health | Platypus

Connections between Health, Science, and Technology: What Does Anthropology Have to Do With It?

 Hellen Caetano  November 12, 2024

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

As I became acquainted with social studies of science and technology, particularly through anthropological research, I realized it opened new doors for me, offering fresh perspectives and new possibilities for conducting scientific research. During my graduate studies, I sought to bring together two fields that had always intrigued me: the anthropology of health and the social studies of science and technology. In recent years, I have focused specifically on the regulation of cannabis derivatives for therapeutic use in Brazil. This topic, which naturally sparks heated debates and strong opinions, is fraught with controversies (Latour, 2012), especially regarding cannabis’s historical role, nationally and internationally, as both a recreational drug and a medicine. To delve deeper into these controversies, I decided to conduct research that would focus on public health discourses and scientific practice around cannabis, incorporating the Brazilian debate on public safety. The discussion of health and public safety is deeply tied to the unique position cannabis holds in Brazil. When legislators or civil society engage in debates about cannabis, distinctions between recreational and therapeutic uses often blur. One form of use tends to receive greater moral acceptance, while the other is frequently disqualified. Thus, any conversation about regulating cannabis as a health technology must consider its social and political classifications and the perceptions surrounding it. (read more...)

“The Day I Discovered I Was Collaborating on a Eugenics Project”: On Imponderables in Collaborative Research

 Sandra Avila, Marisol Marini  September 26, 2023

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português

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The title that opens this reflection is a statement by computer scientist Sandra Avila, who is also a co-author of the lines that will flow here. Her account took place during the recording of a podcast on science and feminism. In that situation, Avila recounted a non-trivial research experience. She may never have been able to talk about it with her colleagues in computer science, let alone with collaborators in dermatology who offered their “expertise advice.” It was in informal conversations with feminist researchers that Avila found a safe place to talk about a situation that had made her cry with anger because she felt cheated. (read more...)

Making Bioethnographic Teams Work: Disciplinary Destabilization, Generative Friction, and the Role of Mediators

 Zoe Boudart, Catherine Borra  June 22, 2023

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Increasingly, scholars across the life and social sciences recognize the necessity of multi-method, interdisciplinary research for its ability to adequately understand the world’s complex problems. However, the process of designing and executing these projects can be challenging. Interdisciplinary endeavors often risk privileging one discipline/methodological paradigm with others incorporated in a more consultative manner (i.e. quantitative versus qualitative), or, they run in-parallel without integrating epistemologies and methodologies (Lewis 2021). Examples of symmetric and integrative projects which unsettle disciplinary boundaries to afford new kinds of knowledge remain few and far between. (read more...)

How Microbes Became Friendly: Visualizations of the Microbiome in Public Media

 Janelle Curry, Alexandra Widmer  June 15, 2023

Este contenido también está disponible en Español.

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The biology, as astonishing as it is, does not tell us what it will mean. -Stephan Helmreich, “Homo Microbis” (2014, 4) Within microbiome research, the human body can be recast as a host of microbial ecologies, a “supraorganism” or “holobiont.” From this comes new ways of understanding and treating digestive diseases as well as illnesses associated with brain functioning, like depression and Alzheimer’s. This research reflects the increasing emphasis in the life sciences on “life as process” (Dupre and O’Malley 2007, Dupre 2020), and in the social sciences on the body as “biosocial” (Niehwöhner and Lock 2018). We take up these insights and examine one way that these ontologies of body and environment circulate in public ways by analyzing how the human body is depicted in relation to microbes and environments through public visualizations of the human microbiome. (read more...)

Invisible Labor of Health and the Spell of Productivity

 Elise Li Zheng  March 2, 2023

This content is also available in Mandarin.

When I talked with Jia, who works for an e-commerce company in Shanghai, China, she was trying to finish a “Perfect Month Challenge” on her Apple Watch. That meant closing the rings on her watch every day for a month—achieving goals for standing up once an hour across all 12 hours, burning over 400kcal calories, and exercising 20 minutes. She was fully invested in this project, until Shanghai hit a lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2022, and she suddenly lost the streak. “The ‘firework’ after closing the rings is so nice, and the ‘Perfect Month’ sounds attractive to me,” she said, “I was drawn into exercising, and made a lot of progress, and setting myself a new goal every now and then. But this is also a source of anxiety and stress, and once I couldn’t keep up, I would just let go.” (read more...)

Enigmas of Corporeal Justice: Surrogacy and Legality in India

 Ritu Ghosh  November 17, 2021

এই কন্টেন্ট বাংলায়ও পাওয়া যায়

Over the last two decades, India has become a popular global destination for what is commonly referred to as reproductive tourism, wherein clients travel from one part of the world to another to seek biomedical interventions to help them have children. Breakthroughs in assisted reproductive technologies (ART), such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF), have led to a boom in surrogate pregnancies as a means of having children, with international clients (mostly from the Global North) flocking to countries in the Global South, like India, to avail of these services. Like much of the medical tourism industry, this movement is motivated by access to state-of-the-art medical facilities, skilled professional care, along with remarkably low costs and the availability of poor bodies to extract from. (read more...)

“Un-fixing” hormones: searching for the multiple in hormonal selves

 Lisa Raeder  October 6, 2020

What are hormones? While biomedical notions of hormones focus on their biological functions in bodies, hormones are also cultural artifacts, shaping understandings of health, normalcy, and what it means to live “hormonally balanced lives.” These molecules activate processes across emotions and physiology, social and material worlds, mental and physical health, organic and synthetic biology, the gendered and the non-gendered, and the normal and the pathological. Thus, hormones carry multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings, and sit at the meeting point between many different biomedical and social spheres of life, making them subject to multiple kinds of knowledges (Roberts, 2007). (read more...)

Roundtable: “COVID-19: Views from the Field”

 Baird Campbell, Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam, Caitlyn Dye, Kristina Jacobsen, Rebekah Ciribassi, Sonia Qadir  May 20, 2020

We’re wrapping up our five-part series, “COVID-19: Views from the Field,” with a pre-recorded roundtable. This roundtable brought our authors into conversation with each other, across continents and timezones, to discuss conducting—or not conducting—fieldwork in places not understood as COVID-19 “hotspots.” Check out the video here, and follow the links below to read the whole series, also available in the language of each field site. (read more...)