Everyday adaptability in Ghanaian hospital laboratories

— Ian LichtensteinDeveloped countries that enact laboratory standards and universal health policies have the luxury of numerous resources and technological advances to ensure an efficient diagnosis. In rural and urban Ghana, resource availability fluc…

Worlds in a bottle

An object-centered ethnography for global health — Abigail H. NeelyIn this article, I call for an object-centered ethnography to illuminate the ontological multiplicity that marks the worlds of health and healing that people inhabit. Focusing on a spor…

Disaggregating diabetes

New subtypes, causes, and care — Lauren Carruth, Sarah Chard, Heather A. Howard, Lenore Manderson, Emily Mendenhall, Emily Vasquez, Emily Yates-DoerrInterest in disaggregating diabetes into numerous subtypes is growing as patients and providers recogni…

On the coloniality of global public health

— Eugene T. RichardsonThe continued inordinate demise from communicable pathogens in the global South is not the result of an intractable problem thwarting our best efforts to prevent and cure disease; we have the means. Rather, as an accomplice to co…

Opening up ‘fever’, closing down medicines

Algorithms as blueprints for global health in an era of antimicrobial resistance — Justin Dixon, Clare ChandlerRising concerns about antimicrobial resistance have sparked a renewed push to rationalise and ration the use of medicines. This article explo…

Epistemic prejudice and geographies of innovation

Health disparities and unrecognized interventions in Mississippi — Kate M. Centellas, Emma Willoughby, John J. GreenThis article seeks to understand how and why certain locations are excluded from or seen as foreclosed as places of innovation and knowl…

The spaces in-between

Anthropological engagements with classifying, boundary making, and epistemological closure — Eileen Moyer, Vinh-Kim Nguyen

Making bodies kosher

The politics of reproduction among Haredi Jews in EnglandBen Kasstan — Kaveri Qureshi

Thinking through complex webs of potency

Early Tibetan medical responses to the emerging coronavirus epidemic: Notes from a field visit to Dharamsala, India — Barbara GerkeThe epidemic of COVID-19 caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been in the headl…

Ongame molwashoka otse

Reflections on suicide from Swakopmund, Namibia — Jack BoultonA recent national survey by the Ministry for Health and Social Services revealed that Namibia’s suicide rate was vastly higher than previously thought. Mirroring global conceptions of mental…

Autism as heredity, autism as heritage

The movement of autism back and forth through time — Ben BelekKinship relations constitute the grooves through which autism travels temporally. On the one hand, the biological components of the condition are understood to journey from one generation to…

Protecting life, facilitating death

The bureaucratic experience of organized assisted suicide — Marcos Freire de Andrade NevesThe process of organized assisted suicide (OAS), permitted in Switzerland under specific circumstances, requires applicants to produce and circulate an array of m…

Transfigurations of aging

Everyday self-care in a civil servant milieu of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania — Andrea Kaiser-GrolimundTo date, most social anthropological studies on aging in African contexts focus on care for poor older people provided by related others. The focus of this…

Old, disabled, successful?

Transfigurations of aging with disabilities in Switzerland — Francesca RickliAging – both the definition and the actual process of aging – has undergone fundamental local and global changes in the past decades. Various advances in technology and medici…

Following ‘Fosfo’

Syntheticphosphoethanolamine and the transfiguration of immunopolitics in Brazil — Márcio VilarThe chemical substance synthetic phosphoethanolamine (fosfoetanolamina sintética) was developed at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil at the beginni…

Rethinking sociality and health through transfiguration

— Dominik Mattes, Bernhard Hadolt, Brigit ObristIn this introductory article to the Special Section, we intend to literally bring sociality to (bodily) life and ask what medical anthropology might gain by using the lens of sociality for a better under…

Sticky models

History as friction in obstetric education — John Nott, Anna HarrisThis paper explores the material histories which influence contemporary medical education. Using two obstetric simulators found in the distinct teaching environments of the University o…

Structural vulnerabilities and healthcare services integration

HIV-positive Mozambican migrants in Johannesburg — Bent SteenbergHome to one fifth of all people living with HIV, South Africa carries the world’s heaviest burden of this disease. While a significant proportion of those infected are immigrants from oth…