\n<\/p>\n
Somatosphere welcomes you to the June edition of \u201cIn the Journals.\u201d Scroll through our monthly round up of new research across anthropology, STS and social science journals.<\/p>\n
American Anthropologist<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Positioning Ontologies of Racial Inequity That are Prevalent in Reproductive and Maternal Health in South Africa<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Efua Prah<\/p>\n This paper discusses the racialized historical trajectories through which current health inequities are sustained in South Africa\u2019s health system. While current discussions recognize these inequalities, few have recognized a missing element\u2014disaggregated data based on racial demographic indicators\u2014that is critical to better understanding why these inequalities persist. Drawing on maternal health data, the paper highlights how race is both ontologically and practically invisibilized in demographic health records, undermining targeted health care interventions. The absence of disaggregated statistical data that indicate racial difference regarding health outcomes hinders any meaningful gains in transforming the maternal health landscape in South Africa. By situating maternal health inequalities within a broader framework of historic violence and racialized power structures, this paper calls for a critical reckoning with how race continues to shape access to and experiences of maternal health care in South Africa.<\/p>\n What\u2019s Birth Got to Do With It? Skepticism, Voice, and Race at a Midwives\u2019 Vigil in London<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Caroline Bazambanza<\/p>\n This paper argues that interactions between midwives and allied birth workers \u201coff the clock\u201d reveal diffuse processes of racialization in voice, speech, and visual signs in political spaces. Ethnographically attending to a small demonstration (\u201cthe vigil\u201d) staged by midwives in London, England, and the preparation events, it analyzes the production of \u201cwhite public spaces\u201d that protect privilege by obscuring \u201cnegative realities\u201d of white complicity in racism. With \u201cincommunicability\u201d and \u201craciolinguistics,\u201d this paper provides an analysis of the words, signs, and relationships communicating the negotiation of \u201ccompeting crises\u201d on the ground. Responding to the characterization of race and racism as \u201csilent things\u201d in the British context, I propose skepticism as a salient register in contexts of competing knowledge or divergent points of view: It can breed uncertainties about the intent or effect of political struggles when race is sidelined or silenced.<\/p>\n Biosocieties<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Between technology transfer and South\u2013South collaboration: an Indo-Cuban experiment in biopharmaceutical innovation<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Nils Graber & Yves-Marie Rault-Chodankar<\/p>\n The collaboration between the Cuban Centre of Molecular Immunology (CIM) and the Indian firm Biocon challenges conventional understandings of technology transfer. Initiated in 2003, the joint venture was a unique experiment in South\u2013South biopharmaceutical collaboration. It brought into relation two distinct innovation regimes: Cuba\u2019s public health\u2013oriented model, closely tied to the state and its medical diplomacy, and India\u2019s market-driven biopharmaceutical industry. However, both regimes were animated by postcolonial aspirations for technoscientific emergence in the Global South. The partnership ultimately dissolved, as structural tensions and divergent industrial objectives proved difficult to reconcile. But its apparent failure was also productive. For CIM, it opened access to resources lacking in Cuba and enabled clinical trials on a wider population. For Biocon, it offered research, development, and manufacturing expertise that supported its rise in the global biosimilar market. Drawing on interviews with key actors in Cuba and India, this study situates the partnership within broader debates on innovation regimes, postcolonial science, and the inequalities that shape the global biopharmaceutical economy. The article shows how South\u2013South collaborations, even when framed as alternatives to asymmetric North\u2013South models, remain entangled in (bio)capitalist logics while still opening possibilities for reimagining technological exchange beyond dominant North\/South narratives.<\/p>\n The pharmaceutical commons: conceptual clarifications, a practice example, and a research agenda<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n Susi Geiger & Tineke Kleinhout-Vliek<\/p>\n Recent technological developments in the pharmaceutical sector have fuelled rapid price increases of advanced therapies, but they have also triggered renewed efforts around developing alternative modes of organizing pharmaceutical research and deployment. Examples include patient- and clinician-driven innovation, hospital-based manufacturing, and drug repurposing. While these developments offer a seam of fresh scholarship in the sociology of pharmaceuticals, they are accompanied by an increase in conceptual blurriness. We bring clarity and a consistent conceptual vocabulary to one crucial dynamic: the pharmaceutical commons. We draw together the landscape of current pharmaceutical commoning activities and some of the very fertile current commons scholarship. On this basis, we propose nine characteristics of pharmaceutical commons across three overarching aspects: (1) Property: open, mutualized, based on conditional sharing; (2) Governance: legitimized, based on bounded membership, and with a needs-driven agenda; and (3) Practices: people-led, fair in distributing (financial) risks and benefits, and accountable. In distilling scholarship and current experiments, illustrated by an empirical account of a pharmaceutical commons, we formulate a research agenda to spark a joint-up conversation on this vital topic.<\/p>\n Patient advocacy as everyday activism: an ethnographic case study of local support groups in Northern England<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Fredrik Nyman<\/p>\n This article explores how local patient support groups can function as sites of everyday activism within a neoliberal healthcare landscape. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with two Breathe Easy groups for individuals with chronic respiratory illness in North East England, the study examines how practices of care, peer support, and informal advocacy subtly challenge the structural marginalisation of chronically ill populations. While members do not explicitly identify as activists, their collective actions\u2014from lobbying for local services to redistributing medical resources\u2014demonstrate grassroots agency grounded in biosocial solidarity and relational care. Drawing on concepts such as biosociality, radical care, and everyday activism, the article shows how these groups redistribute epistemic authority not through protest, but through sustained, care-led micro-politics. Amidst austerity and healthcare reform, their efforts prefigure alternative models of community health governance and challenge dominant narratives of passive patienthood. Navigating insider\u2013outsider roles, these groups create hybrid spaces of patient participation, community action, and informal health provision. The study offers a conceptual framework for understanding support groups as platforms for slow, collective activism operating through relational power. In doing so, it broadens understandings of activism, citizenship, and agency in the context of chronic illness and a restructuring welfare state.<\/p>\n Processes of encountering: locating urban mental health in the entanglements of weak social relations, material elements and normative orders<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Patrick Bieler<\/p>\n Based on long-term ethnographic research in a neighbourhood in Berlin, Germany, this article develops processes of encountering<\/em> as an ecological concept for analysing the relations between urban life and mental health. Drawing on go-alongs and qualitative interviews, I show how weak and seemingly absent social relations, oftentimes elusive material elements and the inherent normativity of social situations are ubiquitous components of urban life, and highlight their importance for mental health. Processes of encountering functions as an analytical heuristic that describes how urban environments emerge in the entangling of these three components, and grasps the affective qualities emanating from these entanglements. The concept advances an ontological account of the urban and locates mental health ecologically: Rather than treating urban environments as stable entities \u2018out there\u2019 or focusing these elements as isolated variables, the concept empirically unpacks how complex urban environments are constituted, and understands mental health as an effect of these constitution processes.<\/p>\n Profit and power: negotiating medical authority and an informed consumer-patient in transgender surgery<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Dana Ahern<\/p>\n This paper examines the treatment of transgender patients in the United States as they move into the complex simultaneous space of patient and consumer, exploring the emergence of the \u2018difficult patient\u2019 of transgender medicine. Described by surgeons as a disgruntled, unsatisfied customer, surgeons attempt to wrangle the \u2018difficult patient\u2019 from posting bad reviews and sharing cautionary tales, even as these same patients face medical malpractice and\/or simply attempt to provide resources to transgender communities trying to carefully navigate the medical system. This paper unpacks an emerging billion-dollar industry in the U.S. that also draws international patients, as it provides and profits from an urgently needed but increasingly restricted resource. Examining discourse in medical journals, customer reviews, and professional profiles of surgeons, this paper critically challenges how the \u201cdifficult patient\u201d of transgender medicine becomes defined through its threat to profits and to professional reputations.<\/p>\n Chronic pain across clinical settings: the changing understanding of pain and its treatment in endometriosis<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Maria Temmes, Elina Helosvuori & Venla Oikkonen<\/p>\n An ongoing shift toward multidisciplinary pain care and growing emphasis on non-pharmaceutical treatment are reshaping the parameters of how chronic pain is assessed and treated. The article explores these ongoing changes through a chronic gynecological illness, endometriosis. Drawing on interviews with clinicians, people with endometriosis and endometriosis activists in Finland, we ask how pain is understood and its treatment envisioned in cases where the standard course of endometriosis treatment does not alleviate pain. The analysis shows that difficult-to-treat endometriosis pain is conceptualized differently at different clinical sites including endometriosis clinics, pain clinics, emergency care, and primary care settings. We demonstrate that pain treatment in endometriosis is not fixed but constitutes an object of ongoing negotiations between the patient and clinician. In particular, tensions arise when patients move between the siloed clinical sites, and their pain is re-evaluated and approached through different epistemic framings of pain and pain care.