Somatosphere welcomes you to the August edition of “In the Journals.” Scroll through our monthly round up of new research across anthropology, STS and social science journals.
Sociology of Health and Illness
More Than a Role Dispute: Physician Associates and the Changing Grounds of Medical Authority
Louise Ashley
This article examines how the legitimacy of physician associates (PAs) is constructed and contested in English medicine. Drawing on Critical Discursive Psychology, it analyses formal submissions to a government commissioned independent review of medical associate professions from the British Medical Association, General Medical Council and United Medical Associate Professionals to ask: What does conflict over PAs reveal about fractures in medical status and power? The findings show that these actors do not simply disagree about a new occupational role but mobilise shared concerns, especially around safety, standards and responsibility, through competing legitimacy logics. For the BMA, legitimacy is framed predominantly through boundary protection and the exclusivity of medical expertise; for the GMC, through regulatory governance and system assurance; and for UMAP, through workforce contribution and professional integration. Conceptually, this article extends jurisdictional accounts by showing that contemporary role disputes concern not only who controls clinical tasks but also which criteria and institutions are authorised to validate healthcare work. The PA controversy therefore reveals a pluralisation and institutional fragmentation of the grounds of medical authority, rather than its straightforward decline or reproduction.
Vigilant Algorithms and the Contagion of Risk in Automated Opioid Risk Assessment
Amid the ongoing opioid crisis, U.S. health systems have extended prescription monitoring interfaces with proprietary reports that provide clinicians with algorithmic risk scores to guide opioid decisions. However, little is known about how such tools shape clinical encounters, professional authority and accountability in everyday care. This article examines the case of NarxCare, a widely adopted risk-scoring system, through a multi-sited ethnographic study combining clinician interviews, interface walkthroughs, documentary analysis and clinic observation. We find that NarxCare operates through multiple opacities, presenting scores as authoritative yet unexaminable. It produces an amalgamated risk by collapsing diverse concerns—overdose, liability and societal harm—into a single number. Through its logic of contagion, physicians themselves become risk subjects, their reputations and careers tethered to the scores of patients they treat. These dynamics illustrate how this algorithmic automation recasts prescribers as governable agents of the opioid crisis; however, by unsettling established epistemic cultures of safety, it fails to completely enrol them as actuarial enforcers. In practice, clinicians respond by refusing, anticipating, or domesticating the scores, but cannot evade them fully. NarxCare thus reconfigures rather than resolves opioid risk, a dynamic with significant implications as algorithmic infrastructures expand across healthcare and scoring enters new domains.
Anna Louise Skovgaard, Brian Elmengaard, David Høyrup Christiansen & Mette Terp Høybye
Because of increasing pressure on healthcare resources in many countries, public health policies are increasingly occupied with how to optimise decision-making processes to ensure medical interventions are appropriate, necessary and aligned with the preferences and values of patients. One prominent example is the concept/model of shared decision-making (SDM) which target clinician-patient interactions in the clinic. Such public health goals raise renewed questions about what matters to people when seeking healthcare, which models such as SDM may not be able to fully account for. In this article, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish shoulder clinics. We identify specific uncertainties as they manifest in guidelines and the clinic, and draw on pragmatist-inspired theory, to argue that decision-making emerges as interactional work in what has been conceptualised as the subjunctive mood, to make treatment proposals acceptable. In this process doubt and hope are inherent elements to be acknowledged and managed, rather than avoided. Thus, we argue that such pragmatist ideals are fundamental to shoulder care. Our findings call for an approach to clinical decision-making in research and policy that considers the everyday concerns of patients and clinicians as they seek to navigate highly uncertain terrains.
Sahra Gibbon, Carola Tize, Taylor Riley & Tatiane Muniz
Longitudinal birth cohort studies are an under-examined context for considering the dynamics of healthism. This article presents a comparative perspective from the ‘Biosocial Lives of Birth Cohorts’ study, which takes birth cohorts as an ethnographic object of knowledge-making, social practice and participation in the Netherlands, Brazil, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Drawing from ethnographic research with participants and professionals involved in cohort data collection, we examine how, in the routine monitoring and measuring of bodies and lives in cohort studies, ‘healthism’, as an individualised form of moral self-responsibility for health, is entangled with medicalisation. Healthism is also at stake in the way that individual cohort test results are communicated and received. Yet the relational dynamics of cohort studies, which encompass but also exceed the scope of healthism, are also shaped by the precarity of public health infrastructures and closely entangled with the motivational desire of cohort participants, as birth cohorts can act as a stopgap for public health failures. In this way, we demonstrate how birth cohorts are an important context for considering the politics of health and how medicalisation is entangled with healthism in cohort data collection, even as this unfolds in tension with efforts to collectively intervene in public health.
Social Studies of Science
Chemical Governmentality: Manufacturing Politics in Oil Refineries
Sarandha Jain
Petroleum products silently govern human relations not only through ideology or policy but through their chemical composition and material form. What is the technical-chemical work that translates geological formations of oil into sociopolitical formations of human relations? How is governmentality encoded into petroleum products during their manufacturing? This article develops the concept of chemical governmentality to analyze how engineering processes in oil refineries govern sociopolitical life. Drawing on ethnographic research in Indian refineries and households, I examine how fuels such as kerosene, Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), or Piped Natural Gas (PNG) are chemically and infrastructurally configured to produce distinct forms of domesticity, sociality, and state-citizen relations. Refining processes, product specifications, and testing protocols embed political logics into petroleum products, disciplining consumers through material means. Chemicals cohabit human worlds not just through toxicity, but also through governmentality. My analysis foregrounds chemical engineering as an arena where material machinations participate in the production of everyday government.
Since the 1990s, Taiwan has promoted genomics as part of its shift to a knowledge economy. However, controversies concerning Indigenous genetics and genomics extend into political, sociocultural, and historical dynamics. This has prompted a movement among Taiwan’s Indigenous activists, culminating in legal reforms that made Taiwan the first country to enact legislation mandating collective informed consent for Indigenous peoples in 2016. This article proposes the concept of ‘differentiated biological citizenship’ to explain how Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples have developed bioethics governance. First, the article analyzes the origin, dynamics, and main events of this controversy, arguing that it should be understood in the context of globalization and Taiwan’s evolving identity politics. Second, the article traces how different actors (scientists, Indigenous elites, and government officials) negotiate a series of actionable strategies and develop collective informed consent based on the law. Finally, examining such issues as the relationship between trust and distrust and the power inequality between Indigenous and Han peoples, this article also investigates the difficulty in practicing collective consent as a governance model for Indigenous communities.
Beyond Balance: An Ethnography of Validity and Engagement in Citizen Science Practice
Citizen science (CS) is often characterized as involving inherent trade-offs between scientific validity and public engagement. While existing literature has documented these competing imperatives, less is known about the concrete organizational mechanisms that enable their coexistence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Israel Center for Citizen Science (ICCS), this article examines how hybrid knowledge production is sustained not by resolving this tension, but by structuring it. ICCS functions as a unique scientific site where the primary ‘instruments’ are communities of human participants. Through analysis of validation processes (mechanical objectivity, standardized protocols) and engagement practices (role-switching, boundary work), I demonstrate that the validity-engagement tension acts as a mechanism rather than a hurdle. The analysis reveals a structure of ‘fractal biopower’—nested power/knowledge relations where the division between subject and object repeats at every scale: Nature is subject to participants’ observation, participants to institutional management, and institutions to scientific evaluation. This recursive structure allows contradictory logics to operate simultaneously, suggesting that contemporary science increasingly functions through the management, rather than the purification, of hybrid tensions.
