Somatosphere
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Swimming in Denmark: Chemicals, Cultural Norms, and the Politics of Pool Hygiene
View article: Swimming in Denmark: Chemicals, Cultural Norms, and the Politics of Pool HygieneA swimming pool is never just water. It’s a heavily managed aquatic ecosystem, held in precarious balance by chemistry, cultural norms, and care. Without treatment, pools explode with algae, bacteria, protozoa, and fungi, not to mention insects. Chlorination, the standard treatment worldwide, reshapes that multispecies world: it kills off some life forms while allowing chlorine-resistant…
Somatosphere is a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, medical sociology, history of science and medicine, science and technology studies, and cultural psychiatry.
Featured articles
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Disability and the Worship of Work
View article: Disability and the Worship of WorkBetween 1939 and 1945, the Nazis murdered nearly 300,000 disabled people: in gas chambers, by poison or overdose, or simply by leaving them to starve (Herzog 2025, 1). Epileptics, wheelchair users, the mentally ill, and the intellectually disabled were targeted. But what mattered most was whether a person could work. Those who were killed were…
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Book Review: ‘Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary’
View article: Book Review: ‘Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary’Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcolm, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts (eds.) (Bloomsbury: 2024) Far beyond fitness tips about “boosting testosterone” for muscle growth or the tired cliché of attributing women’s moods to menstruation, a wide range of lesser-known hormones has entered public discourse and social media. From productivity…
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Book Review: The Technological non-Fix of Crowdfunding: A Private Health Solution to a Public Health Problem
View article: Book Review: The Technological non-Fix of Crowdfunding: A Private Health Solution to a Public Health ProblemCrowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare by Nora Kenworthy (MIT Press: 2024) One chilly winter day, I (the author of this review) was standing in line at my university’s coffee shop for a hot drink when I saw a poster printed out amongst the ads for ongoing campus activities of a student asking…
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Book Review: Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s ‘Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization’
View article: Book Review: Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s ‘Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization’Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization by Harry Yi-Jui Wu (MIT Press: 2021) Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s Mad by the Millions traces the early efforts of the World Health Organization (WHO) to bring psychiatry into the domain of global public health. Drawing on extensive archival materials, Wu…
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Queer Ties, Weird Time: Thinking Biosociality and Queer Sociality Amid the 2022 Mpox Outbreak and Vaccination in the San Francisco Bay Area
View article: Queer Ties, Weird Time: Thinking Biosociality and Queer Sociality Amid the 2022 Mpox Outbreak and Vaccination in the San Francisco Bay AreaThe 2022 Mpox outbreak in the Global North disrupted the temporality of epidemics amid an uncertain recovery from COVID-19. Immediately associated with men who have sex with men, the outbreak interpellated the queer communities into action—for example, through participation in vaccination campaigns—and reactivated the collective memory of HIV/AIDS. This outbreak thus revealed an intricate form…
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Chronicling Antigypsyism: editors’ response
View article: Chronicling Antigypsyism: editors’ responsePart of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023). We decided to put together Romani Chronicles of COVID-19 during the Great Quarantine of 2020 (Boellstorff, 2020) when, like so many others, we were overwhelmed by the…
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Understanding Roma transnational experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic
View article: Understanding Roma transnational experiences of the COVID-19 pandemicPart of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023). As I sit down to write these words in Glasgow, Scotland, in July 2024, the news is still dominated by the enduring spectre of COVID-19. The UK…
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Pandemic, Prejudice, and Persistence: The Romani Experience in COVID-19
View article: Pandemic, Prejudice, and Persistence: The Romani Experience in COVID-19Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023). On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) before later announcing the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic on…
Featured articles
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Book Review: ‘Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary’
View article: Book Review: ‘Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary’Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcolm, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts (eds.) (Bloomsbury: 2024) Far beyond fitness tips about “boosting testosterone” for muscle growth or the tired cliché of attributing women’s moods to menstruation, a wide range of lesser-known hormones has entered public discourse and social media. From productivity…
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Book Review: The Technological non-Fix of Crowdfunding: A Private Health Solution to a Public Health Problem
View article: Book Review: The Technological non-Fix of Crowdfunding: A Private Health Solution to a Public Health ProblemCrowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare by Nora Kenworthy (MIT Press: 2024) One chilly winter day, I (the author of this review) was standing in line at my university’s coffee shop for a hot drink when I saw a poster printed out amongst the ads for ongoing campus activities of a student asking…
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Book Review: Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s ‘Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization’
View article: Book Review: Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s ‘Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization’Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization by Harry Yi-Jui Wu (MIT Press: 2021) Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s Mad by the Millions traces the early efforts of the World Health Organization (WHO) to bring psychiatry into the domain of global public health. Drawing on extensive archival materials, Wu…
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Queer Ties, Weird Time: Thinking Biosociality and Queer Sociality Amid the 2022 Mpox Outbreak and Vaccination in the San Francisco Bay Area
View article: Queer Ties, Weird Time: Thinking Biosociality and Queer Sociality Amid the 2022 Mpox Outbreak and Vaccination in the San Francisco Bay AreaThe 2022 Mpox outbreak in the Global North disrupted the temporality of epidemics amid an uncertain recovery from COVID-19. Immediately associated with men who have sex with men, the outbreak interpellated the queer communities into action—for example, through participation in vaccination campaigns—and reactivated the collective memory of HIV/AIDS. This outbreak thus revealed an intricate form…
-
Chronicling Antigypsyism: editors’ response
View article: Chronicling Antigypsyism: editors’ responsePart of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023). We decided to put together Romani Chronicles of COVID-19 during the Great Quarantine of 2020 (Boellstorff, 2020) when, like so many others, we were overwhelmed by the…
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Understanding Roma transnational experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic
View article: Understanding Roma transnational experiences of the COVID-19 pandemicPart of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023). As I sit down to write these words in Glasgow, Scotland, in July 2024, the news is still dominated by the enduring spectre of COVID-19. The UK…
-
Pandemic, Prejudice, and Persistence: The Romani Experience in COVID-19
View article: Pandemic, Prejudice, and Persistence: The Romani Experience in COVID-19Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023). On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) before later announcing the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic on…
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Czecho-Slovak Common Ground for Roma Health Promotion
View article: Czecho-Slovak Common Ground for Roma Health PromotionPart of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023). Romani Chronicles of COVID-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience is an admirable and personal account not only of various Roma peoples’ resilience and tenacity but also of…
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