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Bed-Time Storytelling

Digital sketch of a giant green bird described by a hospice patient

Bedtime stories are stories narrated by adults to children before they fall asleep. As an essential parenting skill, the storytelling scene is infused with love and trust. These stories make the transition from day to night easier. Rest well, tomorrow will be another day. In this piece, I wish to introduce an alternate narrative form I have named bed-time-storytelling—a practice of care born within the confines of hospice care beds. This approach redefines our understanding of storytelling, bridging the realms of the living and the departing, and opening a new chapter on how we engage with tales shared in the threshold between two worlds. (read more...)

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Image of hundreds people on the street at night. Many wear green headbands and are facing forward. A few people at the front of the crowd turn back, and others in the middle of the crowd are holding up a sign.

Who Knows About Ethical Research?: Reflections on Research Ethics and Vulnerability in Abortion Research

People who have abortions are often thought of as inherently vulnerable. When retold without nuance, this narrative can be harmful to abortion-seekers, as well as to reproductive autonomy more broadly, since it reinforces negative stereotypes about abortion and abortion-seekers. Changing affective paradigms around abortion has been a key concern for feminist activists around the world. In fact, a significant part of my ongoing PhD research on pharmaceutical abortion, healthcare access, and feminist activism in Argentina is concerned with how and why feminist activists seek to disrupt the social perception of abortion as intrinsically being a certain kind of experience—tragic, shameful, vulnerable, to give just a few pointers. While preparing for my data collection, I was struck by the discrepancy between how feminist activists who accompany abortions conceptualise the agency of (potentially) vulnerable abortion-seekers and my UK university’s research ethics committee’s approach to it. Especially given my own positionality as a non-Argentine PhD student, this prompted me to reflect on the challenges of navigating this divide when researching feminist activism and self-managed abortion. To this end, I unpack some of my reflections while trying to balance my duty of care for potentially vulnerable participants with respect for their agency. Striking this balance can be especially complicated when the understandings of both risk and ethical practice diverge between ethics committees, who—to a certain extent have to—adopt a universalist approach, and feminist practitioners holding contextually specific expertise on the subject, while also frequently working with different definitions of care. This divergence is even more pertinent in the case of abortion, an experience steeped in assumptions based on moralised and medicalised social and political discourses. Throughout my research process, I have understood refusing to reproduce such paternalistic discourses as essential to doing ethical research, alongside attending to potential vulnerabilities. (read more...)

A map of the Mekong Delta oriented to the left is on a round white table. There are piles of small white squares with different icons organized into rows below the map. Colored markers and pens are also on the table next to and below the map. A person's hands are visible at the bottom left corner, while the bodies of others are also seen standing around the table.

Anthropology, STS, and the Politics of Imagination in Navigating Socio-Environmental Change

“he climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2015), p.9. “We are in an imagination battle.” Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017), p.18. In late 2010, members of Dutch and Vietnamese planning delegations, sitting around conference room tables at a fancy hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, began work on what was to become the Mekong Delta Plan. The Dutch consultants depicted four quadrants divided by two axes, with climate change along one and economic growth along the other, which they deemed the two primary drivers of uncertainty facing the Mekong Delta region in the coming decades. The quadrants, they said, represented four “plausible future scenarios,” which could then be used to identify responsible investment and policy decisions in the present, regardless of whichever future were to unfold. This exercise, modeled on a similar set of quadrants used for climate adaptation planning by the Dutch in their own country, was central to the delta management approach being advanced by the Dutch participants. The “scenario planning methodology” is a strategic planning tool used to support policymaking under conditions of deep uncertainty, originally developed by former RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn and later refined by Royal Dutch Shell (Faubion 2019; Samimian-Darash 2021). In other words, it is an exercise in imagining possible futures, used to guide planning meant to enable adaptively navigating among unforeseen events. (read more...)

