Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding

By Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Who has the right to a safe and protected childhood? Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding deepens understanding of children as political capital in the hands of those in power, critically engaging children’s voices alongside archival, historical, and ethnographic material in Palestine. Offering the concept of ‘unchilding’, Shalhoub-Kevorkian exposes the political work of violence designed to create, direct, govern, transform, and construct colonized children as dangerous, racialized others, enabling their eviction from the realm of childhood itself. Penetrating children’s everyday intimate spaces and, simultaneously, their bodies and lives, unchilding works to enable a complex machinery of violence against Palestinian children: imprisonment, injuries, loss, trauma, and militarized political occupation. At the same time as the book documents violations of children’s rights and the consequences this has for their present and future well-being, it charts children’s resistance to and power to interrupt colonial violence, reclaiming childhood and, with it, Palestinian futures.

Read the book here.

May 30, 2024

The Private Worlds of Dying Children

By Myra Bluebond-Langner

Photo: Guillaume Piron

“The death of a child,” writes Myra Bluebond-Langner, “poignantly underlines the impact of social and cultural factors on the way that we die and the way that we permit others to die.” In a moving drama constructed from her observations of leukemic children, aged three to nine, in a hospital ward, she shows how the children come to know they are dying, how and why they attempt to conceal this knowledge from their parents and the medical staff, and how these adults in turn try to conceal from the children their awareness of the child’s impending death.

Access the book here.

April 26, 2024

The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism

By Maren Klawiter

In this book, Klawiter analyzes the breast cancer movement to show the broad social impact of how diseases come to be medically managed and publicly administered. Examining surgical procedures, early detection campaigns, and discourses of risk, Klawiter demonstrates that these practices initially inhibited, but later enabled, collective action. The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer ultimately challenges our understanding of the origins, politics, and future of the breast cancer movement.

Read the book here.

April 23, 2024

Hearing Happiness : Deafness Cures in History

By Jaipreet Virdi

Weaving together lyrical history and personal memoir, Virdi powerfully examines society’s–and her own–perception of life as a deaf person in America. At the age of four, Jaipreet Virdi’s world went silent. A severe case of meningitis left her alive but deaf, suddenly treated differently by everyone. Her deafness downplayed by society and doctors, she struggled to “pass” as hearing for most of her life. Countless cures, treatments, and technologies led to dead ends. Never quite deaf enough for the Deaf community or quite hearing enough for the “normal” majority, Virdi was stuck in aural limbo for years. It wasn’t until her thirties, exasperated by problems with new digital hearing aids, that she began to actively assert her deafness and reexamine society’s–and her own–perception of life as a deaf person in America. Through two genres, Hearing Happiness raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. Taking us from the 1860s up to the present, Virdi combs archives and museums in order to understand the long history of curious cures: ear trumpets, violet ray apparatuses, vibrating massagers, electrotherapy machines, airplane diving, bloodletting, skull hammering, and many more. Hundreds of procedures and products have promised grand miracles but always failed to deliver a universal cure–a harmful legacy that is still present in contemporary biomedicine. Weaving Virdi’s own experiences together with her exploration into the fascinating history of deafness cures, Hearing Happiness is a powerful story that America needs to hear.

Access the book here.

March 25, 2024

Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India

By Dolly Kikon

Photo: Dexter Fernandes

The nineteenth-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian states of Assam and Nagaland, everyday militarization, violence, and the scramble for natural resources regulate the lives of Naga, Ahom, and Adivasi people, as well as migrants from elsewhere in the region, as they struggle to find peace and work.

Anthropologist Dolly Kikon uses in-depth ethnographic accounts to address the complexity of Northeast India, a region where boundaries and borders are made, disputed, and maintained. She mainly explores the social bonds established through practices of resource extraction and the tensions these relations generate, focusing on peoples’ love for the landscape and for the state, as well as for family, friends, and neighbors. Living with Oil and Coal illuminates questions of citizenship, social justice, and environmental politics that are shared by communities worldwide.

Read the book here.