The Changing Concept of Actionability in Precision Medicine
This article tracks the origins, developments, and current usages of the concept of actionability in precision medicine. Originally a label for highlighting ‘incidental’ findings from genetic research, over time this concept became ascribed to catalogued genetic ‘variants’ that are both potentially pathogenic and ‘druggable’. Drawing on a qualitative document analysis, the article identifies several clusters of relevant actors promoting actionability, and several developments to which the concept was subject over time. The concept answers to various problems that emerged gradually, at different points in time, and partially as consequences of previous solutions: the translation between genomic testing in research and clinical settings, the problem of overdiagnosis resulting from a technologically induced information overflow, the complexity of test results combining various dimensions of meaning of non-linearly linked variables, and the problem of having to ‘personalize’ a therapy selection while integrating a new logic into a pre-existing health system.
Social Science & Medicine
Christine Wilson, Sarah Hanson Lauren Flannery, Katie Warncken & Nicholas Steel
Children experience inequalities in health at household and neighbourhood level, even in wealthy countries. Measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic such as school closures, followed by the cost-of-living crisis, did not affect all children equally. This review aimed to understand the impact of socioeconomic adversity on child health and development following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Systematic literature searches used the SPIDER tool to identify studies, and a convergent integrated approach to combine and synthesise quantitative and qualitative data. A mixed methods appraisal tool was used to appraise for risk of bias.
Three integrated findings were identified from 125 studies: 1. Socioeconomic adversity and unequal exposure to risk; 2. Community support and professional input as protective influences. 3. Structural and system-level requirements to address socioeconomic adversity.
COVID-19 restriction measures were associated with worsening family finances and health of disadvantaged children who experienced cramped living conditions and insecure food and housing. COVID-19 amplified existing health inequalities. These inequalities could potentially be reduced through public health interventions such as improved availability of community services, greater consideration of sociodemographic factors in healthcare settings, and by professionals using their collective voice to influence policy development, for example through improved data sharing to help public-sector services make the best use of available data to support vulnerable families.
Steven Kaindaneh, Rosanna Kamara, Abu Bakarr Bangura, Sapana Basnet, Alexandre Chailloux, Julia De Kadt, Elena Schmidt
School-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) affects millions of children globally and is prevalent in Sierra Leone. SRGBV involves abuse at and around school and can affect children’s health, school attendance and academic performance. Due to disability stigma, children with disabilities are often more affected by violence at school and in the community but evidence on this relationship remains weak. Using community-based participatory methods, including focus group discussions, geospatial mapping and photography, this study explored the perspectives, experiences and needs of children with disabilities regarding SRGBV. Findings revealed that children with disabilities in this context experience high levels of physical, psychological and sexual violence and their experiences are shaped by the characteristics of their natural and built environment, political and economic factors and social and cultural norms. The study highlights specific hotspots for violence within and around their schools and provides insights into the relationships between SRGBV, disability stigma, gender inequality and poverty. Suggestions made by children for improving safety and ending SRGBV include training teachers and parents on disability, making environmental and sanitation improvements, enhancing road safety and traffic regulations and strengthening SRGBV reporting and accountability mechanisms. The study has helped to amplify the voices of children with disabilities and highlighted the importance of disability-inclusive participatory methodologies in conducting SRGBV research and ensuring richness and quality of data.
Julia Fischer, Klara Doppler, Tamina-Laetitia Vielgrader, Gerhard Aigner & Karl Stöger
Rationale
In all jurisdictions with laws standardising the process of assisted dying, physicians play a key role. That they do is a concern in the academic literature, with critics accusing physicians of medical paternalism, particularly in relation to their role in assessing requests for assisted dying.
Objective
By exploring how physicians handle medical assessments under the 2022 Austrian Dying Decree Act, we aim to add empirical insights to the overly theoretical debate on medical paternalism in the context of assisted dying.
Method
After employing a maximum-variation sampling strategy, we conducted episodic interviews with 16 assessors recruited among 51 preselected physicians. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the interview data.
Results
When conducting assessments, it was crucial to physicians that they could relate to the request and empathise to the extent of imagining making the same choice if they found themselves in the requester’s circumstances. They did not support requests that they could not relate to, even when the requester met the legal access criteria for assisted suicide. They did so for self-protective reasons.
Conclusion
Criticising the practice of assessing requests for assisted dying through the lens of paternalism leads to oversimplifying the real-world complexities of the matter. Denying or shaming physicians for considering self-interested motives in their assessment practice will not make them disappear.
Gamete selection in gay male surrogacy: Procreative labor beyond gestation
Margot Lherbet
The findings show that gamete selection involves intensive reflexive work through which intended fathers negotiate equality within the couple, manage genetic asymmetries, anticipate social stigma, and articulate moral responsibilities toward egg donors. These choices are shaped by biomedical constraints, legal frameworks, and market logics, but also by emotional and ethical considerations, including efforts to recognize and symbolically compensate women’s procreative labor in contexts where donor bodies are structurally anonymized and commodified. At the same time, strategies aimed at protecting children from discrimination often reproduce racialized and gendered hierarchies embedded in reproductive markets.
By focusing on a triply specific configuration—same-sex male couples, non-compensable genetic choices, and the absence of pregnancy—this article highlights how procreative labor operates as a site where structural inequalities are both made visible and re-enacted through individual decision-making. Without presupposing procreative labor as an analytical framework, the study demonstrates its empirical relevance while extending it to include reflexive, emotional, and political dimensions that remain underexplored in existing scholarship.
Siqi Xue, Leanne M. Lacap, Lisa D. Hawke, Charlotte Munro, M. Ishrat Husain, Samantha Wells, Madeha Umer, Suvercha Pasricha & Sean A. Kidd
People with pre-existing psychiatric illnesses are recognized as a high-risk group in climate-health research, yet few qualitative studies explore their experiences. This study explored the gendered experiences of women with psychiatric illnesses in relation to climate stressors and identified the tailored supports they perceive as necessary to maintain their mental health and wellbeing.
Between January and December 2025, 23 participants took part in four focus groups at an academic psychiatric hospital in Toronto, Canada. The study used a service-user-informed qualitative design in collaboration with people with lived experience, who contributed to developing the interview guide and interpreting the findings. Codebook analysis with an intersectional lens was applied to examine pathways linking climate stressors to mental health impacts and service needs in this under-studied population.
Three main domains emerged: (1) mechanisms by which climate stressors exacerbate psychiatric symptoms, (2) how these impacts intersect with gendered roles and responsibilities, and (3) patient-identified priorities for climate-informed mental health interventions. Participants reported disrupted care, forced isolation, difficulties with medication adherence, strained communication with clinicians, and bidirectional interactions between physical and mental health. Women described reproductive guilt, caregiving burdens, reactivation of sexual trauma, and feelings of disempowerment.
Participants identified actionable priorities, including accessible climate preparedness resources, clinician training, peer support spaces, and hospital-based programs fostering social connection and adaptive coping strategies. These findings reveal social and institutional pathways linking climate stressors to mental health risks, and provide guidance for gender-responsive, service-user-informed interventions to enhance resilience in the context of climate change.
