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[s]’ ( Inhorn, 2012 : 31–46). Method The findings in this paper are based on feminist ethnographic research ( Letherby, 2003 ; Giampietro, 2008 ) in Jordan. The research focused on humanitarian narratives related to gender norms, family relationships, mobility and resistance. In this paper, the findings on resistance are presented. The research was conducted with self-settled Syrian women and men aged 18–60 who live in the
The article will present the findings of ethnographic research into the Colombian and Mexican forensic systems, introducing the first citizen-led exhumation project made possible through the cooperation of scholars, forensic specialists and interested citizens in Mexico. The coupling evolution and mutual re-constitution of forensic science will be explored, including new forms of citizenship and nation building projects – all approached as lived experience – in two of Latin America‘s most complex contexts: organised crime and mass death.
COVID-19 has reinstated the sovereign enclosures of corpse management that mothers of the disappeared had so successfully challenged in the past decade. To explore how moral duties toward the dead are being renegotiated due to COVID-19, this article puts forward the notion of biorecuperation, understood as an individualised form of forensic care for the dead made possible by the recovery of biological material. Public health imperatives that forbid direct contact with corpses due to the pandemic, interrupt the logics of biorecuperation. Our analysis is based on ten years of experience working with families of the disappeared in Mexico, ethnographic research within Mexico’s forensic science system and online interviews conducted with medics and forensic scientists working at the forefront of Mexico City’s pandemic. In the face of increasing risks of viral contagion and death, this article analyses old and new techniques designed to bypass the prohibitions imposed by the state and its monopoly over corpse management and identification.
Research into the governance of dead bodies, primarily focused on post-conflict contexts, has often focused on the aspects of the management of dead bodies that involve routinisation, bureaucratisation and order. Less attention has been paid to the governance of the dead in times of relative peace and, in particular, to the aspects of such work that are less bureaucratised and controlled. This article explores the governance of dead bodies in pandemic times – times which although extraordinary, put stress on ordinary systems in ways that are revealing of power and politics. Observations for this article come from over fifteen years of ethnographic research at a medical examiner’s office in Arizona, along with ten focused interviews in 2020 with medico-legal authorities and funeral directors specifically about the COVID-19 pandemic. The author argues that the pandemic revealed the ways in which the deathcare industry in the United States is an unregulated, decentralised and ambiguous space.
Mass violence is one of the defining phenomena of the twentieth century, which some have even called the 'century of genocides'. The study of how the dead body is treated can lead us to an understanding of the impact of mass violence on contemporary societies. Corpses of mass violence and genocide, especially when viewed from a biopolitical perspective, force one to focus on the structures of the relations between all that participates in the enfolding case study. Argentina is an extraordinary laboratory in the domain of struggle against impunity and of 'restoration of the truth'. It constitutes a useful paradigm in the context of reflection on the corpses of mass violence. Its special character, in the immediate aftermath of the military dictatorship, is to test almost the entirety of juridical mechanisms in the handling of state crimes. The trigger for both the intercommunal violence and the civil war was the mass murders by the Ustaša. This book discusses the massacres carried out by the Ustaša in Croatia during the Second World War. After a brief presentation of the historical background, the massacres carried out by the Ustaša militia and their corpse disposal methods are described. Using Rwanda as a case study, the book proposes an agenda for ethnographic research to explore the relationship between concealment and display in contexts of genocide. This relationship is explored in detail after a discussion of the historical background to the 1994 genocide.
pressing needs. With this premise, she outlines a user-centred design in chapter 10; and to outline the principles of the user-centred design that would contribute to removing these barriers, she relies on ethnographic research. From the accounts given by participants from different demographic characteristics, she develops user personas. The information gathered allowed her to prototype four resource-kit units around telephones (both landlines and mobile phones) as part of a training programme for resettled
thinking in interdisciplinary ways within our own individual work. We also found that because of the multi-sensory nature of the medium, authorship could be shared across different elements within the story. For example, while the script was largely set by the testimony gathered in fieldwork done by the UNAL team, Inty Grillos fully led on the development of the visuals, the colour palette and the sounds – all of which were informed by ethnographic research. Still, there are
ethics of clinical research should not simply concern bioethical principles but are inseparable both from local political dynamics and long-standing contests about governance, situated against a background of imperial medical exploitation and contemporary geopolitical inequalities. Methods The article is based on ethnographic research carried out between October 2020 and March 2021 in Goma, when the DRC-EB-001 vaccine trial was restarted after a
. These snapshots talk about the present but reveal the longue durée . The five authors were closely involved in the national (Sylvain Landry B. Faye, Frédéric Le Marcis, Almudena Mari Saez and Luisa Enria) and international Ebola response (Sharon Abramowitz) in different capacities: carrying out ethnographic research, providing guidance on the socio-cultural aspects of clinical interventions and community engagement, advising multiple international actors, and
and Jochum, 2014 ). Based on his past ethnographic research of the organisation, Redfield (2015) agreed that MSF was constitutionally ill suited to lead the response as the organisation ‘operates as independently as possible … and issues moral exhortations, not commands’, making its role reliant on the existence of a political as well as technical health infrastructure. However, in a situation where the unfamiliarity of national health