Category Archives: News

Garcia’s ethnography on pastoral clinics and rural heroin addiction in New Mexico humanizes heroin addiction. She emphasizes the societal, familial, and systemic issues that contribute to pastoral clinics’ purported failure by measures self-discharge and relapse. Garcia’s quote in Chapter 5 … Continue reading →

In regards to content, I enjoyed this reading as it reframes the issue of drug addiction, which is highly stigmatized in the United States. Garcia goes against norms and stereotypes of addicts to look at alternative factors in drug usage and relapse. … Continue reading →

Garcia’s The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande provides a fascinating look into the lifestyle and challenges faced by people in New Mexico, tracing complicated histories of heroin addiction, detox resources, overdoses, and structural violence. Methodologically, the … Continue reading →

In the introduction, readers begin to learn about the presence of clandestine abortions in Senegal and the ways in which those performing post-abortion care have worked in conjunction with the carceral system in order to prosecute and investigate these abortions … Continue reading →

I thought that this ethnography was a perfect example of showing how ethnographic methods can provide information that we would not be able to get from another research method or style. Something from the introduction that particularly stood out to … Continue reading →

Suh’s ethnography explores the racial, class, and gender-based components of post-abortion care (PAC) and reproductive health politics in Senegal. At first glance, I thought of the term PAC to be neutral. However, my impression of the term soon flipped to … Continue reading →

A sentiment that stood out to me was that “Ethnographic data is fleeting, and the ethnographer’s job is to record it before it disappears or dissipates,” meaning one must be prepared in advance of their interviews to efficiently document minutiae … Continue reading →

I found Suh’s work to be very insightful. The placement of PAC, which is an attempt to protect mothers, in the category of obstetric violence was really profound. The way that the PAC statistics are manipulated to show success and … Continue reading →

Author Siri Suh presents an interesting dynamic that healthcare providers face in her work Dying to Count. Her ethnography focuses on Senegal, a country of Islamic majority with relatively strict abortion laws. These laws coincide with cultural expectations of restraining from sexual relations … Continue reading →

From the start, I found Dixon’s approach to her ethnography to be incredibly interesting and rather well-rounded considering the intended goals of her work. When used correctly, ethnography can do exactly what we have discussed in class: unveil the non-obvious. … Continue reading →

In chapter three, Dixon describes what she calls maternal conditioning, which refers to the process by which “women become conditioned to behav[e] in a certain way and… [expect] certain things and to the material conditions that women find themselves in … Continue reading →

Dixon writes her ethnography in a way that directly acknowledges the subversion of expectations. For example, on the very first page of the Introduction, she discusses how pharmaceuticals and syringes are not something that you might expect when you think … Continue reading →

In this reading, Carwill Bjork-James talks about the Bolivian social movement, focusing on discussing the strategies used by activists. I found the term “Sovereign Street” pretty interesting, especially in how it highlighted how urban protesters built their base of supporters … Continue reading →

This reading was an interesting examination of the role of midwifery in reproductive care in Mexico. Since reproductive health is a topic I was passionate about, I took greater care reading this. Dixon’s work was done using fieldwork in rural … Continue reading →

In Deborah Thomas’s essay, she examines violence concerning Jamaican citizenship. Violence is typically the last resort of Jamaican people being denied citizenship wrongfully. She also looks at various other forces pushing Jamaicans towards violence, such as international forces and global … Continue reading →

In the introduction, Tsing talks about a concept called “savage capitalism,” which is the process by which companies try to create capital and product out of their waste products. From the get-go, this rhetoric of savageness in the capitalist system … Continue reading →