<\/p>\n Making pain social: developing a critical social science of pain<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Jen Tarr<\/p>\n Recent developments in pain science, buttressed by findings from neuroimaging, have supported the view that pain is a thoroughly biopsychosocial phenomenon, one that is differentially distributed in inequitable ways. However, the social aspects of pain are still poorly articulated and understood. While pain science has struggled to make sense of what is social, social science has sometimes relied too heavily on the phenomenological experience of pain as isolating. Drawing on key insights from the developing neuroscience of pain \u2013 that pain is a response to threat, and that chronic pain can result from central sensitization of the nervous system \u2013 I argue that social scientists can productively engage with pain research by developing a critical social science of pain. This social science should engage with pain as a communicative process through which to learn about threat; understand how social inequity may produce and exacerbate pain; and look critically at how the methodologies used to measure and document pain will also shape it. This includes critical engagement with our own social science methods for knowing about pain. Undertaking this work is crucial to producing relevant and contemporary research on pain, particularly in a sociopolitical context where inequality is rising.<\/p>\n Data roles: youth mental health outcome measures and the young people who defy them<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Rosie Jones McVey<\/p>\n Health measurement shapes peoples\u2019 political relationships with the state, with services, with one another, and with oneself. But what are the political dynamics at play when people can\u2019t\/won\u2019t\/don\u2019t have health measurements taken? And what is the political predicament of those whose needs, values, and experiences don\u2019t fit within the measures available? This paper presents a case study of one youth mental health service\u2019s efforts to improve their collection of outcome measures, and reinvigorates the concept of \u2018sick role\u2019 to describe young people as defying the \u2018data roles\u2019 expected of them. The concept of data roles draws attention to the political dynamics of measurement on two interlinked scales: the interpersonal, embodied measurement encounter; and the systemic care-measurement assemblage. In the case reported here, measures are hard to collect given the \u2018routinized intimacy\u2019 required, and the restrictive, normative, individualised understandings of need inscribed within available measures. Yet defying measurement equates to a marginalised, precarious political position for young people and for the services that support them. In sum, the data roles expected of young people ask too much of them, and do too little for them.<\/p>\n Anthropological Quarterly<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n The Erin Brockovich Chemical and the Construction of Toxic Uncertainty in Norman, Oklahoma<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Daniel Mains<\/p>\n In 2010, the Environmental Working Group announced that Norman, Oklahoma\u2019s tap water had the highest levels in the nation of what it called the \u201cErin Brockovich Chemical\u201d \u2013 hexavalent chromium. Erin Brockovich famously investigated Pacific Gas & Electric\u2019s contamination of drinking water with hexavalent chromium. For many Norman residents, the Erin Brockovich Chemical immediately established a narrative of industrial pollution, cancer clusters, and government coverups. The encounter between the Erin Brockovich Chemical narrative and the city of Norman\u2019s struggles with hexavalent chromium complicates scholarly understandings of toxic uncertainty. Scholars have documented the intentional production of toxic uncertainty \u2013 the creation of doubt about the health implications of contaminants that companies rely on for profit. The Erin Brockovich Chemical narrative, however, reveals an additional dimension of uncertainty that is rooted in expectations of contamination. The Norman case demonstrates that NGOs, bloggers, and environmental activists also contribute to toxic uncertainty by advancing powerful narratives about industrial contamination. City of Norman employees advanced a counter-narrative, noting that Norman\u2019s tap water meets Environmental Protection Agency regulations and hexavalent chromium occurs naturally in the local aquifer, but this did little to create confidence in the city\u2019s tap water. As I researched Norman\u2019s water supply, I increasingly struggled to reach any form of certainty regarding the toxicity of hexavalent chromium in the tap water. The film Erin Brockovich offers surprising clues about how to alleviate this uncertainty by drawing attention to how toxic uncertainty is related to the struggle to care for others. In a context of late industrialism in which trust in state expertise has significantly eroded, Erin Brockovich demonstrates that access to care can provide the time to research, organize, and engage in policy debates.<\/p>\n Anthropologie et sant\u00e9<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Collaborer pour quelles transformations de sant\u00e9 et de soci\u00e9t\u00e9?<\/a> Tensions situ\u00e9es, n\u00e9gociations des postures et hybridit\u00e9 des savoirs<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Collaborating to bring which changes to healthcare and society? Situated tensions, negotiation of postures and hybridity of knowledge<\/em><\/p>\n Ibtissem\u00a0Ben Dridi et Rose-Anna\u00a0Foley<\/p>\n Au croisement d\u2019enjeux sociaux, professionnels, politiques et scientifiques, les exp\u00e9riences collaboratives se multiplient dans le champ de la sant\u00e9. Ce num\u00e9ro d\u2019Anthropologie & Sant\u00e9<\/em>\u00a0questionne les formes de collaboration entre chercheur\u00b7se\u00b7s en sciences humaines et sociales, des professionnelles de diff\u00e9rents domaines et des usager\u00b7\u00e8re\u00b7s en sant\u00e9. \u00c0 l\u2019heure o\u00f9 les postures critiques engag\u00e9es tendent \u00e0 remplacer les approches interpr\u00e9tatives en sciences sociales, il s\u2019agit d\u2019analyser les collaborations \u00e0 la lumi\u00e8re des vis\u00e9es de\u00a0justice \u00e9pist\u00e9mique<\/em>\u00a0et des dispositifs de co-construction des connaissances au sein de la recherche. Les articles de ce num\u00e9ro tentent d\u2019appr\u00e9hender, de mani\u00e8re r\u00e9flexive, les effets de telles approches sur la mani\u00e8re de faire de la recherche en sciences sociales et sur les pratiques des sciences de la sant\u00e9. Ils cherchent \u00e0 cerner quels positionnements \u00e9mergent d\u00e8s lors qu\u2019il est question de faire tant de la recherche \u00ab\u00a0avec\u00a0\u00bb des chercheurses et professionnelles d\u2019autres domaines que de la recherche critique et\/ou participative \u00ab\u00a0au service de\u00a0\u00bb populations invisibilis\u00e9es et d\u00e9favoris\u00e9es.\u00a0En d\u00e9finitive, ce num\u00e9ro interroge ce que les collaborations permettent de produire comme types de connaissances et de r\u00e9cits, les juxtapositions et int\u00e9grations de savoirs hybrides, les liens entre savoirs (exp\u00e9rientiels, professionnels, scientifiques) et production, ou encore, les transformations sociales propos\u00e9es voire \u00ab\u00a0recommand\u00e9es\u00a0\u00bb relatives aux soins et \u00e0 la sant\u00e9, y compris lorsque des chercheurses de diff\u00e9rentes disciplines travaillent s\u00e9par\u00e9ment sur des questions similaires avec des approches jug\u00e9es inconciliables. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n At the intersection of social, professional, political, and scientific issues, collaborative initiatives are on the rise in the field of health. This issue of Anthropology & Sant\u00e9<\/em> examines the forms of collaboration between researchers in the humanities and social sciences, professionals from various fields, and healthcare users. At a time when critical stances are increasingly replacing interpretive approaches in the social sciences, the aim is to analyze these collaborations in light of the goals of epistemic justice and mechanisms for the co-construction of knowledge within research. The articles in this issue attempt to reflectively examine the effects of such approaches on the practice of social science research and on health science practices. They seek to identify the positions that emerge when it comes to conducting research \u201cwith\u201d researchers and professionals from other fields, as well as critical and\/or participatory research \u201cin the service of\u201d marginalized and disadvantaged populations. Ultimately, this issue examines the types of knowledge and narratives that collaborations enable, the juxtapositions and integrations of hybrid knowledge, the links between forms of knowledge (experiential, professional, scientific) and production, as well as the transformations proposed or even \u201crecommended\u201d in relation to healthcare and health, including when researchers from different disciplines work separately on similar issues using approaches considered irreconcilable.<\/p>\n Ni tout \u00e0 fait dedans, ni tout \u00e0 fait dehors\u00a0: composer avec l\u2019interdisciplinarit\u00e9 entre sant\u00e9 et sciences humaines et sociales<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Neither fully inside nor fully outside: Making sense of interdisciplinarity between health, humanities and social sciences<\/em><\/p>\n Niels Ulrich, Milena Maglio, Livia Velpry, Bernard Pachoud et Margot Morgi\u00e8ve<\/p>\n L\u2019interdisciplinarit\u00e9 entre sciences humaines et sociales et m\u00e9decine, voire avec des disciplines qu\u2019on cat\u00e9goriserait comme relevant de la sant\u00e9, est aujourd\u2019hui largement promue dans la recherche de ces domaines. Mais quels effets a-t-elle sur les parcours des chercheur\u00b7se\u00b7s qui s\u2019engagent dans des collaborations interdisciplinaires\u00a0? En s\u2019appuyant sur les r\u00e9sultats d\u2019une enqu\u00eate mobilisant des m\u00e9thodes qualitatives, cet article met en lumi\u00e8re diff\u00e9rents effets de l\u2019engagement dans des collaborations interdisciplinaire sur les trajectoires des chercheur\u00b7se\u00b7s. L\u2019\u00e9tude de trois parcours contrast\u00e9s permet de penser la diversit\u00e9 des configurations d\u2019\u00ab\u00a0entr\u00e9e\u00a0\u00bb dans l\u2019interdisciplinarit\u00e9. Parmi les modalit\u00e9s concr\u00e8tes de construction des collaborations, la co-construction des projets de recherche agit comme un \u00e9l\u00e9ment d\u00e9terminant de l\u2019engagement dans les collaborations interdisciplinaires, parmi d\u2019autres rapports de pouvoir et de l\u00e9gitimit\u00e9. Les engagements interdisciplinaires transforment les rapports que les chercheur\u00b7se\u00b7s entretiennent avec leur discipline d\u2019origine, entre continuit\u00e9s revendiqu\u00e9es, d\u00e9placements assum\u00e9s et zones de tension. Ces diff\u00e9rents enjeux, pouvant parfois cr\u00e9er des situations d\u2019inconfort, sont cependant moteurs de cr\u00e9ativit\u00e9 dans la recherche pour celles et ceux qui s\u2019y engagent.<\/p>\n Interdisciplinarity between the humanities, social sciences and medicine is now widely promoted in health research. But what impact does it have on the careers of researchers who engage in interdisciplinary collaboration? Based on the results of a research project using qualitative methods, this article highlights the different effects of involvement in interdisciplinary collaborations on the career paths of researchers. The study of three contrasting trajectories provides an insight into the diversity of configurations of \u2018entry\u2019 into interdisciplinarity. Among the concrete ways in which collaborations are constructed, the co-construction of research projects acts as a determining factor in the commitment to interdisciplinary collaborations, among other relationships of power and legitimacy. Interdisciplinary involvement transforms the relationship that researchers have with their original discipline, between asserted continuities, assumed displacements and areas of tension. These different issues, which can sometimes create uncomfortable situations, are nonetheless a driving force for creativity in research for those involved.