February 29, 2024

Science for Governing Japan’s Population

By Aya Homei

Twenty-first-century Japan is known for the world’s most aged population. Faced with this challenge, Japan has been a pioneer in using science to find ways of managing a declining birth rate. Science for Governing Japan’s Population considers the question of why these population phenomena have been seen as problematic. What roles have population experts played in turning this demographic trend into a government concern? Aya Homei examines the medico-scientific fields around the notion of population that developed in Japan from the 1860s to the 1960s, analyzing the role of the population experts in the government’s effort to manage its population. She argues that the formation of population sciences in modern Japan had a symbiotic relationship with the development of the neologism, ‘population’ (jinkō), and with the transformation of Japan into a modern sovereign power. Through this history, Homei unpacks assumptions about links between population, sovereignty, and science.

Read the book here.

January 8, 2024

Wild Men in the Looking-glass

The Mythic Origins of European Otherness

By Roger Bartra

Long before the age of exploration, wild men inhabited the European imagination. These fascinating, hairy creatures have a long history of representation in art, literature, and folklore, appearing among other guises as satyrs and fauns in ancient Greece, mythical forest – and mountain-dwellers in the Middle Ages, and Shakespeare’s Caliban and Cervantes’s Cardenio in the Renaissance. Wild folk also captured the attention of naturalists, who investigated homo ferus and homo sylvestris, and philosophers, who elaborated the image of the noble savage. In Wild Men in the Looking Glass, Roger Bartra searches out the roots of the European wild man myth and explores its long evolution. Turning the tables on those who suggest that the primitive peoples “discovered” and colonized by European explorers gave rise to the myth, Bartra finds that the wild man myth preceded and helped shape European reactions to real peoples. Indeed, he shows that the wild man underpins the notion of civilization on which much of Western identity has been based. The man we recognize as “civilized” has not been able to take a single step without the shadow of the wild man at his heel.

Marked Women: The Cultural Politics of Cervical Cancer in Venezuela

By Rebecca G. Martinez

Cervical cancer is the third leading cause of death among women in Venezuela, with poor and working-class women bearing the brunt of it. Doctors and public health officials regard promiscuity and poor hygiene—coded indicators for low class, low culture, and bad morals—as risk factors for the disease.

Drawing on in-depth fieldwork conducted in two oncology hospitals in Caracas, Marked Women is an ethnography of women’s experiences with cervical cancer, the doctors and nurses who treat them, and the public health officials and administrators who set up intervention programs to combat the disease. Rebecca G. Martínez contextualizes patient-doctor interactions within a historical arc of Venezuelan nationalism, modernity, neoliberalism, and Chavismo to understand the scientific, social, and political discourses surrounding the disease. The women, marked as deviant for their sexual transgressions, are not only characterized as engaging in unhygienic, uncultured, and promiscuous behaviors, but also become embodiments of these very behaviors. Ultimately, Marked Women explores how epidemiological risk is a socially, culturally, and historically embedded process—and how this enables cervical cancer to stigmatize women as socially marginal, burdens on society, and threats to the “health” of the modern nation.

Seeds and Food Sovereignty

Eastern Himalayan Experiences

By Dixita Deka, Joel Rodrigues, Dolly Kikon, Bengt G. Karlsson, Sanjay Barbora and Meenal Tula

Crops and seeds are everywhere. They nourish our bodies, families, and communities, but are also taken for granted. Simultaneously, an increasing number of community organisations, farmer movements, and individuals are challenging corporate control and commodification of seeds. In the name of seed and food sovereignty, they seek to enhance local control over agriculture and ensure peoples’ rights to nutritious, ecologically-sound and culturally-appropriate food. In this book, the authors bring together resource persons, students, and researchers working across the Eastern Himalayan region, and, in doing so, they hope to facilitate new ways of learning together. The Eastern Himalayas are commonly characterised as a biodiversity hotspot, and this also applies to agrobiodiversity. The authors hope that this book will inspire further engagements with the ongoing farming initiatives and food sovereignty movements on the ground.