Medical Anthropology最新文献

Anthropologists explore sequential art, particularly comics, as an accessible medium to co-produce knowledge about trauma and disability with research collaborators. However, practices of image description developed by blind scholars and artists need to be integrated into these projects to ensure visual studies are accessible. Collaborating with sighted service users of drop-in centers in Denmark, we reflect on the process of creating comics and image descriptions about their experiences with digital access, trauma, and disability. By analyzing insights from both drawing and describing images, we propose this method in medical anthropology as one way to build research collaborations that embrace disability expertise.

In this article, drawing on ethnographic research on everyday life and care for people with dementia in Dutch residential care, I argue that researchers who work with people with dementia can contribute to the enactment of "interesting subject positions," thereby enriching the ways in which life with the condition is understood. The crux, I propose, is to use "hanging out" as a method and to ask "interesting questions," an approach that enables participants to let researchers know what matters to them. Researchers, in turn, are enabled to "say more" about dementia, and to bring to light interesting subject positions.

Creatief met clowns is a creative and art-based workshop for people living with dementia that invites participants to join in a collaborative process of creating an outfit and clothing a clown. In this article, I look at what happened in workshop sessions and how this mattered to those involved, including what participants with dementia valued about the activity - by listening to what they had to say, but also by attending to their performative, creative and affective ways of engaging in Creatief met Clowns. To further articulate values that came up in practice, I analyzed my findings in terms of the quality of psychosocial relations, the role of embodiment, material aspects, and playfulness in person-centered care. By combining an ethnographic study of art-based care-practice with a value-sensitive theoretical reflection on empirical findings, my approach offers an alternative to problematic efforts to quantify the value of art in person-centered dementia care.

Being able to speak and understand local languages is regarded as an important prerequisite for conducting fieldwork. In this article we reflect on fieldwork in which we did not speak the local language - Polish - but in which we could still learn something about a central practice in our field sites: how language was implicated in practices of care. Hanging out as linguistically constricted researchers propelled us to research situations in which care was done through using words as sounds and practices, rather than relying on meanings, and to relate to not sharing a language in new ways.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control employs Community-Based Organizations (CBO) to conduct mass testing on "hidden" Men who have Sex with Men (MSM). Testing MSMs is intended to make risky bodies legible to the state and discipline the CBOs around narrow health goals. However, detailed ethnographic fieldwork with MSM CBOs in southwest China demonstrates that pressures to achieve HIV testing quotas produce the need to "water-down" or manipulate data. This distorts the identities and practices of MSMs from state surveillance and builds collusive partnerships between CBOs and low-level government officials to mitigate the disciplinary impacts of strict audits.