<\/p>\n \u00ab\u00a0Faire entrer des ronds dans des carr\u00e9s<\/em>\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0: les sciences humaines et sociales au service de la recherche en sant\u00e9 en Guyane<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cFitting square pegs into round holes\u201d: Social sciences and humanities in the service of health research in French Guiana<\/em><\/p>\n Claire Gatti, Leslie Alcouffe, Th\u00e9o Blaise, Carlotta Carboni, Diane-Mica Malivert, Lo\u00efc Epelboin, Alice Tosi et Marc-Alexandre Tareau<\/p>\n La Guyane, territoire fran\u00e7ais d\u2019Am\u00e9rique du Sud, se situe au carrefour de multiples syst\u00e8mes de soins \u2013\u00a0biom\u00e9decine, phytoth\u00e9rapies et ethnom\u00e9decines\u00a0\u2013 qui se compl\u00e8tent, se chevauchent et s\u2019opposent. La sant\u00e9 s\u2019y pense ainsi au-del\u00e0 des seules approches biologiques ou \u00e9pid\u00e9miologiques, en tenant compte des repr\u00e9sentations socioculturelles qui orientent les comportements de soin. French Guiana, a French territory in South America, lies at the crossroads of multiple healthcare systems \u2013\u00a0biomedicine, phytotherapies, and ethnomedicines\u00a0\u2013which complement, overlap or sometimes conflict. Health is therefore examined beyond purely biological or epidemiological perspectives, taking into account the cultural and social representations that shape health behaviors. Consid\u00e9rer les hi\u00e9rarchies \u00e9pist\u00e9miques en contexte\u00a0: \u00e9cologie des savoirs et justice cognitive dans le processus de co-construction en sant\u00e9 et services sociaux<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Considering epistemic hierarchies in context\u00a0: Ecology of knowledge and cognitive justice in co-construction processes within health and social care<\/em><\/p>\n Baptiste Godrie<\/p>\n Cet article analyse les concepts d\u2019\u00e9cologie des savoirs et de justice cognitive comme analyseurs des processus de co-constructions des interventions sociales et des soins de sant\u00e9. La premi\u00e8re partie de cet article probl\u00e9matise ces concepts en situant leur origine dans des r\u00e9flexions Nord-Sud et leur pertinence pour penser des enjeux d\u2019actualit\u00e9, notamment la participation des personnes usag\u00e8res et patientes de services de sant\u00e9, en empruntant des exemples de l\u2019intervention sociale et de la sant\u00e9. La deuxi\u00e8me partie interroge les contextes favorables \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9mergence d\u2019\u00e9cologies des savoirs, la perspective sur la justice cognitive invitant \u00e0 se demander de quels points de vue ces diff\u00e9rents savoirs et exp\u00e9riences sont appr\u00e9ci\u00e9s. La troisi\u00e8me partie tire des cons\u00e9quences de ces r\u00e9flexions du point de vue de l\u2019action\u00a0: si l\u2019\u00e9cologie des savoirs rejette les hi\u00e9rarchies de savoirs issues des syst\u00e8mes de domination anciens et actuels, elle propose une action port\u00e9e par le souci des cons\u00e9quences qui permet de reconsid\u00e9rer la hi\u00e9rarchie des savoirs en contexte.<\/p>\n This article analyzes the concepts of knowledge ecology and cognitive justice as analyzers of co-construction processes in social intervention and health care. The first part of the article problematizes these concepts, situating their origins in North-South reflections and their relevance to thinking about current issues, notably the involvement of users and patients, using examples from social intervention and health care. The second part looks at the contexts conducive to the emergence of knowledge ecologies; the cognitive justice perspective invites us to ask from what points of view these different types of knowledge and experience are valued. The third part draws consequences from these reflections from the point of view of action: while knowledge ecology rejects the hierarchies of knowledge arising from old and current systems of domination, it proposes a hierarchy of knowledge in context that enables action driven by a concern for consequences.<\/p>\n Faire communaut\u00e9 pour faire sant\u00e9\u00a0? Co-production des savoirs et tensions dans une communaut\u00e9 mixte de recherche en France \u2013 la d\u00e9marche Capdroits<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Building community to promote health? Knowledge co-production and tensions within a mixed research community in France: the Capdroits initiative<\/em><\/p>\n Camille Carpentier, H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Chiron, Audrey Parron, Paul V\u00e9ron, Chantal Bruno, Hind Maalal, Marie-H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Audier, Samir Boudrahem, Marika Lefki, Jean-Philippe Cobbaut, Arnaud B\u00e9al, Sandrine Amare et Beno\u00eet Eyraud<\/p>\n La d\u00e9marche Capdroits s\u2019est constitu\u00e9e en communaut\u00e9 mixte de recherche (CMR) r\u00e9unissant personnes concern\u00e9es par des situations de handicap ou de maladie, professionnels et chercheurs. Cet article analyse les dynamiques de co-production et de circulation des savoirs qui s\u2019y d\u00e9veloppent. \u00c0 partir d\u2019un corpus documentaire et d\u2019entretiens, il montre que la CMR s\u2019appuie sur une pluralit\u00e9 de dispositifs participatifs, notamment les groupes locaux d\u2019enqu\u00eate et les Cap\u2019Lab, organisant la mise en dialogue de savoirs h\u00e9t\u00e9rog\u00e8nes, notamment par la pratique du r\u00e9cit. L\u2019analyse met en \u00e9vidence des processus de reconnaissance des savoirs exp\u00e9rientiels et des tensions li\u00e9es \u00e0 l\u2019h\u00e9t\u00e9rog\u00e9n\u00e9it\u00e9 des acteurs, \u00e0 la fois entre et \u00e0 l\u2019int\u00e9rieur des groupes d\u2019appartenance. La CMR est discut\u00e9e comme une communaut\u00e9 \u00e9pist\u00e9mique en mouvement, susceptible de produire des effets en termes d\u2019empowerment<\/em> et de sant\u00e9.<\/p>\n Capdroits has been established as a Mixed Research Community (MRC) bringing together people living with disabilities or illness, professionals, and researchers. This article analyzes the dynamics of co-production and knowledge circulation that have emerged within this community. Drawing on a collection of documents and interviews, it shows that the MRC relies on a variety of participatory mechanisms, notably local research groups and Cap\u2019Labs, which facilitate dialogue between diverse forms of knowledge, particularly through storytelling. The analysis highlights processes of recognition of experiential knowledge and tensions linked to the heterogeneity of actors, both between and within the groups to which they belong. The MRC is discussed as an epistemic community in motion, capable of producing effects in terms of empowerment and health.<\/p>\n Recherche collaborative et handicap\u00a0: d\u00e9fis \u00e0 relever et attentes \u00e0 ne pas cultiver. Conflits et d\u00e9bats entre chercheurs et soci\u00e9t\u00e9 civile au Maroc<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Collaborative research and disability: challenges to be addressed and expectations to be avoided. Conflicts and debates between researchers and civil society in Morocco<\/em><\/p>\n Alvar Jones S\u00e1nchez<\/p>\n Dans le cadre d\u2019une recherche dite \u00ab\u00a0collaborative\u00a0\u00bb men\u00e9e au Maroc, nous avons exp\u00e9riment\u00e9 des conflits et des malentendus r\u00e9currents entre les diff\u00e9rents acteurs engag\u00e9s. Nous nous proposons dans cet article, de mener une analyse critique du processus collaboratif mis en \u0153uvre. Revenir sur cette exp\u00e9rience nous permettra de d\u00e9tailler certains enjeux sociaux, id\u00e9ologiques et institutionnels qui structurent et divisent le champ du handicap au Maroc. Le r\u00e9cit des diff\u00e9rents conflits sera surtout l\u2019occasion d\u2019interroger les tensions et les \u00e9cueils finalement assez fr\u00e9quents de la d\u00e9marche participative et de se questionner sur le r\u00f4le de la conflictualit\u00e9 dans ce type de recherche.<\/p>\n In the context of a so-called \u201ccollaborative\u201d research project conducted in Morocco, we have experienced ongoing conflicts and misunderstandings between the various actors involved. In this article, we propose to conduct a critical analysis of the collaborative process implemented. Looking back on this experience will allow us to detail some social, ideological and institutional issues that structure and divide the disability field in Morocco. Recounting these conflictual situations will be an opportunity to examine the tensions and pitfalls that are ultimately quite common in participatory approach, and to question the role of conflictuality in this type of research.<\/p>\n Quand les savoirs des personnes d\u00e9tenues \u00e9mergent\u00a0: la recherche interventionnelle en sant\u00e9 publique comme espace \u00e9thique de r\u00e9flexivit\u00e9 et de n\u00e9gociation<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n When the knowledge of incarcerated people emerge: Intervention research in public health as an ethical space for reflexivity and negotiation<\/em><\/p>\n Cl\u00e9ment Picot-Ngo, L\u00e9a Loubet, Morgane Michel, Jo\u00eblle Kivits et Karine Chevreul<\/p>\n Cet article examine la reconnaissance des savoirs d\u2019exp\u00e9rience des personnes d\u00e9tenues dans le cadre du projet de recherche interventionnelle Tabapri, conduit entre d\u00e9cembre 2019 et d\u00e9cembre 2024. Son objectif \u00e9tait de r\u00e9duire les m\u00e9faits li\u00e9s au tabac au sein des \u00e9tablissements p\u00e9nitentiaires fran\u00e7ais. \u00c0 partir d\u2019une \u00e9tude qualitative reposant sur des entretiens semi-directifs avec des personnes d\u00e9tenues et des professionnel\u00b7le\u00b7s, puis des focus groupes de co-construction, il explore la mani\u00e8re dont les personnes incarc\u00e9r\u00e9es participent \u00e0 repenser les interventions de sant\u00e9 publique dans le contexte contraint de la d\u00e9tention. En mettant en lumi\u00e8re les tensions entre logiques disciplinaires et objectifs de sant\u00e9, l\u2019article d\u00e9fend une approche situ\u00e9e de la production de savoirs, attentive aux r\u00e9alit\u00e9s v\u00e9cues, aux capacit\u00e9s d\u2019agir et aux aspirations des individus. Il sugg\u00e8re de consid\u00e9rer la recherche interventionnelle comme un espace \u00e9thique de n\u00e9gociation, permettant de pr\u00e9server une dignit\u00e9 et une r\u00e9flexivit\u00e9 collective malgr\u00e9 les contraintes du milieu carc\u00e9ral.<\/p>\n This article examines the recognition of experiential knowledge among incarcerated individuals within the Tabapri interventional research project, conducted between December 2019 and December 2024, whose objective was to reduce tobacco-related harms in French prisons. Based on a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with incarcerated persons and professionals, followed by focus groups to co-construct the intervention, it explores how prisoners participate in rethinking public health interventions within the constrained context of detention. By highlighting the tensions between disciplinary logics and health objectives, the article advocates for a situated approach to knowledge production, one that is attentive to lived realities, the capacities for action, and the aspirations of individuals. It suggests considering intervention research as an ethical space for negotiation, allowing for the preservation of dignity and collective reflexivity despite the constraints of the carceral environment.<\/p>\n Se d\u00e9caler du d\u00e9calage\u00a0? La critique sociologique \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9preuve de \u00ab\u00a0terrains exemplaires\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Rethinking critical distance: Sociological critique and \u201cexemplary field sites\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Iris Loffeier et S\u00e9bastien Saetta<\/p>\n La sociologie dans les champs de la vieillesse et de la psychiatrie donne g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement \u00e0 voir des \u00e9tablissements repoussoirs, travers\u00e9s par des m\u00e9canismes de domination. \u00c0 partir du croisement de deux recherches de type ethnographique (l\u2019une sur des \u00e9tablissements psychiatriques, l\u2019autre sur des \u00e9tablissements pour personnes \u00e2g\u00e9es), cet article porte, au contraire, sur les enjeux \u00e9pist\u00e9mologiques et politiques de l\u2019enqu\u00eate aupr\u00e8s de \u00ab\u00a0terrains exemplaires\u00a0\u00bb. Ces terrains reposent notamment la question des attentes vis-\u00e0-vis des op\u00e9rations de d\u00e9calage \u2013\u00a0critique ou non\u00a0\u2013 propres \u00e0 la perspective sociologique et des sciences humaines et sociales plus globalement. L\u2019article vise \u00e0 d\u00e9finir la notion d\u2019exemplarit\u00e9 tout en mettant en \u00e9vidence les sp\u00e9cificit\u00e9s de chacun des terrains d\u2019enqu\u00eate. Il revient sur les mani\u00e8res de \u00ab\u00a0faire terrain\u00a0\u00bb en lien avec la construction de l\u2019objet, la sp\u00e9cificit\u00e9 des donn\u00e9es recueillies ainsi que le parcours et les conditions de travail des chercheur\u00b7e\u00b7s. Il aborde enfin les dilemmes rencontr\u00e9s par les auteur\u00b7e\u00b7s qui, tout en cherchant \u00e0 satisfaire aux normes acad\u00e9miques, ont proc\u00e9d\u00e9 \u00e0 des d\u00e9placements \u00e9pist\u00e9mologiques propres \u00e0 la relation \u00e0 ces terrains exemplaires.