The absence of one’s own voice generated a persistent unease, experienced as a form of self-alienation when a technologically mediated self was presented as the speaking physician. This tension became particularly salient in one-to-many settings, such as public lectures, where vocal authority traditionally underpins professional legitimacy.
Glasgow’s Royal Hospital in for Sick Children: ‘nationalisation’ and protecting voluntary largesse
Iain Hutchison
Scottish voluntary hospitals were founded, supported and expanded by philanthropy and charity across the 19th century and through the first half of the 20th century. Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Sick Children (RHSC) opened in 1883 and, during the following decades, it attracted and built up reserves received from thousands of small donations annually, but supplemented by special events and substantive gifts and legacies.
By the time of the formulation and creation of the National Health Service (NHS), the RHSC possessed a significant portfolio of assets. Notable were monetary reserves, stocks and shares, and property bequeathed by elderly supporters who had died without close kin to inherit their wealth. Proposals for full incorporation of charitable ‘royal’ hospitals into the NHS caused particular alarm for the RHSC, which feared that its assets and reserves accrued from charitable subscribers would be seized and placed in a central ‘pot’ beyond the hospital’s reach.
This article explains the development of the RHSC from its founding and the growth of its financial base, the potential loss of which, on absorption by the NHS, spurred alarm to its Board of Management. The article narrates how the Board of Management, under the NHS, reacted to the uncertainty surrounding its pre-NHS assets during the first two decades of the Service.
Territories of coexistence: rodents, risk and disease in a dynamic ecosystem in rural Tanzania
Caroline Mwihaki Mburu
In Kilombero district, in South-central Tanzania, rapidly evolving environmental conditions, land-use transformations and conservation policies are restructuring human-rodent interactions including epizootics. This article examines how these changes shape the local epistemologies of health and coexistence. While biomedical discourses frame rodents as transmitters of zoonotic infections, local perceptions frame them as inevitable cohabitants, embedded within broader multispecies entanglements. The accelerating pace of environmental change which is marked by frequent flooding, expanding agricultural frontiers and conservation policies has intensified rodent proliferation and encounters, particularly in temporary farm settlements where structural precarity heightens human-rodent contact. At the same time, conservation initiatives that emphasise the protection of charismatic wildlife species inadvertently create complex ecological interactions, allowing rodents to flourish. By interrogating these intersections of environmental dynamism, governance and livelihood practices, this article argues that human-rodent entanglements in Kilombero problematise dominant One Health narratives of zoonotic risk by emphasising cohabitation and by tracing rodent lives beyond farms and biosecurity underpinnings. This article, therefore, calls us to rethink zoonoses through the lens of multispecies interactions, lay knowledges and environmental complexities.
Meghna R Gaddam
Menstruation and homelessness are each highly stigmatised experiences, yet their intersection remains critically understudied. This paper introduces the concept of amplified stigma to describe the compounded psychosocial, material and structural harms faced by individuals who menstruate without stable housing in high-income Western cities. Drawing from a conceptual synthesis of over 70 interdisciplinary sources, including public health, feminist theory, medical sociology, anthropology and gender studies, we employ three core analytical frameworks: embodiment, objectification and intersectionality. These lenses reveal how stigma is not merely symbolic but deeply lived and institutionalised, shaping how menstruating unhoused bodies are surveilled, controlled and excluded.
Through embodiment, we explore the visceral experiences of bleeding without privacy, resources or relief, compounded by internalised shame and systemic misrecognition, especially among ageing and transgender menstruators. Objectification highlights the bureaucratic demands and surveillance that reduce menstruators to regulated bodies, often denied dignity and care. Intersectionality foregrounds how race, gender identity, class and age intersect to exacerbate exclusion and harm within shelters, healthcare and public spaces.
Our analysis challenges dominant menstrual equity narratives that focus narrowly on product access, advocating instead for a structural justice approach grounded in dignity, recognition and systemic reform. Addressing amplified stigma requires trauma-informed, gender-inclusive policies and healthcare, alongside decriminalisation of survival behaviours and intersectional research. This paper calls for moving beyond silence and charity towards accountability and societal transformation, affirming the right of all bodies to bleed with dignity.
Joyce Zazulak, Lorrie Gallant, Nicole Knibb & Laura Cleghorn
In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report, the McMaster University Department of Family Medicine developed Indigenous Teaching Through Art, an experiential, arts and place-based programme for faculty, clinicians and staff to address knowledge gaps pertaining to historical injustices experienced by Indigenous Peoples in Canada, particularly related to the residential school system.