“We all agree” – or do we? Strategic participation in health echo chambers among mothers on Facebook
Darryn DiFrancesco
Access to health information and the “information environment” are now understood as social determinants of health. Correspondingly, researchers are increasingly concerned about the potential impacts of internet “echo chambers” – ideologically insular online spaces – on health beliefs and behavior. Understood as “health managers” for their families, mothers are a population of particular interest, yet little research has explored their experiences in online echo chambers. This manuscript draws on findings from an 18-month internet ethnographic study of ideologically-insular Facebook parenting groups – one “science-based”, the other focused on “natural parenting”. Through inductive analysis, I assert that the apparent ideological homogeneity of echo chambers is not a structural feature, but a side effect of mothers’ strategic participation. Five categories capture mothers’ strategic participation: (1) appreciating the echo chamber; (2) concealing differences to avoid rebuke; (3) plural membership; (4) hacking the algorithm; and (5) evolving participation. These findings reframe engagement with echo chambers as an active, intentional process, casting mothers as strategic architects of their health information environments. In this framework, mothers treat echo chambers as only one option among many in the broader information landscape. This study has implications for how researchers, clinicians, and health educators understand the relationship between parenting ideology, maternal health learning, and the evolving online information environment.
Yong Yu, Wenzhao Huang, Keke Qin & Zheng Ren
Background
Pesticide self-poisoning was a major cause of suicide in rural China. Although mortality has declined, little is known about how earlier suicide waves continue to shape bereaved families, kinship relations and village life decades later.
Aims
To examine how a past wave of pesticide suicides shaped linked lives, gendered kinship obligations and intergenerational inequality in rural China, and to theorise these deaths as relational structural events.
Methods
Between October 2024 and March 2025, we conducted a qualitative life-history case study in a Hunan village where multiple pesticide suicides occurred in the 1980s–1990s. After identifying all 12 known bereaved households in the relevant settlement, we interviewed 28 relatives and 7 key informants. Data were analysed using framework-informed thematic analysis, with life course theory as the primary framework.
Results
Pesticide suicide redirected linked rural lives through four mechanisms: role substitution and trajectory resequencing in schooling, labour and care; gendered moral accounting that allocated earning, caregiving, silence and blame across kin positions; reputational transmission through village memory, marriage screening and informal governance; and unequal repair through ritual containment, kin-based rescue, informal monitoring and reverse investment in children’s education.
Conclusion
We develop a relational structural-event model showing how sudden, stigmatised death can become intergenerational inequality through linked lives, gendered kinship, reputational governance and uneven social repair. Public health postvention matters, but the primary contribution is to theorise how suicide loss is socially transmitted across kin and community life.
The feminist care work in abortion funds
Ophra Leyser-Whalen, Briana Trejo, Kari White
We contribute to the research on care work and emotion work through a focus on abortion fund workers in an abortion restrictive landscape. We utilize interview data collected from 23 abortion fund staff and volunteers serving Texans after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and a subsequent Texas Executive Order that suspended abortion care for 30 days. We find that abortion restrictions led to increased workloads for abortion fund workers and more desperate situations for callers, which then necessitated fund workers to provide intensive emotional support to callers. This led some volunteers to experience burnt out, and staff described strategies to mitigate burnout, including delving into a community of care model for the workplace. These findings add to the literature on abortion funds, and on human services workers and emotion and care work, which is particularly timely in the current post-Dobbs landscape where abortion fund staff and volunteers are facing similar and new challenges.
Hao Zhao, Tailun Zhang, Lili Liu, Shuai Zhang & Wen Ma
Background
Individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) often experience difficulties managing topics in daily interactions, which can hinder their participation in interactions and affect their social engagement. There is a gap in exploring the interactional dynamics and the maintenance of personhood when interacting with individuals with AD in asymmetric institutional settings.
Objectives
This study aims to examine the interactional competence of individuals with AD and how their vulnerabilities are managed in daily-topic interactions within institutional healthcare settings.
Methods
This study adopts Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine video-recorded conversations between a trained researcher and individuals with mild cognitive impairment due to AD residing in two residential care facilities in China.
Findings
Individuals with mild AD demonstrate agency within asymmetric interactions by reshaping conversational frames, preserving face, and situating themselves within relational contexts to maintain their personhood. This agency emerges only when interlocutors actively engage, providing validation and recognition while accommodating temporary incoherence. These findings underscore the collaborative nature of sustaining identity in dementia care and highlight the particular significance of such interactional practices within the Chinese cultural context.
Implications
Conversation partners can support agency in individuals with AD by ratifying frame reconfigurations, sustaining topics, acknowledging repetitions, and responding flexibly to disengagement. Care facilities are also expected to create more opportunities for residents to engage in casual conversation.
Emotional labour in therapeutic work – the case of physiotherapists and psychotherapists in Poland
Bartosz Mika & Justyna Zielińska
This article presents a comparative analysis of emotional labour among physiotherapists and psychotherapists in Poland, based on 26 in-depth interviews conducted separately with practitioners working primarily in private practice. Despite differences in therapeutic modality – physiotherapists intervening through the body, psychotherapists through the psyche – the analysis reveals structural convergences in their emotional experiences. Drawing on Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour and Bolton’s typology of emotion management, the article examines how practitioners employ both surface and deep acting. The article’s key contributions are threefold. First, it offers an innovative comparative approach, providing empirical evidence of professional similarities across therapeutic modalities (and some differences). Second, it reconceptualises therapy sociologically as a normative and relational setting. Third, it clarifies the boundaries between emotional labour and self-care.
A paradigm shift in fertility care? Discourses on AI for IVF in the Netherlands and the UK
Esca van Blarikom & Manuela Perrotta
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly promoted as a transformative innovation in in vitro fertilization (IVF), particularly for embryo selection. This article examines how discourses surrounding AI in IVF reflect broader shifts in medical paradigms and market logics. Drawing on a comparative critical discourse analysis of clinic websites, media texts and professional publications in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, we explore how stakeholders frame the promise and potential of AI-enabled embryo selection. Our findings reveal three interconnected dynamics. First, UK discourses predominantly construct a paradigm shift from evidence-based medicine (EBM) toward data-driven care, positioning AI as a solution to the perceived limitations of randomised controlled trials. Dutch sources, by contrast, largely sustain EBM principles, framing caution as a safeguard against false hype and escalating costs. Second, UK clinics and technology developers predominantly employ promissory narratives that create self-fulfilling prophecies about an AI-driven future, while Dutch actors largely resist the inevitability of technological fixes. Third, the meaning of patient choice diverges: in the UK, choice is increasingly conflated with consumerism, enabling clinics to market unproven add-ons at additional cost; in the Netherlands, patient choice remains more insulated from market forces, though globalised imaginaries exert growing pressure. These findings illuminate how commercial interests and sociotechnical imaginaries shape reproductive care beyond clinical evidence, raising ethical concerns about equity, regulation and the commodification of hope. The IVF sector offers a critical lens on the wider implications of AI-driven medicine for healthcare governance in an era of marketisation.