<\/p>\n Sociological research in the fields of ageing and psychiatry generally tends to portray institutions as undesirable places shaped by mechanisms of domination. Drawing on the intersection of two ethnographic studies \u2014 one conducted in psychiatric institutions and the other in facilities for older adults \u2014 this article instead examines the epistemological and political stakes involved in conducting research in \u201cexemplary field sites.\u201d These field sites notably reopen the question of expectations regarding the distancing operations \u2014 whether critical or otherwise \u2014 that are characteristic of sociological perspectives and, more broadly, of the social sciences and humanities. The article seeks to define the notion of exemplary field sites while highlighting the specific features of each research site. It reflects on fieldwork practices in relation to the construction of the research object, the specific nature of the data collected, and the trajectories and working conditions of the researchers. Finally, it discusses the dilemmas encountered by the authors, who, while while remaining attentive to academic standards, also engaged in epistemological shifts shaped by their relationship to these exemplary field sites.<\/p>\n Naviguer dans l\u2019entre-deux\u00a0: trouver une place singuli\u00e8re pour la recherche dans les structures sanitaires et m\u00e9dico-sociales<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Navigating in between: Finding a distinct place for research within health and medico-social institutions<\/em><\/p>\n Silvia Rochet<\/p>\n L\u2019article examine les enjeux li\u00e9s \u00e0 l\u2019ambigu\u00eft\u00e9 de la position ethnographique dans les sciences sociales, et plus particuli\u00e8rement dans le champ de la sant\u00e9, en s\u2019int\u00e9ressant \u00e0 la mani\u00e8re dont cette position distincte\u00a0et singuli\u00e8re \u2013 fa\u00e7onn\u00e9e par les tractations et d\u00e9calages qui se produisent dans le rapport \u00e0 chaque terrain\u00a0\u2013 a \u00e9t\u00e9 n\u00e9goci\u00e9e dans deux Centres th\u00e9rapeutiques r\u00e9sidentiels (CTR) en addictologie. Cette ethnographie compar\u00e9e pr\u00e9sente les choix op\u00e9r\u00e9s entre refus des r\u00f4les assign\u00e9s, mise en jeu et mise en partage, pour affiner une position caract\u00e9ris\u00e9e par un engagement dans \u00ab\u00a0l\u2019entre-deux\u00a0\u00bb \u2013\u00a0importante dans des institutions travaillant aupr\u00e8s d\u2019individus consid\u00e9r\u00e9s comme d\u00e9viants. Apr\u00e8s avoir analys\u00e9 les places (objectives) et les postures (subjectives) que j\u2019ai pu construire sur les deux terrains au contact des attentes des divers enqu\u00eat\u00e9s, j\u2019entends montrer que l\u2019exp\u00e9rience d\u2019enqu\u00eate n\u2019est pas incompatible avec des formes de collaboration impliquant l\u2019ensemble des protagonistes des institutions de soin.<\/p>\n This article examines the challenges associated with the ambiguity of the ethnographic position in the social sciences, more specifically within the field of health, focusing on how this distinct and context-specific place \u2013\u00a0shaped by the negotiations and shifts that occur in relation to each field site\u00a0\u2013 was negotiated in two french residential treatment centers for substance use disorders (CTR). This comparative ethnography explores the choices made between rejecting assigned roles, engaging oneself, and sharing that engagement, in order to refine a stance characterized by a commitment in the \u201cin-between\u201d\u2013\u00a0a stance particularly important in institutions working with individuals commonly regarded as deviant. After analyzing the (objective) spaces and (subjective) stances I was able to establish in both field sites in response to the expectations of the various participants, I seek to demonstrate that the research process is not incompatible with forms of collaboration involving all key actors within healthcare institutions.<\/p>\n Amades, acteur historique de l\u2019anthropologie de la sant\u00e9 francophone. Un retour pour le futur<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Amades, a key historical actor in francophone medical anthropology. A look back to move forward<\/em><\/p>\n Alice Desclaux et Aline Sarradon-Eck<\/p>\n \u00c0 l\u2019heure o\u00f9 les institutions acad\u00e9miques sont menac\u00e9es par les coupes budg\u00e9taires, les initiatives associatives sont attendues pour porter une part de la transmission des savoirs et du renouvellement de la r\u00e9flexion qui assurent la vie scientifique d\u2019une discipline. Mais le peuvent-elles dans la dur\u00e9e\u00a0? La question se pose pour l\u2019association Amades (Anthropologie m\u00e9dicale appliqu\u00e9e au d\u00e9veloppement et \u00e0 la sant\u00e9), cr\u00e9\u00e9e il y a 38\u00a0ans. Pour soutenir cette r\u00e9flexion \u00e0 un moment critique de son existence, nous pr\u00e9sentons ici un retour sur la vie de l\u2019association afin de suivre l\u2019adage\u00a0: \u00ab\u00a0Savoir d\u2019o\u00f9 l\u2019on vient, permet de choisir o\u00f9 l\u2019on va.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n At a time when academic institutions are threatened by budget cuts, grassroots initiatives are expected to play a role in the transmission of knowledge and the renewal of thought that sustains the scientific life of a discipline. But can they do so in the long term? This question arises for the Amades association (Medical Anthropology Applied to Development and Health), founded 38 years ago. To support this reflection at a critical juncture in its existence, we present here a retrospective of the association\u2019s history, guided by the adage: \u201cKnowing where you come from allows you to choose where you are going.\u201d<\/p>\n Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Too Black for Care: Clinical Apperception, Anti-Blackness, and Narrative Aporia<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Roy Cherian<\/p>\n In this essay, I read Seth Holmes and Maya Ponte\u2019s work on \u201cen-casement\u201d alongside Immanuel Kant\u2019s Critique of Pure Reason<\/em> to argue that faculties of biomedical apperception cultivated through clinical training are symptomatic of an orientation to sensational experience developed within Enlightenment philosophy. Characterized by the negation of subjectivity, en-casement is an expression of the anti-Black tendency to dehumanize and dominate the other in ways that render the biomedical paradigm of healing impotent with regard to the redress of Black suffering. I problematize narrative medicine as an intervention to resist en-casement by drawing on Afropessimism to elaborate limits and failures derivative from its assumptive logic of a free, agentive, autonomous, and sovereign subject capable of dramatizing suffering. Insofar as paradigmatic social death renders Blackness as a site of absolute dereliction on the level of the Symbolic, Black suffering is aporetic to narrative in ways that make even the humanist intervention no less impotent as a mode of redress. Given that the totalizing violence of anti-Blackness forecloses the redress of Black suffering within humanist paradigms of healing writ large, from the biomedical to the narrative, I consider the unmet demand for ante-anti-Black forms of care from the framework of abolition medicine.<\/p>\n Exploring Barriers to Recovery Amongst Women with Psychosis: A Qualitative Secondary Analysis<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Chizara Lock, Anna Lavis, Rosina Pendrous & Sheila Greenfield<\/p>\n Experiencing psychosis can impact all areas of a\u00a0person\u2019s life, causing significant changes to thoughts, perceptions, mood, behaviour, and sense of self. Details of the specific barriers to recovery experienced by women with psychosis and how these barriers may relate to both sex and gender remain unknown. To identify and conceptualise barriers to recovery, a qualitative secondary analysis was undertaken of 31 semi-structured interviews from a primary anthropological study focused on women\u2019s lived experiences of a first episode of psychosis. Participants were recruited from Early Intervention Services in England, UK, between 2010 and 2015. Reflexive thematic analysis demonstrated various barriers to recovery, including internal conflicts with identity, the constraining of\u00a0moral agency, inadequate support to address past traumas, structural factors, and stigma. Each of these barriers intersects with both sex and gender norms in a number of ways. Barriers to recovery must be addressed within mental health services to ensure that women have the best chance of moving forward with, and finding new meaning in, their lives after psychosis. Consideration of past experiences as well as normative gender roles, and other structural barriers is needed. Future research should develop and evaluate sex- and gender-specific interventions and consider integrating these into clinical practice.<\/p>\n Secular Mysticism: Entanglements of Science and Religion in Psychedelic Medicine<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Aidan Seale-Feldman\u00a0<\/p>\n Psychedelic medicine is a rapidly growing, billion-dollar industry poised to transform mental health care by incorporating spiritual experiences into clinical psychiatry. However, while the blending of psychiatry and mystical experience has long made this field unique, the blurred boundaries between science and spiritual practice have sparked increasing public debate. What does the entanglement of science and religion in psychedelic medicine reveal about the concerns, anxieties, and yearnings of our contemporary social and political moment? This article draws on an analysis of public discourse alongside ethnographic and qualitative research within a psychedelic church, a psychedelic-assisted therapy training program, and psychedelic science conferences in the United States. Through stories of the intertwining of science and religion, psychotherapy and mysticism, and attempts to distinguish between drugs, medicine, and sacraments in both clinical and non-clinical spaces, I argue that the mainstreaming of psychedelic medicine is not only shifting paradigms of mental health care but also creating new forms of secular mysticism in an age of disenchantment.<\/p>\n The Question of the Origin of Overrepresentation of Violence in the French West Indies: A Psychosocial Approach to Attachment Issues<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Anais Ogrizek & Arthur Felix<\/p>\n The French West Indies, particularly Martinique and Guadeloupe, are grappling with high rates of violence, particularly among youth, which might be deeply rooted in historical trauma from slavery. A significant portion of the population has experienced abuse and violence in early life, prompting researchers to explore the connection with attachment theory. The transatlantic slave trade tore families apart and disrupted the secure attachments that are essential for healthy emotional development. Children raised without stable caregivers often develop insecure attachment styles, which may have been passed down through generations. These unresolved attachment wounds often manifest as violence or self-destructive behavior. Without nurturing figures, both parental and societal, individuals may feel unworthy and angry. France, seen as the \u201cabusive stepmother,\u201d failed to provide meaningful support after emancipation to replace lost parental figures. Consequently, the population oscillates between a desire for recognition and a fear of further rejection. This emotional paradox mirrors the turbulence of adolescence, where independence is both craved and feared.