Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
Images are increasingly used in health research as a complement to discursive methods, to elicit more and different types of knowledge and experience from participants. The use of image-based research, such as drawing and photography, then, …
What can we learn about the therapeutic landscapes of in-patient psychiatric care by focusing on the invisible, the seemingly unimportant? To explore how mental affliction and caregiving acts are connected to other-than-human dimensions and …
Special Section Introduction
During research on love songs and political poetry in Somaliland, one of my closest interlocutors has been a poet named Weedhsame who describes his work as arising from a duty to ‘give voice to the voiceless’. Collaborating with a musician a…
Editorial for the Spring issue, 2025.
In this article, I investigate the case of a deaf woman, Silivia, who lived in western Uganda. Silivia did not use standardised sign language and was commonly considered to be ‘mad.’ However, some of her interlocutors disagreed, arguing that…
In this Field Note, I take the opportunity to reflect on some of the concrete dilemmas that I was faced with in trying to negotiate, secure and maintain access to my field-site. These reflections derive from my engagement with infectious dis…
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam, the media has meticulously covered disease prevention and reported on infection cases. This article will explore the current and shifting gender relations of Vietnam’s state and societ…
Our worlds and lives are awash with industrially-produced chemicals. This dizzying array of chemicals includes compounds, interactions, and health effects that are poorly, if at all, understood. While the vast majority of both natural and so…
Illness is fluid. It can cross bodily boundaries, across space and time, and permeate entire families and communities. This is especially apparent in places where people have come to rely on one another in order to withstand austerity and st…
Uncertainty, disavowal, forgetting, and stigmatisation are common responses to toxicity: dumping grounds are habitually portrayed as ‘strange, alien spaces with no comprehensive histories’ (Little and Akese 2024). How can we best face this s…
Emma Kowal’s Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity (2023) investigates the history of biological and medical research about Indigenous peoples in Australia. This book forum invited contributors to provide nuanced insights that engage the…
Precision medicine is a field of future promise. Its imaginary is that ‘health data saves lives’. But which lives and at what costs? In this position piece, we direct attention to how non-imagination (Prainsack 2022) operates in the field of…
Digitally tracking food and eating has become a widespread activity. Scholars in anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies have problematised the personal and social implications of dietary tracking and the metrification of …
Psychiatric clinicians and managers increasingly use data to monitor the use of force on psychiatric patients. In this study, we describe how Danish authorities simultaneously emphasise a need for close data monitoring and tell a story of fa…
Mental health platforms and apps provide technologies and techniques for self-work, diagnosis, and management of everyday crises. Therapeutic interventions designed to work outside the clinic, they distribute and reconfigure psy expertise. U…
In recent years, a lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to how practices of digitalisation and datafication require medical professionals to work together with different stakeholders, and to how such collaborations shape expertise (St…
Special Issue “Health-Related Expertise in the Digital Age: Reconfigurations and Redistributions”, guest edited by Sandra Bärnreuther, Nolwenn Bühler and Giada Danesi.
Data constitute a crucial resource in healthcare systems increasingly reliant on digital technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI). However, before these technologies can be used, they need to be ‘trained’ on large datasets ass…
This Photo Essay seeks to visualise the room-homes of the residents in one of the largest semi-public nursing homes in Athens, Greece. Unlike in other facilities, residents are given the opportunity to intervene in their individual rooms, to…
The article analyses the politicisation of nursing personnel during the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina, focusing on the trajectories of nurses trained in the public universities of the so-called ‘conurbano bonaerense’, especially in the youn…
This article presents an ethnographic study of the donor body in deceased organ donation. Drawing on the science and technology studies’ incitement to study bodies being enacted and acted upon in situated practices, I explore the body being done and be…
Wonkifong Ebola treatment unit was unique at the time of the outbreak that hit the Guinea in 2014. Contrary to other infrastructures run by Western workers, Wonkifong mainly employed personnel from Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, a…
This article delves into the complex dynamics of khat (Catha edulis) prohibition in the UK, with a particular focus on a Somali community in north-west London. Despite the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs finding no substantial eviden…
Few other categories of things appear so bound up with questions of agency, power and responsibility as that of ‘drugs’. With over a century of global treaties and prohibition of such substances, we are accustomed to thinking of them as pote…