Beyond legality: Bureaucratic violence and obstacles to abortion care
Ashley McKay & Melanie Heath
Pregnant people across the globe continue to face significant barriers in their ability to access abortion care. Some of these barriers are due to bureaucratic systems that can delay or even deny abortion care access, highlighting how complex procedures, fragmented systems, and opaque rules bring challenges to getting services, especially for those with fewer resources or less institutional familiarity. Illuminating these operational processes and outcomes, this study advances the concept of “bureaucratic violence” to capture how administrative barriers can produce harm. Drawing on 36 in-depth interviews with Canadian reproductive health professionals and advocates, we identify three forms of bureaucratic violence. First, general bureaucratic impediments mean that individuals face poor access to information and technological challenges to accessing care. Second, bureaucratic processes generate funding barriers that restrict some populations from obtaining services. Finally, bureaucratic procedures for billing create additional obstacles to receiving care. Overall, this article uncovers how bureaucracy can serve as a formidable barrier that results in violence against some pregnant people’s bodily autonomy and their ability to access abortion.
Linnea A. Evans, Kaitlyn Jaffe, Amy M. LeClair, Abigail W. Batchelder, Brindet Socrates, Chiteara M. Thomas, Alysse G. Wurcel, Elizabeth A. Evans
In the U.S., nearly 8 million people are incarcerated in jail each year, a majority of whom are structurally vulnerable and at elevated risk for poor health, including HIV. Jails have been identified as strategic settings for health interventions, offering opportunities to deliver “status neutral” HIV services (testing, prevention, and linkage to care) to people who may otherwise have intermittent access to care. To understand barriers and facilitators to integrating HIV care into routine jail health services, we conducted semi-structured, in-person interviews with 15 incarcerated individuals and 13 jail staff at two county jails. While interview guides focused on HIV care, participants largely reflected on the provision of healthcare in jail more generally. Both groups converged on their understanding of institutional constraints (e.g., resource and capacity limitations; an absence of protocols), with staff additionally highlighting organizational silos and threats to their clinical autonomy as obstacles to adopting status-neutral HIV care. However, staff and incarcerated individuals diverged on care experiences. Staff described respect for patient autonomy, whereas incarcerated individuals described feeling unheard, invalidated, or subject to care delays. Participants’ reactions to these limitations varied and are interpreted using concepts of street-level bureaucracy and relational autonomy, which highlight how frontline decision-making and interpersonal dynamics interact in carceral settings to restrict clinical staff autonomy, and in turn, medical autonomy of incarcerated individuals. Our findings show that the provision of routine healthcare and integration of status-neutral HIV care requires addressing institutional constraints and relational dynamics that shape perceived autonomy and trust in carceral settings.
Uncertainty and luck discourses in intersex/VSC reproduction and family-building journeys
Limor Meoded Danon, Marcy Brink & Daniela Crocetti
Are we “lucky” to live in an era of rapidly expanding medical technology? Drawing on qualitative interviews with people with Variations of Sex Characteristics (VSC), their partners, and medical professionals across multiple national contexts, this article examines how “luck discourse” is mobilized in narratives of family building. Participants frequently invoke luck, often in contradictory ways, to describe their experiences of pursuing parenthood in technoscapes that include uterus transplantation (UTx), surgical sperm retrieval (TESE/MicroTESE) and other assisted reproductive technologies. Rather than treating such inconsistencies as error, we ask what luck discourse does and reveals. We analyse invocations of luck as sociolinguistic acts that mediate tensions between agency and constraint, autonomy and medical authority, hope and despair across medicalized life courses. These invocations often index broader concerns surrounding inequality and medical authority, while providing a flexible language for uncertainty. Building on this analysis, we propose a sociological typology of luck that conceptualises it as a dynamic, non-binary, and indexical resource. We identify three primary domains of luck discourse: temporal, statistical, and structural; alongside a cross-cutting agentive dimension through which individuals negotiate responsibility and control. Attending to luck discourse offers a valuable methodological and analytical entry point for understanding how people navigate uncertainty and how broader social dynamics, inequalities and conflicts are reflected and negotiated through luck discourse.
Cynthia Itbo Musah & Susan J. Elliott
Women in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) carry a disproportionate burden of unpaid care and domestic work (UCDW), with significant consequences for their health and wellbeing. This burden persists despite widespread recognition of the inequity. Yet less is understood about how it is reproduced through household authority structures and intergenerational norm enforcement within the very populations it harms. Drawing on Mbembe’s necropolitics, we theorise UCDW in SSA as a necropolitical arrangement through which sovereign power consigns women to conditions of slow death by normalising the ordinary, cumulative toll of reproductive labour under conditions of state abandonment. We then develop the concept of nested sovereignty to account for how this arrangement persists. Nested sovereignty describes a multi-scalar structure of power in which the state, through its withdrawal from infrastructural provision and abdication of its protective obligation, creates the conditions for patriarchal household authority and intergenerational norm enforcement to govern women’s bodies. Placed in conversation with Nancy Krieger’s ecosocial theory, nested sovereignty points toward a necrosocial orientation to health, showing how necropolitical arrangements operating through social reproduction become biologically inscribed as illness, diminished wellbeing, and unequal life chances. From this perspective, the home appears not as a private space outside politics but as a site where state abandonment produces embodied conditions of life-in-death and where sovereign power operates through the everyday relations of social reproduction.
Society and Mental Health
Rachel Donnelly and Courtney E. Boen
Financial hardship was pervasive during the COVID-19 pandemic, with adverse consequences for mental health. However, access to state-level paid sick leave during the pandemic had the potential to reduce the mental health burden of financial hardship—a possibility that has not been tested in prior research. Using nationally representative survey data on more than 1.7 million individuals from the Household Pulse Survey (August 2020 to November 2022) merged with state-level data on paid sick leave policies, we estimated a battery of two-way fixed-effects linear probability models to examine whether paid leave policies buffered the association between financial hardship and depression and anxiety risks. Results show that experiencing financial hardship increased depression and anxiety risks but that the mental health consequences of financial hardship were dampened for respondents living in a state with an active paid sick leave policy. Moreover, because racially minoritized adults, women, transgender adults, and less-educated adults were more likely to experience financial hardship over the period, our study highlights the potential for paid leave policies to reduce population inequities in mental health. We point to paid sick leave policies as an important macro-level determinant of mental health with especially salient mental health consequences for marginalized groups.