<\/p>\n The Place Where the Ground Gives Way: On Functional Disorders, Uncertainty, and Fantasies of Medicine<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Daisy Couture<\/p>\n Functional disorders index the phenomenon in which someone is seriously ill\u2014seizures, paralysis, complex pain\u2014and yet no pathophysiological cause can be found. Traditionally, psychiatry has approached these disorders as instances of psychic distress manifesting through the body; however, multiple explanations currently compete within North American biomedicine and profound uncertainties, in diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis remain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with clinicians and patients with\u00a0suspected functional disorders at a Canadian neuropsychiatric clinic, this paper approaches medicine as an epistemological, psychic, and affective space. Focusing specifically on the role of fluctuation in these disorders, I explore how transience becomes a problem in the clinic, sticking to patients and instigating both ethical and epistemological crises. Following the anxieties and desires of both patients and clinicians, I argue that, in the unease surrounding functional disorders, a cultural fantasy of medicine as a space of certainty emerges. I describe this fantasy as a collective imagination of medicine as a place that can, and should, provide access to objective answers and stable truths. Despite the inescapable uncertainties of medicine, I suggest that this fantasy haunts the clinic, fundamentally shaping the conditions of possibility for affliction and care, especially for patients with contested illnesses.<\/p>\n Phenomenology of Subjective Anomalous Experiences in People with Schizophrenia<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Orlando Mondrag\u00f3n-Ben\u00edtez, Lina D\u00edaz-Castro, Fernando Corona-Hern\u00e1ndez & H\u00e9ctor Cabello-Rangel<\/p>\n Current diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia overlook the patient\u2019s subjective experience, offering a simplified view. To describe the subjective anomalies in the personal experience of the \u201clived world\u201d in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia via the EAWE interview (Examination of Anomalous World Experience). A qualitative study was conducted between January and May 2024. Semistructured interviews were conducted with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, using the thematic axes of the EAWE as a framework. Also, the interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis using ATLAS.ti.v24 software. We interviewed five patients, three men and two women, aged between 18 and 46. The main narrative focused on religious and sexual delusions involving God, the Virgin Mary, or the Holy Spirit, within the context of \u201cExistential Orientation.\u201d Sexual experiences were identified as an emerging category in the interview content. In the \u201cSpace and Objects\u201d domain, participants reported hallucinations and blurred vision. The \u201ctime and events\u201d domain showed a perception of slowness. The \u201cOther Persons\u201d domain included hypoattunement and paranoia. The \u201cLanguage\u201d domain revealed disorganized thinking. The \u201cAtmosphere\u201d domain covered d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu and emotional emptiness. Conclusions: Individuals may experience their place in the world and their intimate relationships in ways that significantly differ from usual.<\/p>\n Children\u2019s Everyday Actions After Disaster: Cultural Meaning, Developmental Timing, and Moral Agency in Post-disaster Japan<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Naru Fukuchi<\/p>\n Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, children in affected regions exhibited everyday behaviors that challenge conventional psychological interpretations. Drawing on ethnographic field observations conducted in schools, shelters, and temporary housing in Miyagi Prefecture between March 2011 and March 2012, with follow-up observations from 2012 to 2013, this study examines five vignettes of children\u2019s post-disaster behaviors: hiding shoes, experiencing perceived scarcity related to school lunches, impulsive spending, giving away sweets and supplies, and engaging in silent play in communal spaces. The study aims to explore how these behaviors function as culturally and developmentally meaningful adaptations to disaster rather than as indicators of psychopathology. Analytically, these behaviors are interpreted through Japanese cultural frameworks\u2014particularly group harmony (wa), reciprocal obligation (giri), and tacit social negotiation\u2014alongside developmental theories of moral and cognitive growth in middle childhood. The findings suggest that these behaviors represent symbolic efforts by children to reassert moral agency, reconstruct temporal coherence, and restore social belonging in disrupted environments. The study concludes that culturally grounded, interpretive approaches are essential for understanding children\u2019s post-disaster responses and for developing psychosocial interventions that recognize children as active agents in communal recovery.<\/p>\n W\u00e8r\u00e8 and the Ontological Politics of Global Mental Health: Distributed Cognition in Yor\u00f9b\u00e1 Traditional Medicine<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Obafemi Jegede<\/p>\n Global mental health initiatives increasingly replace indigenous diagnostic categories with neuropsychiatric frameworks, framing this as anti-stigma progress. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic research with traditional healers in southwestern Nigeria and my position as both researcher and practitioner, this paper examines w\u00e8r\u00e8\u2014the Yor\u00f9b\u00e1 term for mental illness\u2014to reveal fundamental ontological incommensurability between Western personalistic medicine and Yor\u00f9b\u00e1 ecological-cosmological healing. Through linguistic analysis, micro-phenomenological interviews, and participant observation, I demonstrate that w\u00e8r\u00e8 (w\u00e9 = weave; \u00ecr\u00e8 = misery) diagnoses not individual brain dysfunction but unraveling of interconnections across bodily, environmental, ancestral, and spiritual domains. Yor\u00f9b\u00e1 language grammatically locates cognitive processes beyond the brain\u2014fear in chest (ay\u00e1), happiness in stomach (in\u00fa), focus in liver (\u1eb9\u0300d\u1ecd\u0300)\u2014while recognizing environmental agents (rivers, trees, earth) as cognitive beings with agency requiring ritual attention. Therapeutic protocols operationalize \u201ctotalness\u201d (gbogbo \u00e0y\u00e8), addressing not only persons but ecological-cosmological fields where disequilibrium occurs. Replacing w\u00e8r\u00e8 with \u00e0r\u00fan \u1ecdp\u1ecd\u0300l\u1ecd (brain illness) constitutes epistemic violence, imposing personalistic ontology where ecological-cosmological ontology operates. Global mental health must recognize ontological pluralism: multiple valid healing sciences operating in incommensurable realities.<\/p>\n Dementia Diagnosis in Postapartheid South Africa: Providers\u2019 Perspectives in Ethnographic Context<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Casey Golomski<\/p>\n This article situates perspectives of South African social service and health care providers on older adults who live with dementia and Alzheimer\u2019s disease in ethnographic context. A review of findings from multi-year field research on long-term care and service provision for older adults in peri-urban Mpumalanga shows: racial disparities in accessing formal dementia diagnoses; aggression, forgetfulness, and wandering as the most reported symptoms of presumed dementia; and provider-reported ethno-racial differences in families\u2019 diagnostic- and care-seeking practices. Findings corroborate evaluative research showing structural barriers to diagnosis and care. Hansen\u2019s concept of diagnostic apartheid is expanded to explain how making sense of dementia is a sometimes partial, unequal, and racializing process; how older adulthood is reproduced as a structurally vulnerable position; and how historical consciousness of violence informs understandings and non-integration of neuropsychiatric and other models of dementia.<\/p>\n Decolonizing Mental Health in Algeria: Integrating Local Beliefs, Culture, and Islamic Principles for Culturally Responsive Care<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Sarah Memchout<\/p>\n Algeria\u2019s mental health system still bears the scars of a colonial asylum regime that delegitimized indigenous cosmologies and ruptured ties among self, family, community, and the sacred. Drawing on psychological, anthropological, historical, and Islamic literatures, this article reframes those ties as a relational nucleus composed of three interlinked processes: persistent colonial mistrust, the level of dialogical safety that clinicians and communities can co-create, and the degree of spiritual consonance between therapeutic methods and local moral worlds. This article proposes an integrative framework that partners evidence-based psychology with Qur\u2019anic ethics, Amazigh and maraboutic healing, and legal safeguards for patient rights. By rooting assessment and intervention in the relational nucleus, the model aims to deliver epistemic justice, cultural legitimacy, and clinical efficacy, positioning decolonized mental health care as both a therapeutic and societal imperative in postcolonial Algeria.<\/p>\n Pharmacological Microcontroversies and Civilizational Grammars Around ADHD in Chile<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Esteban Radiszcz, Hugo Sir & Juan Pablo Pinto<\/p>\n This article examines pharmacological microcontroversies (PMC) surrounding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in Chile, based on a comparative, multisited ethnography in four educational contexts with differing socioeconomic and territorial profiles. Drawing on science and technology studies, microcontroversies studies, and Norbert Elias\u2019s sociology of interdependence, the study conceptualizes ADHD as a situational configuration in which diagnosis and treatment emerge from interwoven relations among children, caregivers, educators, and health professionals. Data were collected through focused ethnography, open interviews, discussion groups, and triangular groups and analyzed via emergent content and sociological discourse analysis. Two axes structure PMC: (i) desired effect\u2014stillness versus performance, and (ii) normative model\u2014external conduct versus internal capacities. Across sites, pharmaceuticals were embedded in distinct \u201ccivilizational grammars\u201d linking bodily regulation, moral expectations, and educational aims: from medication as protection against criminality to a \u201cconcentration pill\u201d enabling hidden potential. These grammars mediate acceptance, rejection, or ambivalence toward medication crossed by other vectors as class and gender. ADHD-related debates thus constitute territorially situated normative arrangements, revealing how local trajectories and interdependencies shape diagnoses and the production of children\u2019s interiority.<\/p>\n Seeing Oneself Seize: A Case Study on the Affordances of a Video-Based Diagnostic Encounter for a Patient with Functional Seizures<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Paula Muhr<\/p>\n This paper examines how integrating clinical video recordings into the diagnostic encounter shapes a patient\u2019s experience of functional seizures, a contested neurological condition historically known as hysterical attacks. Drawing on James Gibson\u2019s theory of affordances and de Haan et al.