The Private Worlds of Dying Children

By Myra Bluebond-Langner

Photo: Guillaume Piron

“The death of a child,” writes Myra Bluebond-Langner, “poignantly underlines the impact of social and cultural factors on the way that we die and the way that we permit others to die.” In a moving drama constructed from her observations of leukemic children, aged three to nine, in a hospital ward, she shows how the children come to know they are dying, how and why they attempt to conceal this knowledge from their parents and the medical staff, and how these adults in turn try to conceal from the children their awareness of the child’s impending death.

Access the book here.

The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism

By Maren Klawiter

In this book, Klawiter analyzes the breast cancer movement to show the broad social impact of how diseases come to be medically managed and publicly administered. Examining surgical procedures, early detection campaigns, and discourses of risk, Klawiter demonstrates that these practices initially inhibited, but later enabled, collective action. The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer ultimately challenges our understanding of the origins, politics, and future of the breast cancer movement.

Read the book here.

Ek Jagah Apni – A Place of Our Own

Ek Jagah Apni (‘A Place of Our Own’) is a film set in the city of Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh, India) and offers a glimpse into the lives of the transgender community in the city. Part of the Museum of Art and Photography’s exhibition ‘Visible/Invisible: Representation of Women in Art through the MAP Collection’, the movie follows the journey of two trans women in their quest for an apartment as well as for a space in society.

Presenting a slice of reality and shot in a realistic style, it is a story of an artistic expression of people who are the subjects of the film as well as the tellers of their own story as actors, co-writers, and the cast and crew that comprise the filmmaking process.

Read more and explore the museum’s website here.

Rethinking Global Health: Frameworks of Power

By Rochelle A. Burgess

This book reflects and analyses the working of power in the field of global health– and what this goes on to produce. It asks the pivotal questions of, ‘who is global health for’ and ‘what is it that limits our ability to build responses that meet people where they are?’

Covering a wide range of topics from global mental health to Ebola, this book combines power analyses with interviews and personal reflections spanning the author’s decade-long career in global health. It interrogates how the search for global solutions can often end up far from where we anticipated. It also introduces readers to different frameworks for power analyses in the field, including an adaptation of the ‘matrix of domination’ for global health practice. Through this work, Dr Burgess develops a new model of Transformative Global Health, a framework that calls researchers and practitioners to adopt new orienting principles, placing community interests and voices at the heart of global health planning and solutions at all times.

Access the book here.

Why Do You Make It About Race? Epistemic Disobedience of a Public Health Doctoral Trainee

By Satrio Nindyo Istiko

In Australia, racism remains a challenge to dismantle within public health institutions. In this paper, Satrio Nindyo Istiko examines the pressures he experienced from some public health scholars and practitioners to conform to colonial and positivist approaches in knowledge production that still dominate the field. To challenge this hegemony, he aligned his research practices with what Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience,” an approach to delink from Western ways of producing knowledge. Based on this experiential learning process, he argues epistemic disobedience should not be overlooked in the discussion of decolonizing research and antiracist pedagogy in the context of doctoral training. Through this reflection, he encourages public/global health PhD students from the Global South/Global majority to resist colonial perspectives as they navigate Western systems and cultures of producing knowledge.

Read the article here.

Hearing Happiness : Deafness Cures in History

By Jaipreet Virdi

Weaving together lyrical history and personal memoir, Virdi powerfully examines society’s–and her own–perception of life as a deaf person in America. At the age of four, Jaipreet Virdi’s world went silent. A severe case of meningitis left her alive but deaf, suddenly treated differently by everyone. Her deafness downplayed by society and doctors, she struggled to “pass” as hearing for most of her life. Countless cures, treatments, and technologies led to dead ends. Never quite deaf enough for the Deaf community or quite hearing enough for the “normal” majority, Virdi was stuck in aural limbo for years. It wasn’t until her thirties, exasperated by problems with new digital hearing aids, that she began to actively assert her deafness and reexamine society’s–and her own–perception of life as a deaf person in America. Through two genres, Hearing Happiness raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. Taking us from the 1860s up to the present, Virdi combs archives and museums in order to understand the long history of curious cures: ear trumpets, violet ray apparatuses, vibrating massagers, electrotherapy machines, airplane diving, bloodletting, skull hammering, and many more. Hundreds of procedures and products have promised grand miracles but always failed to deliver a universal cure–a harmful legacy that is still present in contemporary biomedicine. Weaving Virdi’s own experiences together with her exploration into the fascinating history of deafness cures, Hearing Happiness is a powerful story that America needs to hear.

Access the book here.

Will global health survive its decolonisation?

By Seye Abimbola and Madhukar Pai

There are growing calls to decolonise global health. This process is only just beginning. But what would success look like? Will global health survive its decolonisation? This is a question that fills us with imagination. It is a question that makes us reflect on what Martin Luther King Jr saw when he said in 1968, in the last speech he gave before he was killed, that “I’ve been to the mountaintop…and I’ve seen the Promised Land.” If what he saw was an equal, inclusive, and diverse world without a hint of supremacy, then, that world is still elusive. Similarly, an equal, inclusive, just, and diverse global health architecture without a hint of supremacy is not global health as we know it today.

Read the article here.

Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India

By Dolly Kikon

Photo: Dexter Fernandes

The nineteenth-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian states of Assam and Nagaland, everyday militarization, violence, and the scramble for natural resources regulate the lives of Naga, Ahom, and Adivasi people, as well as migrants from elsewhere in the region, as they struggle to find peace and work.

Anthropologist Dolly Kikon uses in-depth ethnographic accounts to address the complexity of Northeast India, a region where boundaries and borders are made, disputed, and maintained. She mainly explores the social bonds established through practices of resource extraction and the tensions these relations generate, focusing on peoples’ love for the landscape and for the state, as well as for family, friends, and neighbors. Living with Oil and Coal illuminates questions of citizenship, social justice, and environmental politics that are shared by communities worldwide.

Read the book here.

How All Politics became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump

By Laura Briggs

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, the US’ current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where Americans face economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction – stories of Black “welfare queens” and Latina “breeding machines”- were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families. With decreasing wages, rising McJobs, and no resources for family care, American households have grown ever more precarious over the past forty years in sharply race-and class-stratified ways. This crisis, argues Briggs, fuels all others – from immigration to gay marriage, anti-feminism to the rise of the Tea Party.

Read the book here.

Ashish Kothari

Image: By A. Kothari, “A touching moment with a Bonnet macaque baby”, Athirapally Falls, Kerala, Nov 2023.

Ashish Kothari is, in his words, “an Indian environmentalist working on development”, passionate about the environment and wildlife. In 1978-79, he helped found Kalpavriksh, a non-profit organisation in India which deals with environmental and development issues. From that time onwards, he has been associated with peoples’ movements like Narmada Bachao Andolan and Beej Bachao Andolan. He also helps coordinate national and global networks like Vikalp Sangam and Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and has been a member of different international commissions on environmental protection.

Kothari is the author/co-author and co-editor of about 30 books, and writer/co-writer of about 600 articles, most of which are available on his blog. He worked on a plethora of topics, including biodiversity, energy and climate, education, COVID-19, and social justice – complementing them with a wide range of artworks.

Explore Kothari’s works on his blog here.