Curare | Zeitschrift für Medizinethnologie |ournal of Medical Anthropology
(A)symmetrische Beziehungen Professionelle Einblicke in den psychiatrischen Krankenhausalltag
(A)symmetrical relationships: Professional insights into everyday life in a psychiatric hospital
Andrea Kuckert
Fallbeispiele haben uns als Mitarbeitende im Krankenhaus motiviert, uns mit der Thematik der (A)symmetrie näher auseinanderzusetzen. Im Rahmen der 36. Jahrestagung der Arbeitsgemeinscha” Ethno-logie und Medizin (AGEM) in Kooperation mit dem Alexius/Josef Krankenhaus in Neuss und der Verbundforschungsplattform Worlds of Contra-diction (WOC) der Universität Bremen wollten wir diese Thematik aus verschiedenen Perspektiven beleuchten. Mit dem Titel „(A)symmetrische Bezie-hungen: Facetten der Kooperation im psychiatri-schen Krankenhausalltag“, organisiert von Ehler Voss und Andrea Kuckert, konnten wir zahlreiche Sprecher*innen gewinnen, die sich mit uns auf einen spannenden Weg gemacht haben. Ausgangspunkt war die Frage, wie die Mitarbei-tenden in einem psychiatrischen Akutkranken-haus in unterschiedlichen Bereichen und Zusam-menstellungen miteinander kooperieren. Dazu muss man sich zunächst Folgendes vor Augen führen: Der Alltag in einer Psychiatrie wird von unterschiedlichen Akteur*innen be-stimmt. Neben den Patient*innen gibt es unter anderem den ärztlichen und den p!egerischen Dienst, Psycholog*innen, Mitarbeitende der thera-peutischen Dienste wie Sport-, Ergo- und Musik-therapie, klinische Sozialarbeiter*innen und Ge-nesungsbegleiter*innen wie Seelsorger*innen oder Ehrenamtler*innen sowie Mitarbeiter*innen in Verwaltung, Raump!ege und Küche, die mit-einander auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen koope-rieren. Eingebettet sind diese Beziehungen in ökonomische, infrastrukturelle und gesellscha”-liche Rahmenbedingungen. Zudem beein!ussen die sozialen und kulturellen Hintergründe von Patient*innen und Mitarbeitenden die jeweiligen Beziehungen genauso wie die Wahl der Behand-lungsform, insbesondere die der Medikation. Dabei zeichnen sich die Beziehungen der betei-ligten Akteur*innen durch unterschiedliche Asymmetrien in den Bereichen des Wissens, des Handelns, der Macht und des Nutzens aus.
Case studies motivated us as hospital staff to delve deeper into the topic of (a)symmetry. At the 36th annual conference of the Working Group for Ethnology and Medicine (AGEM), in cooperation with the Alexius/Josef Hospital in Neuss and the collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WOC) at the University of Bremen, we wanted to explore this topic from various perspectives. With the title “(A)symmetrical Relationships: Facets of Cooperation in Everyday Psychiatric Hospital Life,” organized by Ehler Voss and Andrea Kuckert, we were able to attract numerous speakers who embarked on this fascinating journey with us. The starting point was the question of how staff members in an acute psychiatric hospital cooperate with one another in different areas and constellations. To understand this, it’s essential to first consider the following: Daily life in a psychiatric hospital is shaped by a variety of actors. In addition to the patients, there are, among others, medical and nursing staff, psychologists, employees of therapeutic services such as sports, occupational, and music therapy, clinical social workers and recovery support staff such as chaplains or volunteers, as well as employees in administration, housekeeping, and the kitchen, who cooperate with each other on various levels. These relationships are embedded in economic, infrastructural, and social frameworks. Furthermore, the social and cultural backgrounds of patients and staff influence the respective relationships, as does the choice of treatment, especially medication. The relationships between the actors involved are characterized by various asymmetries in the areas of knowledge, action, power, and benefit.
Experienced Involvement: A project to use the knowledge of people with lived experience of mental illness for the benefit of others.
Andrea Kuckert, Andreas Rexin Alexius & Heidrun Lundie
Mit Peergroups wie dem Trialogforum wurden in der Psychiatrie bereits erste Schritte unternom-men, in der Behandlung die Sicht von Betro!e-nen deutlich in den Fokus zu nehmen und als Ressource zu nutzen (Bock und Sielaff 2010). Da-mit verbunden ist der Versuch einer gesellschaftlichen Entstigmatisierung der psychiatrischen Behandlung in einem Akutkrankenhaus. Mit dem EU-Programm Leonardo da Vinci (EX-IN Deutschland E.V. 2025) wurde das Ziel verfolgt, genau dieser Gruppe der Psychiatrieerfahrenen eine Qualifikation zu ermöglichen, mit der sie als Mitarbeitende in psychiatrischen Diensten tätig werden können. Aus diesem Projekt hat sich das Curriculum EX-IN entwickelt, das die Grundlage einer eigenständigen Ausbildung zur „Gene-sungsbegleitung“ bildet.EX-IN ist die Abkürzung des englischen Aus-drucks „experienced involvement“ und bedeutet, dass Menschen, die eine psychische Erkrankung oder Krise erfahren haben, an der Behandlung von akut Erkrankten teilhaben. Durch ihr indivi-duelles Erfahrungswissen sind sie die Expert*in-nen für ihren Krankheits- und Genesungsverlauf und können durch dieses Wissen die Patient*in-nen unterstützen. Gleichzeitig bringen sie durch ihr Expertenwissen auch eine neue Qualität in die multiprofessionellen Teams ein.
With peer groups like the Trialogue Forum, initial steps have already been taken in psychiatry to clearly focus on the perspective of those affected in treatment and to utilize it as a resource (Bock and Sielaff 2010). This is linked to an attempt to destigmatize psychiatric treatment in acute care hospitals. The EU program Leonardo da Vinci (EX-IN Germany e.V. 2025) pursued the goal of providing precisely this group of people with lived experience of mental illness with qualifications that would enable them to work as staff in psychiatric services. The EX-IN curriculum developed from this project and forms the basis of independent training for “recovery support.” EX-IN is an abbreviation of the English term “experienced involvement” and means that people who have experienced a mental illness or crisis participate in the treatment of acutely ill patients. Through their individual experiential knowledge, they are the experts on their own illness and recovery process and can use this knowledge to support patients. At the same time, their expertise brings a new quality to the multidisciplinary teams.
Media and Medicine as Resources for Each Other. Polio Oral Vaccination on West German Television in the 1960s and 1970s
Tobias Becker
Nachdem ab 1962 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland flächendeckend die Oralimpfung gegen Poliomyelitis („Kinderlähmung“) eingeführt wurde, gab es intensive und langjährige Werbekampagnen, bei denen besonders dem Fernsehen als neuem gesellschaftlichen Leitmedium eine immer größere Bedeutung zukam. Der Artikel analysiert diese Rolle des Fernsehens für die Propagierung der Polio-Schluckimpfung sowohl hinsichtlich der Vielzahl an re-daktionellen Sendungsbeiträgen als auch mit Blick auf einflussreiche staatliche Werbespots. Das Argument lau-tet, dass die Propagierung der Polio-Schluckimpfung in den 1960er- und 70er-Jahren eingebettet war in ein teils institutionalisiertes, vor allem aber informelles Zusam-menwirken von medizinischen und medialen Akteuren, die in strategischen Allianzen voneinander zu profitieren suchten. Der Artikel beschreibt, wie Medien als Ressourcen der Medizin, umgekehrt aber auch Medizin als Res-source der Medien dienten. Zudem zeigt er auf, wie sich die Werbestrategien im Laufe der 1960er- und 70er-Jahre veränderten. Dieser medienhistorische Blick fördert zu-tage, dass die Behauptung, der Rückgang der Erkran-kungsfälle in den frühen 1960er-Jahren sei maßgeblich dem berühmt gewordenen Werbeslogan „Schluckimp-fung ist süß – Kinderlähmung ist grausam“ zu verdanken gewesen, ein medialretrospektiver Mythos ist, der auf ei-ner meist unzutreffenden zeitlichen Zuschreibung beruht. Der Artikel stellt die historische Einordnung des Slogans richtig und erläutert den in den 1970er-Jahren vollzogenen Wandel der Werbelogiken für das Impfen – weg von Abschreckungs- und Schockbildern hin zu Darstellungen eines unbekümmerten Immunitätsversprechens –, wie sie bis heute eingesetzt werden.