\u2019s account of how individuals perceive affordances based on their needs and concerns, the study analyzes a single in-depth interview with an 18-year-old patient recently diagnosed with functional seizures. It explores what viewing seizure videos with a doctor offers the patient\u2014in clinical, epistemic, emotional, and experiential terms. The interview was subjected to a close reading, attending to how video-mediated communication of diagnosis intersects with the patient\u2019s prior illness history, sociocultural context, and understanding of self. The analysis identified three positive (epistemic insight, diagnostic validation, trauma recollection) and three negative affordances (shame, vulnerability, resignation). These affordances emerged not only from what the videos showed but also from how they were viewed, framed, and interpreted during the diagnostic encounter. The study concludes that the videos\u2019 affordances cannot be separated from an individual patient\u2019s interpretive resources and biography. Clinical video viewing can generate meaningful diagnostic insights, but it also risks harm unless embedded within a carefully structured dialogical process that attends to the patient\u2019s specificities.<\/p>\n Psychiatric Care and Legal Residency for Japan\u2019s \u2018Non-legal\u2019 Immigrants<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Selim Gokce Atici<\/p>\n This article examines the role of psychiatric care in the passage of unstably documented migrants and asylum seekers in Japan from detention-bound, dispossessed non-citizens with no recognized voice to medically certified claimants whose documented distress opens legal pathways to social protection. Psychiatric care is the only medical welfare provision in Japan for those without residential registry, who are required to verify severe mental illnesses to maintain provisional release permits (PRPs) that may defer detention and potential forced repatriation. Drawing on multisited ethnography through 18 months of fieldwork in Hanami Clinic\u2014a neighborhood-based psychiatric clinic\u2014and Tsunagi Shelter\u2014a refuge for individuals lacking formal registration\u2014I explore the intersection of clinical intervention, legal procedures, and everyday experiences of mental illness. Through these psychiatric care practices, multi-ethnic PRP holders cultivate new ways to articulate their detention experience and legal predicament, discursively broadening narratives about their psychological distress along with its potential for documentability. My argument is that psychiatric medicalization is helping create an important conceptual space for psychiatric legitimization of access to basic rights. Through its constitutive role in legal documentation and PRP justification, psychiatric mediation provides new discourses that legitimize moral claims to legal resolution.<\/p>\n Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Narrative, moral and institutional effects of childhood ADHD: Listening to teachers and mothers of diagnosed children<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Galia Plotkin-Amrami & Talia Fried<\/p>\n Building on research on the critical role of laypeople in medicalization and the multi-dimensional character of this process, this study explores the effects and meanings of the ADHD category for mothers and teachers of diagnosed children. Based on interviews with 27 schoolteachers from two different schools and 42 mothers of children diagnosed with ADHD, we show that despite the growing acceptance of ADHD as a medical diagnosis, it exhibits only minor narrative, institutional, and moral effects in school and family arenas. The diagnostic label attributed to children does not resolve blame games and uncertainty about the source of children\u2019s difficulties and does not provide many pragmatic benefits for either mothers or teachers. We argue that these limited narrative, moral and institutional effects are shaped by the moral positionings available to mothers and teachers, the institutional status of ADHD as a category of disability, and educational policy. We distinguish medicalization\u2019s institutional and interpersonal dimensions and explore their complex interrelations. Our analysis resonates with recent moves in medical sociology toward more pragmatic and practice-based analyses of the effects of medical categories, particularly when enacted outside traditional healthcare settings.<\/p>\n When health changes everything: The disruptive side of identity shifts in people with CF<\/strong><\/a> Noa Tal-Alon<\/p>\n Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a severe genetic disorder historically associated with low life expectancy. The introduction of CF transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) modulator drugs like Trikafta has dramatically improved health outcomes for many people with CF (pwCF), shifting their lived experiences in unexpected ways. This qualitative study explores the psychological and social consequences of such improvements, focusing specifically on identity disruption and emotional adaptation. Utilizing a phenomenological approach, in-depth interviews were conducted with CF patients who had used Trikafta for at least 2\u2009years, alongside an analysis of publicly available blog narratives. The findings reveal two central themes: identity disruption and ambivalent loss. Participants described profound challenges in adjusting to their new health status, including difficulties in redefining their identity after years of viewing themselves as chronically ill. Additionally, they reported a paradoxical sense of loss, grieving aspects of their previous illness experience, such as a sense of urgency in life decisions and strong connections within the CF community. While participants also shared hopeful and forward-looking narratives, this study centers on the less-explored emotional complexities that emerge when long-standing illness-based identities are disrupted. The findings underscore the need for comprehensive psychological support systems to help PwCF process identity shifts and sustain a sense of continuity in their lives.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you want to know or not?\u201d How prenatal providers manage clinical uncertainty related to chromosomal risk and noninvasive prenatal testing<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Aleksa Owen<\/p>\n In 2011, noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) disrupted clinical screening and testing paradigms. While concerns have been raised over public and patient-oriented NIPT usage, providers\u2019 views of NIPT remain understudied. This is significant because providers offer pre-test counseling to pregnant patients. This study sought to better understand how prenatal care providers view NIPT in the context of risk and uncertainty. After obtaining institutional ethical approval, semi-structured interviews were conducted with certified nurse-midwives and obstetrician-gynecologists (n<\/em>\u2009=\u200920). Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and coded using abductive analysis. Providers perceived chromosomal risk as an ever-present uncertainty that they worked to help patients make sense of, and providers perceived NIPT as a binary risk assessment tool to decrease uncertainty and increase patient knowledge. These results indicate that while providers may be more likely to use NIPT as a way to limit uncertainty, the social consequences of this move are that providers may inadvertently offload decisional responsibility onto patients, impacting respect for patients\u2019 autonomy.<\/p>\n Affective gaps in eHealth communication: Exploring patient experiences with health data on the eHealth platform sundhed.dk<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Martina Skrubbeltrang Mahnke<\/p>\n The exploratory study examines how patients in Denmark experience health data on the eHealth platform sundhed.dk<\/em>. The study takes its starting point in the communicative process taking place between patients as platform users and the eHealth platform as a communicative agent. In dialogue with literature at the intersection of eHealth and communication studies, it develops the analytical lens of affective gaps, connecting Peters notion of communicative gaps with Lupton\u2019s concept of affective atmospheres. Empirically, the study unpacks the complex, often conflicting experiences that arise when patients attempt to make meaning of and engage with their health data. Building on 24 in-depth, purposefully sampled interviews, the article presents a thorough thematic analysis, showing that patients need to simultaneously deal with states of being (1) informed and insecure, (2) confident and frustrated, and (3) in control and in doubt. Receiving health data on eHealth platforms is a complex and often challenging process for patients, provoking profound and at times unsettling experiences, oftentimes creating vulnerabilities. While gaps and uncertainty have always been a part of health communication, eHealth platforms amplify and reconfigure these dynamics, thus presenting novel challenges for patient-healthcare professional communication. In conclusion, the article calls for further research into the communicative user-platform relations that shape patient experiences with health data, positioning patients as the primary receivers of eHealth communication.<\/p>\n Femtech in context: A critical conceptual (re)view<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Danica Facca, Jodi Hall, Gail Teachman , Joanna Redden, and Lorie Donelle<\/p>\n Emerging as a commercial category in 2016, \u2018femtech\u2019 has been publicly celebrated as a category of consumer-based digital health technologies designed to support the unmet and systemically marginalized health needs of women in areas such as menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause, through data-driven apps, wearables, and self-diagnostic tools. Since its emergence, the term femtech has become culturally significant and has taken on a life of its own across commercial, public, and healthcare discourses. Despite the growth of femtech scholarship, clarity is lacking on how different disciplines have challenged the assumptions about sex, gender, health, technology, and innovation that shape dominant understandings of \u2018who\u2019 femtech is for (i.e. fem) and \u2018what\u2019 it constitutes (i.e. tech). Motivated by this research gap, a critical conceptual review was conducted to provide new entry points into critical debates. This article novelly adapts \u2018diffractive reading\u2019 as a methodological approach to bring disciplinary perspectives on femtech into conversation with one another across anthropology, computer science, cultural studies, gender studies, information studies, law, media studies, medicine, and science and technology studies. This article focuses on insights drawn between critiques of femtech which trouble the ideologies, discourses, and practices that shape dominant understandings of \u2018fem\u2019 and \u2018tech\u2019. In thinking through and with the conceptual boundaries of femtech, this review underscores the ongoing need to examine femtech\u2019s role in shaping global dynamics of reproductive, labor, and environmental justice, in addition to neoliberal approaches to healthcare more broadly.<\/p>\n Problems of equity in US HIV integrated planning, 2015\u20132021: Enacting a bounded justice continuum<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Stephen Molldrem, Nivan Wadhawan, Alec Manning, and Justin D. Edwards<\/p>\n The US HIV\/AIDS response is notably worse than those of other high-income countries. The country\u2019s epidemic is marked by low viral suppression rates, high incidence, lacking coordination, and entrenched disparities along lines of sexuality, race\/ethnicity, gender, class, and other factors. In 2010, the National HIV\/AIDS Strategy for the United States<\/em> (NHAS<\/em>) was launched, centering an equity-oriented vision that prioritized marginalized groups. NHAS<\/em> implementation required states to create HIV integrated plans to better coordinate services and meet populations\u2019 needs. We used Carol Bacchi\u2019s \u201cWhat\u2019s the Problem Represented to Be?