Or is it the seductive reduction of social entrepreneurship? I've seen Courtney Martin's essay circulating for the past few days; I read it amongst a slew of development articles popping up in my Twitter timeline. The point of the essay appears to be: don't go to work on development/social change projects in other countries simply because... Continue Reading →
David Bowie and Sonic Parody
For most of my 20s and early 30s, I was an avid --some friends might even say rabid -- karaoke singer. I often sang Bowie songs, even when I knew it was a terrible idea. ("Ziggy Stardust," anyone?) "China Girl" was a staple when I sang weekly at Deon's karaoke gig at the now-defunct Irish Eyes, in... Continue Reading →
A curious conversation about ‘the war on obesity’ and biopolitics
This month, I am using the blog to work through some sticking points I encountered during my month off of writing. This one is about biopolitics and race. Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to attend two presentations by Susan Greenhalgh about her new book, Fat Talk Nation. (How one ends up... Continue Reading →
Changes
It has been a while. I haven't written here for a year, mostly because I began to write for other outlets about a range of things: from the Ebola crisis; to the HIV/AIDS pandemic and recent pledges to get to zero; and the guinea worm eradication campaign, as it also winds down. I also had... Continue Reading →
“It don’t take a semiotician…” Or, what we talk about when we talk about bush meat.
This weekend, Newsweek published a relatively controversial article about the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Here’s the cover:Let’s just say it’s not exactly an original piece of journalism either.I found myself frustrated not only by the cover and the article, but also by the editor-in-chief’s condescending response to his critics:@texasinafrica radical suggestion: put twitter down.... Continue Reading →
The Not-So-Secret Serum | Dissent Magazine
My latest piece on aid, suspicion and evacuation in a time of Ebola has been posted in Dissent Magazine's blog.
On gender, the case data and why an anthropologist cares
Last night, I was talking to a reporter with the Washington Post about gender and Ebola. She contacted me because she saw a tweet I wrote asking about sex disaggregated data for the outbreak. None of my 'Ebola tweeps' -- some of them data wonks -- knew of any good sources. I looked at the ministry of... Continue Reading →
Black Twitter Responds To AP’s Insensitive Renisha McBride Verdict Tweet
Critical media reading by ‘Black Twitter.”
Black Twitter wasn’t happy with how the Associated Press handled the verdict in case of Theodore Wafer, who was convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting death of Renisha McBride.
The tweet in question inexplicably references McBride’s reported inebriation at the time of her murder, with an equally inexplicable mention of Wafer’s home-ownership.
The hashtag that followed “#APHeadlines” took the usually venerable news wire to task through absurdly satirized headlines of old news stories. Check out some of the more poignant examples below.
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Rich people’s shit and other fun things in humanitarian pop culture
A few years ago, I wrote a paper about the brouhaha over Salma Hayek’s breastfeeding a Sierra Leonean baby. I delivered that paper a few places and it started a relatively long and fairly complicated relationship with what I’ve been calling “humanitarian popular culture.” Into this category, many things fit: the satirical Matt Damon’s Children ad on... Continue Reading →
On the off chance that war doesn’t change everything: more on Ebola
I’m trying not to make my commentary about the current Ebola outbreak about representation, but I’ve been a bit troubled by the political analyses accompanying the epidemiological and health systems ones. Specifically, I want to talk a bit about how Liberia’s and Sierra Leone’s civil wars have been deployed by these analysts to understand the response... Continue Reading →
Ethnographic Emergency 