I am supposed to be finishing a full draft of my manuscript, The Fever Archive, a book about the West African Ebola outbreak, right now. My ambitious plan was to submit it to the press by May 1, but that is looking unlikely. It's fine. We are living under conditions of exception. Any attempt to... Continue Reading →
Evidence in things not yet felt
In a recent article, Alison Howell asks us to rethink militarization as a useful descriptor or analytic of contemporary politics. Specifically, Howell suggests that “it is not that ‘war’ is encroaching on ‘peace,’ and it is not that ‘the military’ is trespassing on the ‘civilian.’ Rather, ‘martial politics’ are fundamental to the constitution and continued... Continue Reading →
But my soul is a witness
I did not start out thinking that these cases shared any close connection, or demonstrated any meaningful pattern. Even as they were housed in the same building. Even as these connections were loosely stitched together for me in my first conversation with the curator. But a few things happened that made it difficult for me... Continue Reading →
My memory stammers
On August 5, 2014, Nancy Writebol became the second American to be evacuated to Atlanta from Liberia for Ebola treatment. Accompanied by police and FBI escorts from Dobbins Air Reserves base, Writebol was met by several attendants at the Emory University Hospital on Clifton Road. The ride to the hospital, while described by authorities as... Continue Reading →
Reading the classics: Ideology, tautology, and memory
In a 1986 New York Review of Books essay that would become the opening section of his 1991 book, Italo Calvino asks “Why read the classics?” He organizes his answer as a list of definitions. The items in the list blend into each other, deepening a case for reading books that “learned” people claim to have read,... Continue Reading →
Freetown, its landslides, and the problems of preparedness
I was in Freetown when the August 14 mudslide happened. The morning of the disaster, I went to breakfast and saw a friend who, unaware of the extent of the human toll, had received a call from a co-worker. The co-worker reported that one of their colleagues' house had collapsed. Children had been killed.... Continue Reading →
My Little Buttercup, Or what happened when I visited a community health center near Bo
I wanted to see a community health center, where clinicians might have seen suspected Ebola cases three years ago. So, I asked my driver, Idrissa, whether he could ask some of his local contacts about the location of the health center in Gondama. I hadn’t been to Gondama since 2003. It wasn’t too difficult to... Continue Reading →
Facebook reminded me that streets have names: a dispatch from Freetown
When I was in Bo on August 15, 2017, I received a reminder on Facebook that I had a appeared on Democracy Now three years ago, with Laurie Garrett and Lawrence Gostin, to talk about the then escalating Ebola crisis in West Africa. During her epic screed -- it nearly left me speechless, that's how... Continue Reading →
Politics and memory in the fever archive: A tribute to Rosalind Shaw
Here is the text for the talk I gave during a celebration of the work of Rosalind Shaw Politics and memory in the fever archive First, I need to apologize to the discussants and the audience. Two things happened between the time I sent this already fragmented paper to Jean and Rosalind. I participated in... Continue Reading →
Developing an analysis plan (ethnographic data)
The other day, I found myself overwhelmed by the amount of data I had collected over the past four or five years for my global surgery project. I’m trying to finish up the book proposal, and I realized that there were bits of data that I hadn’t taken into consideration: should that stuff be in... Continue Reading →
Ethnographic Emergency 