\u201d approach to analyze 20 jurisdictions\u2019 plans, focusing on how they incorporated equity-oriented principles articulated in NHAS<\/em>\u2019s vision statement and other factors such as plans for integration across HIV care, surveillance, and prevention programs. Building on Melissa Creary\u2019s concept of \u201cbounded justice,\u201d we show that integrated plans enacted a \u201cbounded justice continuum,\u201d wherein some states pursued more equity-oriented strategies than others. We argue that this reflects constraints planners faced and the structure of US federalism, where implementing jurisdictions operated in variously restrictive or enabling conditions related to state-level politics, available public health infrastructure, and other factors. Our approach and the bounded justice continuum concept can be useful for scholars studying the rollout of equity-oriented policies in federal systems where local implementations will vary widely. We ultimately arrive at a positive assessment of US HIV integrated planning. However, we also advocate for more transformative reforms to ensure that people living with and affected by HIV can access universal healthcare, social services, housing, and employment.<\/p>\n Implementation of patient participation in rehabilitation: An approach caught between different ideologies<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Elin Margrethe Aasen, Marianne Kjelsvik, Lindis Katrine Helberget, and Elisabeth Dahlborg<\/p>\n The definition of specialised rehabilitation in Europe has changed from a focus on patients\u2019 bodily functions and work tasks to a patient-centred focus prioritising patients\u2019 wishes, allowing patients to actively collaborate and set their own goals. This study aimed to explore interprofessional healthcare teams\u2019 discursive practice regarding the implementation of patient participation in specialised rehabilitation units in Norway. Data were collected from three focus groups with seven different health professions, totalling 18 healthcare professionals. A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis outlined by Fairclough was used to analyse the data. Three interdiscursive discourses based on different and opposing ideologies were found: (1) the discourse of standardisation, in which healthcare professionals used international models for rehabilitation goal setting; (2) the discourse of interprofessional experts, in which healthcare professionals constructed themselves as experts; and (3) the discourse of patient responsibility, in which the patients were constructed as having rights and autonomy. The sociocultural practice of implementing patient participation in specialised rehabilitation in Norway highlighted a hegemonic struggle between standardisation; paternalistic and autonomy ideologies; ethical dilemmas between healthcare professionals\u2019 knowledge and use of standardised goals; and patients\u2019 autonomy, knowledge, and will.<\/p>\n The Billie project: A story completion study of young people\u2019s views on citizenship for persons in mental health recovery<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Clara De Ruysscher, Oona Moeyaert, Jessica De Maeyer, Florian De Meyer, Ottar Ness, and Marius Veseth<\/p>\n This study explores young people\u2019s perceptions of citizenship and recovery for individuals with severe mental health challenges using the story completion method. In this qualitative approach, participants were invited to complete an open-ended story stem about a fictional character, Billie, whose journey of recovery unfolds through their narratives. We analyzed 47 stories, with lengths ranging from 65 to 598 words (M<\/em>\u2009=\u2009253 words), applying both horizontal (thematic) and vertical (narrative progression) analyses. The findings reveal that participants often framed Billie\u2019s recovery in terms of social roles\u2014such as student, friend, or worker\u2014emphasizing the fluctuating and relational nature of recovery. At the same time, the narratives also reflect societal expectations and implicit biases surrounding mental health and citizenship. Broader systemic factors, such as rights, resources, and societal responsibilities, were less frequently addressed. The results suggest that young people\u2019s perspectives on mental health recovery are largely shaped by relational contexts but may lack a critical awareness of structural barriers to inclusive citizenship. This study underscores the potential of the story completion method as both a research tool and an educational intervention, fostering dialog on stigma, inclusion, and mental health recovery.<\/p>\n Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Autopsy, deathways, and intercultural healthcare in the southern Peruvian Andes<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n David M.R. Orr<\/p>\n While death remains a popular topic for anthropology, relatively few ethnographic accounts consider the modern bureaucratic processes accompanying it. One such process is public health autopsy, which scholars have\u00a0largely taken for granted. Existing analysis has regarded it as a form of \u2018cultural brokering\u2019 and autopsy reluctance in communities is seen, within both medical and cultural models, as a matter of ontological difference between incommensurable scientific and spiritual cosmologies. This article presents an ethnographic case study of the disagreement between a biomedical practitioner and the bereaved family on the death of a teenager who died of an unknown illness. The family\u2019s wish to hold a wake, as is customary in the rural Peruvian Andes, clashed with the doctor\u2019s mandate\u00a0to determine the cause of death\u00a0through\u00a0autopsy. However, the details of the disagreement and the wider context of the deceased\u2019s health-seeking itinerary suggest that ontological contradictions alone do not adequately explain the disagreement, but must be considered alongside the social relations in which these actors were embedded. Administrative state processes of certification, often overlooked by the anthropology of death in favour of more striking responses and rituals, are shown to be analytically vital to how communities negotiate mourning and grieving.<\/p>\n \u2018Vitamins\u2019, shortcuts, and athletic citizenship in Ethiopia and Cameroon: considering sporting ethics beyond biomedicine<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Michael Crawley, Uro\u0161 Kova\u010d<\/p>\n This article argues that the current way of thinking about ethics in sport in primarily biomedical terms, and in particular in terms of the presence of particular pharmaceutical substances, fails to account for broader notions of sporting ethics and fairness in the Global South. Ethnographic material from Ethiopia and Cameroon on attitudes towards doping, \u2018spiritual doping\u2019, and age tampering demonstrates that athletes themselves are far more concerned with issues of global inequality and the fair distribution of resources. Current statements on sporting ethics are revealed as at once too narrow (focusing only on individual responsibility and biological factors) and too abstract (without accounting for specific social and economic realities). We extend the notion of \u2018athletic citizenship\u2019 to go beyond \u2018biological citizenship\u2019, and argue that the current biomedical model of sporting ethics works to obscure the structural and racialized inequalities that define global sports. Beyond sport, our analysis also demonstrates that the boundaries of citizenship are today often policed through hybridized formations that are not limited to the legal systems of individual countries or to straightforward processes of regulation, but which extend to quasi-legal, transnational entities that police specific kinds of bodies.<\/p>\n \u2018As long as I can\u2019: women\u2019s health, physical exertion, and household futures in rural Indian Himalayas<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Nishtha Tewari<\/p>\n Through an ethnography of exertion, this article adds to anthropological literature on the actions and interpretations of marginalized groups in response to social hardship and suffering. It argues that, against a reduction in social and state-support mechanisms in Eastern Uttarakhand, north India, women consciously used physical exertion to achieve household stability. Exertion manifested as arduous paid labour, which strengthened household positions and prospects, alongside unpaid physical service, which sustained inter-household and extended social relationships. Women\u2019s most reliable resource towards reproducing a collective future was their continuous physical labour \u2013 which led them to intentionally deprioritize their immediate, individual health concerns. Caste and class networks shaped the possibilities and risks of exertion. Despite women\u2019s efforts, exertion had its limits and was sometimes fallible. Women responded to these limits by adopting self-reliance as a discursive measure to calibrate their exertion. In contrast to a focus on women\u2019s moral and kinship strategies in response to health-driven distress, I foreground women\u2019s exertion as an embodied strategy they adopted to safeguard households as a whole. Attending to exertion adds a new dimension to understanding women\u2019s practices in response to hardship \u2013 that of using their health to pursue long-term outcomes they value, in this case household reproduction.<\/p>\n Tears in the taiga: alcohol, agency, and more-than-human relations in northeast China<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Richard Fraser<\/p>\n This article explores the complex entanglements of alcohol, human agency, and more-than-human relations among Ewenki reindeer herders of northeast China. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Da Xing\u2019anling Mountains, I examine how alcohol is both a potent cultural substance and a site of existential tension. I show how alcohol mediates social relations, reinforcing friendship, status, and gendered identities, while simultaneously underpinning ritualized engagements with reindeer, spirits, and ancestral presences. At the same time, alcohol has been implicated in cycles of violence, self-harm, and premature death, linking personal and communal suffering to broader historical and political processes, including forced relocation and a hunting ban. By juxtaposing these dimensions, I highlight the paradoxical roles of alcohol as both a medium of connection and a vector of harm. Central to this analysis is a phenomenological approach that foregrounds embodied experience and sensory engagement, attending to how Ewenki navigate, give meaning to, and inhabit these entangled worlds through drinking. In doing so, the article contributes to anthropological understandings of substance use, more-than-human relations, and coping practices, offering insight into how alcohol functions as a relational and existential technology within a marginalized Indigenous world.<\/p>\n Medical Anthropology<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Pandemic Memes and Tamil Health Narratives<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Haripriya Narasimhan, Shriram Venkatraman & Venkata Ratnadeep Suri<\/p>\n \u00a0This article analyses the Tamil COVID-19 memes as artifacts of humor and social commentary during Tamil Nadu\u2019s first pandemic wave. Drawing on a corpus of WhatsApp memes, cross-verified on Facebook and Instagram, we trace how Tamil cinematic iconography and anthropomorphism articulated health anxieties and negotiated therapeutic authority between Siddha and biomedicine. Using visual ethnography, we identify two narrative logics, namely, dissonance (skepticism, satire) and congruence (pragmatic coexistence). Framed by encoding and decoding, carnivalesque inversion, and performative health communication, we argue that memes do not merely reflect sentiment, rather, they actively stage reasoning about care and pluralist health imaginaries.<\/p>\n Multi-Modal Sensoriality and Online Community-Based Support in the Long Covid Choir<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Gavin Robert Walker<\/p>\n Long covid involves diverse chronic physical and cognitive symptoms with poorly understood mechanisms and limited treatment options. Many affected individuals turn to community groups for support. Drawing on ethnographic research with the Long Covid Choir, a patient-run online singing and support group, in this paper I examine how participants use overlapping sensory experiences to cultivate belonging, foster biosocial solidarity, structure care, and counter isolation. Through shared auditory and visual practices \u2013 collective breathing, guided mindfulness, and gentle stretching \u2013 the choir cultivates multi-sensory connection. These activities foster digitally mediated social intimacy for individuals who face significant barriers to in-person participation.