Medical Anthropology Quarterly最新文献

This article addresses healthcare experiences of Ukrainian refugee women with HIV in the EU. It shows that refugee expectations of healthcare starkly contrasted with their lived experiences. To explain this mismatch, I introduce the idea of therapeutic connections. Building upon the concepts of biosociality and the Imaginary West, I show that refugees' pursuit of HIV treatment in their host countries was about seeking both medicine and therapeutic connections with clinicians and other patients. Unable to find similar tight-knit communities (e.g., sex workers or women who use drugs) in their host countries and to forge relationships with clinicians that would go beyond patient-doctor encounters, many refugees decided to mobilize their therapeutic connections to Ukrainian vulnerable communities and clinicians to receive medicine and satisfy the need for belonging. In other cases, the mismatch between the expectations and experiences of healthcare led refugees to return home, even when it was not safe yet.

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.

In this ethnographic research project involving disabled and non/disabled siblings in Canada, we have found that during major life-changing transitions, such as the death of a parent, siblings face many challenges, including structural and systemic inequalities, struggles with and within various service systems, and difficulties with emotions and mental health. In response to these challenges, siblings undertake "extraordinary measures" through co-creative "sibling disability worldmaking" to imagine livable futures. During times of major transition, worldmaking is a strategy siblings use to navigate these upheavals and attempt to co-create livable lives despite a lack of systemic support.

Residential long-term care facilities, known in California as "board and care" homes, have been closing rapidly in the last decade. Proponents assert these provide vital forms of housing and care to the poor and must be saved, while critics contend they perpetuate the institutionalization of people with disabilities and should be abolished. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork in Los Angeles, I demonstrate that board and cares offer residents much-needed shelter and sustenance while also trapping them in worsening conditions amid ongoing "slow abandonment" by the state. Residents are confined by neoliberal state policy and political-economic forces that leave them with "nowhere else to go," and articulate critiques of their predicament that far exceed reformist solutions intended to salvage this peculiar, struggling institution. Seen through the lens of slow abandonment, meaningfully addressing residents' concerns requires an abolitionist project of building life-affirming structures of support.

This article draws on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles' (LA) jail mental health facility to describe the interrelated crises of rising numbers of people declared incompetent to stand trial and the recurrent failure of managing madness in jail. It draws on the concept of a "spatial fix," which refers to provisional solutions that displace, without resolving, systemic problems while, in fact, creating new ones. Within LA's carceral system, psychiatry has offered one such "fix": institutional and extra-institutional actors have mobilized the personnel, discourses, and technologies of psychiatry to manage the carceral system's apparent excesses. However, such a mobilization of psychiatry deepens, rather than resolves, these crises, while ideologically and spatially securing the wider carceral social order. This psychiatric fix, thus, has important implications for understanding how psychiatric power sustains, reproduces, and extends the shape-shifting US carceral state.