Focus groups and individual interviews were conducted to understand participants’ experiences of the programme and their awareness of the legacy of residential schools. This study employed the Two-Eyed Seeing approach to data analysis to guide a reflexive thematic analysis that combined Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. Two-Eyed Seeing was paramount in making meaning of and reconciling the data.
Four major themes emerged: (1) experiencing; (2) reflecting; (3) meaning making and (4) acting. These themes fall directly in line with the Experiential Learning Cycle for Indigenous Learners. Although the cycle suggests an ordered progression through each element, analysis of the data showed that participants entered the programme at diverse stages of this cycle, some navigating through its entirety, while others traversed through various points within the cycle.
The programme’s intention was to be a starting point for all participants, the majority were settlers, to journey toward learning and reconciliation. Based on participant data, the programme achieved this goal. Providing space for participants to learn would increase awareness and offer new knowledge and, in this journey, consider their individual responsibility to respond to what they learnt and how to provide more equitable and culturally appropriate care, education and service for Indigenous Peoples.
Seeing is making: AI visualisation and genomic prediction
Amanda Furiasse
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into genomics is reshaping not only how biological data are analysed, but how genomic knowledge is produced and operationalised in clinical practice. Earlier computational approaches relied on alphanumeric outputs—risk scores, statistical associations and textual reports—that required interpretive reasoning to translate data into clinical meaning. By contrast, contemporary AI systems increasingly generate visual outputs such as maps, rankings and image-based representations that render genomic information immediately perceptible as clinically relevant futures.
This paper argues that this shift from alphanumeric processing to visual forms reconfigures the role of interpretation in genomic reasoning. Instead of requiring clinicians to reconstruct the inferential steps linking data to conclusion, AI systems present structured visualisations that foreground outcomes as ready for action. In this context, visualisation does not simply display results but participates in organising what counts as knowledge in the first place. As a result, genomic modelling no longer functions primarily as a predictive framework grounded in explainable evidence, but as a system that presents actionable futures whose authority lies in their visual form, raising the question of how clinical action is being grounded when these images shape the very biological outcomes they appear to represent.
Intersex medical guidelines in the UK and Germany: a critical discourse analysis
Sarah Knaus, Robbie Duschinsky & Tessa Morgan
The medical care of infants born with atypical sex characteristics sits at a peculiar ideological intersection. While many healthcare practitioners hold biologically essentialist views on sex development, the history of intersex medical management also illustrates the ways in which the sexed body is socially constructed. In practice, this meant that children born with an intersex trait or difference in sex development (DSD) were often subjected to non-consensual, invasive procedures in the name of sex assignment. The fields of paediatric endocrinology and surgery have since undergone reforms, centering open communication and family support while delaying surgical interventions. However, surgical corrective practices are still widespread, demonstrating that the underlying ideological conflict has not changed in a substantial way. The most recent DSD medical guidelines from the UK and Germany were released in 2021 and 2024, respectively. This article analyses and compares these texts by using a critical discourse analysis framework as a guide and placing them in dialogue with poststructuralist queer theory. This study is the first to systematically analyse the most recent paediatric endocrinological guidelines. Studying medical intersex discourse has implications beyond patient management. It can reveal both the power and possibility inherent in guidelines as performative speech acts, as well as the ways in which sex and gender are constructed and negotiated in medical discourse across different national contexts.
Vibeke Narverud Nyborg,Hilde Orderud & Svenn-Erik Mamelund
This study investigates the relationship between non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and influenza morbidity during the 1918 pandemic, with a focus on urban and rural medical districts in Norway. By integrating published secondary statistical data from 1918 from Statistics Norway with primary medical records from the Norwegian National Archive, the paper offers a novel historical data set to explore the timing and frequency of NPIs in relation to monthly reported influenza and pneumonia morbidity cases. Despite inherent limitations in the historical data, the findings suggest that a greater number of NPIs may have contributed to a delay in the onset and/or a reduction in the intensity of influenza morbidity. These results support the premise that the combined implementation of multiple NPIs was more effective in delaying and flattening the epidemic curve. The findings underscore the importance of early, coordinated and sustained non-pharmaceutical responses in mitigating the spread of infectious diseases, especially in the absence of pharmaceutical treatments or vaccines.