<\/p>\n Between the Extraordinary and the Everyday: Embodied Memory and Epidemic Preparedness During Ebola Outbreaks in Guinea<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Almudena Mari-Saez & Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Le Marcis<\/p>\n In 2021, an outbreak of Orthoebolavirus occurred in Nzerekore (Guinea). Following the declaration, diagnostic and containment actions were triggered, framing the outbreak as an extraordinary event. Yet, outbreaks are embedded in the everyday of social life and generate embodied memories that shape interactions between local populations and outbreak response teams. We examined locally the tension between the community\u2019s everyday and the exceptional in the outbreak response. We argue that the bodily imprint of such extraordinary events plays a critical role in shaping preparedness, yet it remains unseen by the global health technocracy.<\/p>\n Dads and Digital Devices: Embodied and Spectral Presences in Diabetes Care in Greece and Denmark<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Maria Athena Campbell & Hanne Overgaard Mogensen<\/p>\n Fathers to children with type 1 diabetes increasingly engage with digital technologies that monitor and regulate their child\u2019s condition, yet the embodied and emotional dimensions of this care remain underexplored. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece and Denmark, we show how diabetes technologies mediate new forms of paternal attunement, aligning care work with technological competence and culturally valued masculinities. Through routine device work and remote monitoring, fathers cultivate embodied and spectral forms of presence while navigating moments of connection and disruption.<\/p>\n The State, the Household, the Voluntary Sector: The Pharmaceuticalization and Collectivization of Care in Athens\u2019 Social Clinics of Solidarity<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Letizia Bonanno<\/p>\n Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Athens\u2019 social clinics of solidarity, I explore how the volunteers redefined pharmaceuticals as they moved from state-licensed pharmacies to households and into the grassroots voluntary sector. Therefore, I trace how their value, status and meaning shifted in the process: medicines were no longer seen as commodities but treated as sociable objects of care. In showing how state policies and market forces made pharmaceuticals increasingly central to social relations and care practices in times of austerity, I argue that pharmaceuticalization can develop alongside and even arise from grassroots, collective efforts to pool and redistribute medicines.<\/p>\n Modalities of Enfleshment: Albinism and the Limits of Biosociality in Tanzania<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Giorgio Brocco<\/p>\n Media and humanitarian discourses surrounding violence against people with albinism in Tanzania have fostered forms of biosocial relatedness and public recognition. Yet albinism does not consistently consolidate into a stable biosocial identity. Drawing on ethnographic research with Farida, Baraka and other interlocutors with albinism, this article ethnographically develops the concept of \u201cmodalities of enfleshment\u201d to attend to how albinism is lived through shifting interpretations and embodied experiences. In this paper, I argue that the condition offers a case study for understanding how bodymind differences are continually revalued across and shaped by biomedical, disability, socio-cultural, economic, political, and institutional domains and practices.<\/p>\n Erasing Anthropological Knowledge in American Psychiatric Classification: The Culture Concept for DSM-6<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Neil Krishan Aggarwal<\/p>\n The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has introduced its concept of culture for the sixth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-6). However, these articles do not cite recent work from cultural psychiatrists trained in anthropology or anthropologists of mental health. In this article, I analyze the APA\u2019s proposed culture concept, review recent culture theories from cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists in prior DSM revisions, and suggest ways for anthropologists to engage the APA.<\/p>\n Medical Anthropology Quarterly<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n In the shadow of HIV: Fear, rumor, and stigma among young women living with HIV in COVID-19 pandemic in Western Kenya<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Mariam Florence Yusuf,\u00a0Washington Onyango-Ouma,\u00a0Ruth Jane Prince,\u00a0Paul Wenzel Geissler<\/p>\n Drawing on ethnographic research in Dudi village in Western Kenya, this article explores how the lingering legacies of the 1990s HIV\/AIDS epidemic shaped local perceptions of, and responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic and related vaccine controversies. Focusing on the lives of young women living with HIV, the article traces how their experiences of navigating HIV care, stigma, and gendered expectations intersected with anxieties around COVID-19 vaccination. These narratives are embedded within a broader historical and social landscape marked by grief, moral judgement, and structural exclusion. Past experiences with HIV are shown to inform contemporary fears around vaccination, reigniting multi-layered forms of stigma and casting women\u2019s bodies as sites of risk, suspicion, and control. By situating these responses within the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic, the article highlights how disease, memory, and gendered moralities continue to shape health experiences and interventions in deeply unequal ways.<\/p>\n Living a \u201cgood death\u201d: Caring for solitary deaths in Japan<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Hiroko Kumaki<\/p>\n How do public health metrics of \u201cgood death\u201d shape care and everyday life? Concerns over dying alone has become prevalent worldwide. In Japan, social anxieties over solitary deaths (kodokushi<\/em>) have intensified in a rapidly aging society. In response, care practices have emerged to keep people social in life and death. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a tsunami-affected town in Miyagi, I examine how post-disaster care has been reorganized in response to fears of\u00a0kodokushi<\/em>. Care workers improvised their activities to reconcile bureaucratic demands for \u201cstatistics of sociality\u201d with survivors\u2019 shifting needs and desires. These activities demonstrate the impact of standardized scripts of \u201cgood death\u201d on the quality of life and care of those they aim to protect. At the same time, they reveal the potential for care that embraces the indeterminacy and situatedness of what constitutes a good death, allowing for diverse ways of living and dying well.<\/p>\n Working through cancer: Economic precarity and the social meaning of survival for parent-survivors in the United States<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Victoria L. Brown,\u00a0Lindsey Kaufman,\u00a0Sienna Ruiz,\u00a0Clarissa Gaona Romero,\u00a0Janet Njelesani,\u00a0Siobhan Sutcliffe,\u00a0Jean Hunleth<\/p>\n While US cancer survival rates have improved in recent years, the rising incidence of early-onset cancers means cancer is shifting younger, imposing new generational challenges for survivors and their families. This article explores the experience of a cancer diagnosis during one\u2019s re\/productive years by analyzing how parents with dependent children maintain a future amid heightened economic precarity (e.g., loss of stable employment, downward mobility, and a degraded public sphere). By linking physical survival with the social conditions necessary for post-treatment quality of life, we develop a more collectivistic notion of survivorship, where parent-survivors\u2019 efforts to stay employed during treatment serve as an extension of family caregiving in austere times. Reflecting on how the lead authors\u2019 own experience of work and cancer emerged in interviews with 12 parent-survivors, we intervene on traditional team science methods, making space for the autoethnographic voices that underlie interpretations of illness.<\/p>\n Enduring and the horizon of repair: French Caribbean post-stroke rehabilitation amid health inequity<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Rapha\u00eblle Melissa Rabanes<\/p>\n Drawing on ethnographic research with patients and therapists in post-stroke rehabilitation, this article explores how Guadeloupeans strive to exist on their own terms amid postcolonial health inequities, forms of marginalization and institutional disrepair. I argue that French territorial health inequities must be understood in relation to colonial health inequities and reveal the long history of socioracial stratification in the French Caribbean. I then turn to the experience of a patient to examine how she confronts the limitations of her life chances. As she and other Guadeloupean stroke survivors push back against the contours of life delineated by systemic issues, they exist in close engagement with the horizon of life, in a movement I propose to call enduring.<\/p>\n
Cet article explore les effets de l\u2019int\u00e9gration croissante des sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) dans la recherche et les pratiques de sant\u00e9, \u00e0 partir des savoirs exp\u00e9rientiels mutualis\u00e9s d\u2019un collectif de chercheur\u00b7se\u00b7s ayant exerc\u00e9 en Guyane entre 2021 et 2025. Port\u00e9e par l\u2019UA\u00a017 \u00ab\u00a0Sant\u00e9 des Populations en Amazonie \u00bb du CHU de Guyane, l\u2019\u00e9tude mobilise observations, retours d\u2019exp\u00e9rience et \u00e9changes interdisciplinaires afin d\u2019identifier et discuter coll\u00e9gialement des th\u00e9matiques r\u00e9currentes.
Les r\u00e9sultats montrent que l\u2019int\u00e9gration des SHS favorise le dialogue th\u00e9rapeutique et prolonge les approches biom\u00e9dicales, en \u00e9clairant les logiques sociales et culturelles du soin. Plusieurs obstacles persistent toutefois\u00a0: pr\u00e9dominance des m\u00e9thodologies quantitatives, difficult\u00e9s de reconnaissance institutionnelle et biais \u00e9pist\u00e9mologiques. La recherche en sant\u00e9 en Guyane s\u2019attache pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment \u00e0 documenter et d\u00e9passer ces limites en structurant le dialogue entre les savoirs. Si ces dynamiques sont particuli\u00e8rement pertinentes localement, elles constituent aussi un laboratoire d\u2019initiatives pour repenser, \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9chelle nationale, les cadres de recherche et les pratiques cliniques vers davantage de pertinence et d\u2019efficience.<\/p>\n
This article explores the effects of the growing integration of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) into healthcare practices and health research, drawing on the shared experiential knowledge of researchers working in French Guiana between 2021 and 2025. Led by the Institute of Health and Population in Amazonia at the University Hospital Center of French Guiana, the study mobilizes observations, feedback from field experiences, and interdisciplinary exchanges to identify and discuss recurrent issues in dialogue with international literature.
Results show that SSH integration enhances therapeutic dialogue and extends biomedical approaches by clarifying the social and cultural logics shaping care practices. However, several challenges remain, including the dominance of quantitative frameworks, institutional recognition issues, and epistemological biases. Ongoing initiatives in French Guiana seek to overcome these limits by strengthening dialogue across knowledge systems. While particularly relevant locally, these dynamics also provide a laboratory for rethinking research frameworks and clinical practices at a national scale toward greater relevance and effectiveness.<\/p>\n