After oral vaccination against poliomyelitis (‘polio’) was introduced nationwide in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1962, there were intensive and long-term advertising campaigns in which television, as a new leading medium in society, became increasingly important. The article analyses this role of television in promoting oral polio vaccination, both in terms of the large number of editorial broadcasts and in terms of influential advertising spots by the state. The argument is that the promotion of oral polio vaccines in the 1960s and 1970s was embedded in a partly institutionalised, but primarily informal, collaboration be-tween medical and media actors who sought to benefit from each other through strategic alliances. The article describes how the media served as a resource for medicine and, conversely, how medicine served as a resource for the media. It also shows how advertising strategies changed over the course of the 1960s and 70s. This perspective from media history reveals that the claim according to which the decline in polio cases in the early 1960s was largely due to the famous advertising slogan ‘Oral vaccine is sweet – Polio is cruel’ (Schluckimpfung ist süß – Kinderlähmung ist grausam) is a retrospective media myth based on a mostly inaccurate chronological attribution. The article thus sets the historical context of the slo-gan straight as well as it explains how advertising logics for vaccination changed in the 1970s – moving away from deterrent and shocking images towards depictions of a carefree promise of immunity as they continue to be used today.
Cryonics 2.0. Implicit Transhumanism, Anti-Aging, and the “Rise of Rationalism”
William Dawley
Wie wurde die Kryonik durch futuristische Entwicklungen in KI und Anti-Aging-Medizin beeinflusst? Kryonik bezeichnet die Praxis, menschliche Körper mit Frostschutzlösungen (Kryoprotektiva) zu durchdringen und – der Hoffnung auf eine zukünftige Wiederbelebung – bei extrem niedrigen Temperaturen zu lagern. Kryoniker*innen (diejenigen, die Kryonik praktizieren oder sich dafür anmelden) erhoffen sich eine Wiederbelebung durch verschiedene biologische und digitale Methoden. Diese reichen von der Wiedererwärmung, Heilung und Verjüngung des Körpers über digitale und biologische Verbesserungen bis hin zur digitalen Rekonstruktion der Person oder des Bewusstseins. Bis vor Kurzem war Kryonik ein Randphänomen und erst in jüngster Zeit Gegenstand ethnografischer Manuskripte. Doch Fortschritte in der KI, die Altersforschung und andere kulturelle Entwicklungen haben sie in den Mainstream gebracht. Mit der zunehmenden Verbreitung des Themas Kryonik und der steigenden Zahl von Kryoniker*innen haben sich auch deren Lernprozesse, ihre Selbstwahrnehmung und ihre Art der Präsentation verändert. Trotz der Rolle von KI bei der Etablierung transhumanistischer Ideen wie der Idee der Auslagerung des Bewusstsein außerhalb des biologischen Körpers „jenseits der Kohlenstoffbarriere“ zeigen ethnografische Daten und Umfragen, dass sich Kryonik auf zwei alternativen Wegen verbreitet: durch das wachsende Interesse an Anti-Aging-Forschung und -Behandlung sowie durch den Aufstieg des Rationalismus und damit verbundene Bewegungen wie den Effektiven Altruismus und den Langzeitansatz. Mitglieder des Forschungsteams „Human Futures”.
How has cryonics been affected by futuristic developments in AI and anti-aging medicine? Cryonics is the practice of perfusing human bodies with antifreeze solutions (cryoprotectants) and storing them at ultralow temperatures in the hopes of future revival. Cryonicists (those who practice or sign up for cryonics) hope for revival by a vari-ety of biological and digital methods, ranging from re-warming, healing, and rejuvenating the body, to adding digital and biological enhancements, to recreating the person or consciousness in digital form. Cryonics was until very recently a very fringe phenomenon only lately the topic of ethnographic manuscripts. But it has been mainstreamed not only by advances in AI, but by the study of aging, as well as other cultural developments. Along with this mainstreaming and the growth in the number of cryonicists, there have been changes in how cryonicists learn about cryonics, how they self-identify, and how they present cryonics to others. Despite AI’s role in mainstreaming transhumanist ideas, such as consciousness outside the biological body, ‘beyond the carbon barrier’ my ethnographic and survey data show that cryonics is popularizing along two alternative routes: through a surging interest in anti-aging research and treatment, and through ‘the Rise of Rationalism’ and Rationalist-adjacent movements like Effective Altruism and Longtermism. “Cryonics 2.0” is the name that members of the “Human Futures” research team have given to this new context for cryonics, wherein many cryonicists shed the explicit language of immortalism and transhumanism in favour of longevity and Rationalist discourses.
Health & Place
Rebecca A. Reid, Beiou Zhang, Suzanne Mavoa, Julia Gilmartin-Thomas, Sarah Foster, Jerome N. Rachele
Neighbourhood socioeconomic disadvantage has been consistently associated with an increased risk of poor mental health. Beyond socioeconomic conditions, neighbourhood environmental attributes have the potential to shape mental health, either supporting or harming wellbeing. While numerous reviews have examined the relationship between various neighbourhood characteristics and mental health, evidence on whether objectively measured environmental attributes moderate this relationship in the context of neighbourhood socioeconomic disadvantage is yet to be synthesised. This systematic review synthesised evidence from studies examining environmental attributes as moderators of the relationship between neighbourhood socioeconomic disadvantage and mental health. From seven databases and a grey literature search 19 studies were identified for inclusion. Moderation findings were mixed. Greenness and blue space were generally protective in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, while air pollution exacerbated poor mental health. Evidence for parks and walkability was inconsistent and may reflect unmeasured factors such as safety and quality. Noise and elder support centres were examined in one study each, highlighting the limited evidence on these attributes. In addition, more longitudinal research examining a broader range of environmental attributes is needed to inform urban planning policies aimed at reducing mental health inequalities.
Holly A. Harris, Veerle van Garling, Inge Merkelbach, Paul Kocken, Pauline W. Jansen
Families living in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighbourhoods are disproportionately exposed to unhealthy food outlets. Yet less is known about how families perceive and navigate these local food environments in everyday life. Parents play a key intermediary role in translating neighbourhood food environments into family food purchasing decisions. As such, this qualitative study explored how parents of children aged 8 to 10 years perceive and experience their neighbourhood food environment in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with parents from socioeconomically diverse neighbourhoods. Data were analysed inductively using a constructivist grounded theory approach. Two overarching themes conceptualised parents’ engagement with the food environment as a relational and adaptive process, whereby “perceiving the neighbourhood food environment” was continually recalibrated through parents’ “use of the food environment in everyday life”. Perceptions were shaped by what felt available, acceptable, and accessible, extending to digital food retail and influenced by community norms and safety. These perceptions were recalibrated as families actively engaged with their food environment through planning grocery shopping, navigating in-store trade-offs between price, quality and health or environmental values, and outsourcing meals for time management or enjoyment. Experiences of using the food environment, in turn, reshaped perceptions, forming a dynamic perceive-use-recalibrate feedback loop. Public health interventions should address both neighbourhood and consumer food environments, combining urban planning with strategies attuned to how families perceive and navigate food choices in everyday life.