Neil Vickers
This article reconstructs the historical development and evolving conceptual architecture of the medical humanities since its emergence as a university subject in the 1960s. Originating in late 1960s US ‘values programmes’, the medical humanities initially deployed critique—philosophical, theological, psychoanalytical and sociological—to interrogate medicine’s epistemic authority, ethical commitments and social power. Yet, from the 1970s onwards, critique operated in implicit conversation with systems theoretical approaches, particularly through the emergence of the biopsychosocial model and early engagements with phenomenology, cybernetics, anthropology and process philosophy. The subsequent rise of narrative methodologies in the 1980s and 1990s consolidated this synthesis by enabling scholars to conceptualise illness experience as an emergent property of complex, open biological and social systems. The article contends that renewing this synthesis is now essential for advancing the field’s transdisciplinary ambitions. Contemporary systems science—encompassing epidemiology, developmental research, social determinants of health and the ‘omics’ disciplines—provides a powerful framework for understanding how social experience becomes biologically embedded across the lifecourse. At the same time, critique remains indispensable for revealing the often-concealed values, power relations and institutional arrangements that shape health and illness. Integrating these orientations would reconnect the medical humanities with its diverse intellectual constituencies, address long-standing fragmentation and enable new engagements with topics such as childhood, inequality, embodiment and lifecourse health. The article concludes by proposing that a concise set of shared systems theoretical concepts could provide the durable conceptual infrastructure needed to sustain ambitious transdisciplinary dialogue across the field.
Aesthetic experience in medical education: Wit as a case of experiential knowledge
Barbora Řebíková
This article develops a demanding, though non-exclusivist, version of aesthetic cognitivism and argues for its significance in contemporary medical education. Although the arts are increasingly used to foster empathy, reflection and professional identity formation, their educational value is often justified in instrumental terms, as an enrichment that supports competencies otherwise secured by biomedical training. Against this framing, I argue that aesthetic experience offers a distinctive mode of understanding that can make embodied, affective and existential dimensions of illness and dying experientially salient in ways that are difficult to cultivate reliably within the constraints of formal medical education.
Promoting mutual aid and interdependence for queer ethnic minorities during COVID-19
Chase Ledin
This article explores the representation of sexual health in black and brown communities in London during the early COVID-19 pandemic. I examine the ‘Sex & the Coronavirus’ (2020) health comic series and interviews with HIV activists to demonstrate how they shifted the focus of COVID-19 health promotion away from the hegemonic white middle class and towards black and brown experiences. I use textual and visual analysis to trace the construction of practical information about COVID-19 and STI prevention—including biomedical, public health and relationship advice—and demonstrate how the imagery and language of mutual aid and interdependence enact counterhegemonic strategies. I argue that these materials and activist experiences set out key principles for counterhegemonic health promotion practice at the intersection of sexual health and COVID-19 prevention. I suggest that these principles should be further trialled for inclusive health promotion theory and practice.
Bhumika Rohitkumar Bhatt & Pawan Dwivedi
Epidemics have historically been both biomedical disasters and cultural stories that societies interpret and recount. This study explores the epidemic imaginary, examining how literature and cinema symbolically depict contagion by analysing narratives of contagion produced during the Plague era in literature and modern pandemic representations in film. The research considers some plague-era literature, such as Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), alongside more recent pandemic literature like Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness (1981), as well as two films: Contagion (2011), directed by Steven Soderbergh, and Outbreak (1995), directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Drawing from interdisciplinary fields including literary studies, film theory and medical humanities, the study highlights moments of systemic and existential responses to contagion. It explores recurring themes such as fear, denial, governance, death, mortality and resilience, demonstrating how epidemics serve as meaningful moments for both existential reflection and systemic analysis. I argue that epidemic stories function as cultural scripts, that literature subtly allegorises contagion through introspection, and that cinema vividly dramatises urgency by depicting collapsing systems. Overall, these works highlight how societies narrate and remember solidarity during crises, rearticulating collective resilience in the face of devastation.
Mapping the body: poetic metaphor and AI imaging in Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The Map-Woman’
Ozlem Aydin Ozturk
This article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘The Map-Woman’, examining the metaphor of the female body as a map in relation to artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted medical imaging technologies. The study explores how Duffy’s poetic rendering of the body as a cartographic surface fixed with streets, landmarks and memories resonates with contemporary practices of bodily visualisation in diagnostic medicine. Drawing on feminist theory, spatial poetics and digital epistemologies, this article argues that both poetry and AI imaging engage in acts of mapping the body, although through different epistemic frameworks: one rooted in narrative, memory and affect; the other in data, abstraction and algorithmic logic. While Duffy’s poem foregrounds the emotional and historical dimensions of embodiment, AI-driven imaging systems often reduce the body to quantifiable data, potentially overlooking the sociocultural and subjective aspects of human experience. This contrast highlights the limitations of technological representations and underscores the value of literary metaphor in preserving the complexity of embodied identity. By placing poetic and technological mappings in dialogue, this article advocates for a more holistic understanding of the body, one that integrates narrative, emotion and cultural context alongside technological precision. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how literature can serve as a critical lens through which to interrogate the promises and limitations of AI in reconfiguring our relationship to the body in the digital age.