Vivid blues and greens are cut through by blurry rays of light shimmering out from the center, giving the impression of looking down into a watery expanse.

Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Confluences of the Domestic

Much of the water that enters homes in metro Guadalajara, Jalisco is toxic. Water from the tap is used to wash dishes and water plants, but for decades it’s been dangerous to drink. In this sonic ethnography, we hear contaminated water hitting plates used for a meal and evaporating from vegetables as a pan heats on a stove. A woman explains which brands of bottled water are safer, more trustworthy; some, she says, are appropriate for drinking, while others should only be used to wash vegetables. We hear bodies of water referred to as both rivers and sewers. (read more...)

Vivid blues and greens are cut through by blurry rays of light shimmering out from the center, giving the impression of looking down into a watery expanse.

Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Aquatic Attractions

Forty years ago, four hippos arrived in Colombia. Drug trafficker Pablo Escobar illegally imported them as part of his project to build an open-door zoo at Hacienda Naples, his enormous farm located in the Magdalena River Basin. Among many other luxuries and eccentricities, the farm housed 1,200 animals. It also included artificial lakes where the aquatic animals lived. After Escobar’s death in 1993, when the Hacienda Napoles was abandoned, most of the animals died due to lack of care, and others were transferred to other zoos. Only the hippos remained, sheltering in the lakes. In Colombia, over 160 hippos inhabit various locations. Some reside in areas formerly part of Hacienda Napoles, while others are dispersed along the Magdalena River. (read more...)

Vivid blues and greens are cut through by blurry rays of light shimmering out from the center, giving the impression of looking down into a watery expanse.

Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Attend the Rains

Each night and day in the industrial port of Ciudad del Carmen (Campeche, Mexico), dozens of Pemex oil platform workers roll their small suitcases across the concrete as they approach the dock to board ships that will take them to offshore platforms for two-week shifts. At any given moment, seventeen thousand people live and work aboard the ships and platforms in aging infrastructure. On land, dozens of logistics workers spend their days observing. They watch the movement of people and the movement of the weather. They then record it and make decisions based on what they note. Constant transport—from workers to provisions and materials—is required to maintain a constant drilling rhythm, and all needs to happen according to schedule, a task made more complicated by the volatile weather conditions that characterize the Gulf of Mexico. (read more...)

Vivid blues and greens are cut through by blurry rays of light shimmering out from the center, giving the impression of looking down into a watery expanse.

Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Water, Energy, and Youth in the Orinoco River, Colombia

July is part of the heavy rainfall season of South America’s northernmost savannas, known since colonial times as the Llanos (Plains/Grasslands) and, more recently, from a biogeographical perspective, as the Colombian-Venezuelan Orinoquia. During the “winter”/rainy months, the abundance of water everywhere makes audible the sounds of boots and motorcycles crossing flooded pastures and streets, thunders, downpours on the predominant zinc roof tiles, migratory birds, and outboard motors of the many boats traveling along tributaries that at another time of the year will almost entirely disappear. Audio recordings taken during the long six months of “summer”/drought, between November and April when no drop falls on the plains, would radically differ. (read more...)

Vivid blues and greens are cut through by blurry rays of light shimmering out from the center, giving the impression of looking down into a watery expanse.

Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Introduction

Inspired by Feld’s (2015) work on sound, in this collection of essays, we bring five ethnographers from Latin America to think about their research through the sounds of their respective field sites. The exercise we propose here borrows Feld’s concept of ‘acoustemology’ to help frame our approach towards the aural dimensions of a place: Acoustemology conjoins ‘acoustics’ and ‘epistemology’ to theorize sound as a way of knowing. In doing so, it inquires into what is knowable and how it becomes known through sounding and listening. Acoustemology begins with acoustics to ask how the dynamism of sound’s physical energy indexes its social immediacy. It asks how the physicality of sound is so instantly and forcefully present to experience and experiencers, to interpreters and interpretations. (p. 12) (read more...)