Max Bobholz, Carly Schanock, Tinuola Oladebo, Crispus Mwemaho, Julius Ssentongo, Agnes Nyabigambo, Julia Dickson-Gomez, Bryan Johnston, Roy Mayega, Wei Xu, John Bosco Isunju, Kirsten Beyer
Background
The climate crisis plays a central role in the displacement of millions each year in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Few studies have explored the burden of poor health outcomes among climate-related migrants (CRMs) in SSA. This scoping review aimed to summarize this limited body of literature and identify gaps for future research.
Methods
A protocol was developed and registered with OSF before performing the literature search. Four databases were systematically searched, identifying 392 unique records. After screening the titles and abstracts of these articles for relevance, 18 articles were sought for full-text review to assess alignment with the pre-defined inclusion criteria. Ten articles were reviewed in depth and summarized to identify key themes.
Results
Included articles originated from Western, Eastern, and Southern Africa and focused primarily on flooding, droughts, and environmental degradation. The five key health outcomes identified were (i) poor mental health and solastalgia, (ii) poor physical health, (iii) loss of financial livelihood, (iv) reduced access to healthcare, and (v) poor social health. Sense of place was also observed to be disrupted, as CRMs reported feelings of solastalgia.
Conclusions
CRMs experience significant and wide-ranging health and place-based struggles. These outcomes are deeply connected and contribute to many quality-of-life challenges. This study highlights a critical research gap in understanding how displacement and climate change contribute to poor health outcomes and disruptions to sense of place, especially in SSA.
Anthropologie et Sociétés
Inventorier, collecter et échantillonner les mémoires: Le musée et les héritages singuliers
Inventorying, Collecting, and Sampling Memories The Museum and Singular Legacies
Thierry Bonnot
En anthropologie, les interactions entre les ethnologues et leurs interlocuteurs sur le terrain constituent des matériaux scientifiques pour l’enquête, générant différents types de documents : enregistrements, notes, images, films, fichiers numériques. Ces documents n’ont pas de valeur informative en dehors de la relation ethnographique par laquelle ils ont été produits. Ils ne peuvent être considérés comme des données ou des sources brutes. Lorsque l’enquête concerne des objets de patrimoine, entrés ou non au musée, ce questionnement se double d’une dimension problématique que l’on peut résumer ainsi : les objets matériels étant intégrés à un ensemble de relations, sont-ils en eux-mêmes des documents ou la cristallisation de ces relations ? Que documentent les objets ? L’histoire de leur production, celle d’une entreprise, d’une région, d’une famille d’industriels ? Ou celle d’un collectionneur, d’une enquête, d’une relation avec un anthropologue ? Cet article tentera de répondre à ces questions à partir d’enquêtes de terrain au long cours, où l’ethnographie a été amenée à croiser l’histoire, la muséologie et l’archéologie, notamment à l’occasion d’une donation et d’un travail d’échantillonnage de collections dans les réserves d’un musée, en France.
In anthropology, interactions between ethnologists and their interlocutors constitute scientific material for research, generating different types of documents: recordings, notes, images, films, and digital files. These documents have no informative value outside the ethnographic relationship through which they were produced. They cannot be considered raw data or sources. When the survey concerns heritage objects, whether or not they are in a museum, this question is compounded by a problematic dimension that can be summarized as follows: since material objects are part of a set of relationships, are they themselves documents or the crystallization of these relationships? What do the objects document? The history of their production, of a company, a region, and a family of industrialists? Or that of a collector, an investigation, a relationship with an anthropologist? This paper will attempt to answer these questions based on long-term field research, where ethnography has been brought to intersect with history, museology, and archaeology, particularly in the context of a donation and sampling of collections in the reserves of a museum in France.
Des outils de papier aux gestes savants (de la documentation)
From Paper Tools to Scholarly Gestures (of Documentation)
Jean-François Bert, Emmanuelle Chapron, Jérôme Lamy et Simon Dumas Primbault
Cet article explore le rôle de trois « outils de papier » — liste, registre et dossier — dans la production et l’organisation des savoirs. En s’appuyant sur une approche croisant histoire et anthropologie, les auteurs montrent comment ces dispositifs matériels structurent la pensée, standardisent les pratiques et facilitent la communication savante. Chaque outil permet ainsi d’interroger la persistance de gestes documentaires, y compris à l’ère numérique, où coexistent anciennes et nouvelles pratiques d’inscription. L’étude de ces trois outils révèle une « logistique de la pensée » où le papier conditionne les modes de raisonnement, de collaboration et d’archivage.
This article explores the role of three “paper tools”—list, register, and file—in the production and organization of knowledge. Drawing on an approach that combines history and anthropology, the authors show how these material devices structure thought, standardize practices, and facilitate scholarly communication. Each tool thus allows us to examine the persistence of documentary practices, even in the digital age, where old and new methods of recording coexist. The study of these three tools reveals a “logistics of thought” in which paper shapes modes of reasoning, collaboration, and archiving.
Learning through Objects: Documentation and Enhancement of the Ethnographic Collection of the Université de Montréal (Research Note)
Violaine Debailleul, Ingrid Hall et Eugène Fournier
Le Département d’anthropologie de l’Université de Montréal dispose, depuis sa fondation, d’une collection ethnographique comptant près de 4 000 objets. Si l’intégration de la collection aux activités d’enseignement et de recherche a varié au fil du temps, on constate, depuis une quinzaine d’années, un regain d’intérêt à son égard. Les objets sont mobilisés dans un nombre croissant de cours, selon différentes formules qui intègrent de façon plus ou moins poussée la culture matérielle. Parallèlement, des expositions sont organisées. Dans ce cadre universitaire, la documentation occupe une place particulière, car elle est au coeur des activités pédagogiques tout en favorisant la valorisation de la collection. Ce texte a pour objectif de présenter la collection et ses usages afin de montrer la richesse qu’elle représente pour le Département d’anthropologie et au-delà. Sont abordés l’histoire et la nature de cette collection, les défis liés à sa documentation, les différentes façons de la valoriser et, enfin, les enjeux éthiques contemporains auxquels il faut désormais faire face.
The Department of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal has maintained, since its founding, a collection of ethnographic objects comprising nearly 4,000 items. While the integration of the collection into teaching and research activities has varied over time, a renewed interest has emerged over the past fifteen years. Objects are increasingly being mobilized in courses, through various approaches that incorporate material culture to varying degrees. At the same time, exhibitions are organized. In this academic context, documentation plays a particular role, as it lies at the heart of pedagogical activities while also contributing to the valorization of the collection. This text aims to present the collection and its uses in order to highlight the richness it represents for the Department of Anthropology and beyond. It examines the history and nature of the collection, the challenges related to its documentation, the different ways of enhancing it, and, finally, the contemporary ethical issues that must now be faced.
