As we all entered the space and settled into our seats, Ruchi, covered in an oversized red cloth, stood frozen in the middle of the stage. A spotlight blacked out the rest of the intimate performance venue. The audience was separated from the performer only by a few feet. For ten minutes, Ruchi stood without…
Category: Arts and Creativity
Healthcare is Human: Creative Responses to COVID-19 from Martinsburg, West Virginia
(Photo above: Molly Humphries) It’s not a stretch to say that we are all still grappling with COVID. From a biomedical standpoint, though we have ways of staving off and managing the disease, we are still seeing daily deaths in numbers high enough for there to be ongoing concerns. New strains proliferate through countries even…
Representations and Discourses of Indochinese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards (1880s-1920s), Part I
In the opening of his influential book Orientalism, Edward Saïd exposed the dominance and hegemony of Western authors and artists in shaping and formulating the fundamental narratives about the ‘Orient’, emphasizing the binary and self-consolidating character of colonial discourse: A very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and…
A Few Pages for a Life: Self-Portrait Through A Health Record Booklet
“It overflows with loose pages: medical prescriptions all mixed up, from my teenage to my adult years, from benign afflictions to serious troubles. All of those scattered fragments compose an anxious being. Rashes, panic attacks, chronic diarrhea. Nothing really changes, nothing really ever gets better. With slight variations, the same medication names come up again and again. 2005, 2013, 2021.”
Lonely Children in the Mirror: Isolation, Young People’s Mental Health and Literary Chronotopes.
Lonely Children in the Mirror: Isolation, Young People’s Mental Health and Literary Chronotopes. Mizuki Tsujimura’s award-winning novel, Kagami no Kojou, was published in Japan in 2017 and translated into English as Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Philip Gabriel in 2021 (Tsujimura, 2021). The novel is a fantasy adventure which begins when the protagonist, Kokoro,…
Pause and Ambiguity: Vermeer’s Woman With a Balance
I could say, “I wanted to see the Vermeers,” but, in truth, I needed to see them. And so, early on a chilly December morning, I passed through rural highways in West Virginia and Maryland until suburbia gave way to our nation’s capitol. Driving in D.C., never my favorite as someone now used to…
‘Fictions of (In)Dignity’: Graphic Public Health from India
‘Fictions of (In)Dignity’: Graphic Public Health from India It is hard to imagine a viable approach to social justice today that does not rely on the language of human rights. Elizabeth S. Anker (2012) In this essay, I examine two graphic narratives collected in Vidyun Sabhaney’s edited anthology, First Hand Graphic Narratives from India: Volume…
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus My New Year resolves to avoid fitting in within academic circles that reductively evaluate and lazily quantify my professional and personal contributions. I am tired of defending: my dissertation, my philosophies, and, ultimately, myself. Mentors and elders have confessed that the purpose of academic hazing is to…
Beyond the Iron Curtain: A Plea for Eastern European Humanities (I)
I write this on the 347th day of the Russian Invasion on Ukraine, from neighbouring Romania. In between editing, I keep in touch with friends and colleagues across Eastern Europe: there is talk of a major Russian offensive this month and Moldova has, wisely and predictably, extended its state of emergency once more. On…
The Way of Seizures
Note: This essay contains spoilers for Avatar: The Way of Water. There’s little I love more than surprise neurology in mainstream media. One such surprise occurred recently when one of the main characters in Avatar: The Way of Water has a seizure. Seizures are the proverbial bread and butter of pediatric neurology, and while…