Collaborative Documentation Practice at the Montreal Holocaust Museum: The Gerhart and Herbert Maass Family Archives (Research Note)
Marie-Blanche Fourcade
Cette note de recherche explore des pratiques collaboratives de documentation au Musée de l’Holocauste de Montréal à travers l’étude de cas des fonds d’archives des frères Maass. À partir d’une approche ethnographique ancrée dans la pratique professionnelle, le texte met en lumière la manière dont la documentation collaborative peut créer un espace de dialogue, de partage et de co-auteurité. L’expérience menée avec Barbara Maass, fille de Gerhart et nièce de Herbert Maass, illustre bien la puissance de cette collaboration, qui a permis de rendre les fonds plus visibles et d’en approfondir la connaissance, de tisser de nouveaux liens, mais aussi de renforcer la portée mémorielle et historique des archives. Cette note de recherche analyse certains impacts de ce projet pilote sur la collection, sur les participants et sur la transmission de la mémoire. Elle montre comment cette pratique de documentation peut renforcer la responsabilité collective et inscrire la préservation de la mémoire dans un partenariat durable entre le musée et la communauté.
This research note explores collaborative documentation practices at the Montreal Holocaust Museum through a case study of the archival collections of the Maass brothers. Drawing on an ethnographic approach grounded in professional practice, it highlights how collaborative documentation can create a space for dialogue, sharing, and co-authorship. The experience conducted with Barbara Maass, daughter of Gerhart and niece of Herbert Maass, powerfully illustrates the impact of this collaboration, which made it possible to increase the visibility of the fonds and deepen knowledge of them, to foster new connections, and to strengthen the memorial and historical significance of the archives. This research note analyzes some of the impacts of this pilot project on the collection, the participants, and the transmission of memory. It shows how this documentation practice can strengthen collective responsibility and embed the preservation of memory within a sustainable partnership between the museum and the community.
Critical Description and Indexation of Documents in the Nipakanatik Digital Collection (Research Note)
Juste Roy, Jean-Sébastien Sauvé, Julie Lise Simard et Nancy Wiscutie-Crépeau
Au sein de la Nation Anicinabe, la raréfaction des porteuses et porteurs de connaissances conduit à percevoir les archives comme des outils de revitalisation culturelle. Historiquement, les objets culturels anicinabe ont été décrits par des allochtones selon des perspectives canado-européennes, contribuant à l’affaiblissement de la langue, des savoirs et des mémoires des ancêtres. Cette note de recherche présente les normes adoptées par Minwashin pour la description des documents dans la collection numérique Nipakanatik. L’organisme s’est doté d’un comité de gouvernance, le Cercle Mitonentcikan, et a codéveloppé avec des partenaires issus des communautés un schéma de métadonnées et une liste de descripteurs-sujets contrôlés. Ces dispositifs permettent de décrire les documents de la collection de manière à refléter les perspectives anicinabe et à stimuler la revitalisation de la langue anicinabe.
Within the Anicinabe Nation, the decreasing number of knowledge holders has led to viewing archives as tools for cultural revitalization. Historically, Anicinabe cultural objects were described by non-Indigenous people from Euro-Canadian perspectives, contributing to the weakening of ancestral language, knowledge, and memory. This research note presents the standards adopted by Minwashin for describing documents in the Nipakanatik digital collection. The organization has established a governance committee, the Mitonentcikan Circle, and has co-developed, with community partners, a metadata schema and a list of controlled subject descriptors. These measures enable documents in the collection to be described in ways that reflect Anicinabe perspectives and support the revitalization of the Anicinabe language.
IArtefact: An Artificial Intelligence Mobilization Project for the Documentation of Ethnographic Objects (Research Note)
Sandrine Lambert et Martin Hébert
Cette note de recherche présente le projet IArtefact, mené au Département d’anthropologie de l’Université Laval entre 2023 et 2024. Face à la relative sous-utilisation de la collection ethnographique du département — riche, variée et composée de 465 objets —, le projet a exploré de nouvelles voies pédagogiques pour réactiver ces matériaux. Il a mobilisé des systèmes d’intelligence artificielle (SIA) afin d’automatiser et d’enrichir la documentation de la biographie sociale d’objets choisis, dans le cadre d’un protocole de recherche constamment encadré par une intervention humaine. Les résultats sont présentés comme une preuve de concept, mettant en lumière à la fois les potentialités et les limites de l’intelligence artificielle générative pour les textes et les images en anthropologie. Au-delà des informations spécifiques obtenues sur les objets eux-mêmes, l’apport principal du projet a été de susciter un intérêt renouvelé, tant scientifique que pédagogique, pour la collection. Plus largement, cette note de recherche propose une réflexion sur la manière dont les technologies numériques peuvent favoriser un dialogue entre les artefacts de culture matérielle et la pratique anthropologique contemporaine, repositionnant les collections ethnographiques comme des ressources actives pour l’enseignement, la recherche et la réflexion critique.
This research note presents the IArtefact project, conducted in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval between 2023 and 2024. Confronted with the relative underutilization of the department’s ethnographic collection—rich, diverse, and consisting of 465 objects—the project sought new pedagogical ways to re-engage these materials. It employed artificial intelligence systems (AIS) to automate and enrich the documentation of the social biographies of selected objects, within a research protocol consistently guided by human oversight. The results are presented as proof of concept, highlighting both the possibilities and limitations of generative AI for text and images in anthropological research. Beyond the specific information gathered on the objects themselves, the project’s main contribution was to stimulate renewed scholarly and pedagogical interest in the collection. More broadly, this research note reflects how digital technologies can foster dialogue between material culture artifacts and contemporary anthropological practices, resituating ethnographic collections as active resources for teaching, research, and critical reflection.
The Anthropologist, Monkeys and the Camera: From Animalarian Images to a Visual and Multispecies Anthropology
Gaspard Renault
Si les ethnographies multiespèces impliquant des primates non humains se sont multipliées à travers les sciences sociales au cours des dernières décennies, l’anthropologie visuelle s’est quant à elle relativement peu intéressée aux enjeux épistémologiques d’un tel tournant. Face à ce constat, cet article pose le cadre théorique et méthodologique d’une anthropologie visuelle multiespèces. À partir d’un inventaire historique des figurations de singes et des discussions qui animent l’anthropologie et la primatologie concernant l’usage de la caméra et des images, il resitue d’abord ce projet à la frontière entre sciences sociales et naturelles. Puis, en revenant sur les résultats d’une enquête menée dans des centres de réhabilitation pour singes en Bolivie, l’article met en avant l’intérêt d’une approche multimodale pour penser le rôle des images animalitaires. Enfin, la dernière partie explore les intentions esthétiques et narratives d’un projet de film documentaire réalisé dans le prolongement de l’étude présentée. De manière transversale, l’article défend ainsi l’intérêt d’une approche multimodale et cinématographique pour rendre compte des logiques affectives qui sous-tendent les rapports entre humains et animaux pris dans des dynamiques de conservation de la nature.
While multispecies ethnographies involving non-human primates have gained ground across the social sciences in recent decades, visual anthropology has shown relatively little interest in the epistemological issues raised by such a shift. In light of this observation, this paper sets out the theoretical and methodological framework for a multispecies visual anthropology. Drawing on a historical overview of representations of monkeys and of debates in anthropology and primatology concerning the use of cameras and images, it first situates this project at the frontier between the social and the natural sciences. It then revisits the results of a study carried out in primate rehabilitation centres in Bolivia, highlighting the value of a multimodal approach for thinking about the role of animalarian images. Finally, it explores the aesthetic and narrative intentions of a documentary film project developed as an extension of the study. Overall, the paper argues for the value of a multimodal and cinematographic approach to accounting for the affective logics that underlie relationships between humans and animals within the dynamics of nature conservation.
