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…
Category: Covid-19 Special Issue
Collapsing Work-Life Balance in Covid-19
Amala Poli // The beep of the phone.. thudding heart, fingers clicking away. “Is everything okay?” Yes, you say. “I just had to reply to this one email. All done now!” You set it aside, eyes flickering in the direction of the screen just a little.
COVID-19 as a New Structural Barrier to Equitable Health among Expectant Black Women in the US
Katey E. Mari// COVID-19 has created yet another structural barrier for equitable access to healthcare and health among Black pregnant women in the US, particularly in areas affected by racial residential segregation. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, discussions surrounding the social determinants of health as they relate to COVID-19 morbidity and mortality trends…
Anxiety and acceptance: A ritual death under pandemic conditions
Miki Chase // On Wednesday, October 7th, 2020, an unnamed Jain woman in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India, died on her 64th birthday. Local news reported that she had recently been discharged from a private hospital, having recovered from coronavirus and tested negative following treatment for Covid-19. A doctor at the hospital, however, who pointed out that she had…
Is Zoom the sole source of fatigue?
Amala Poli // We have all heard about Zoom fatigue; most of us are perhaps experiencing it on an everyday basis. The literature on combating Zoom fatigue continues to abound, with new perspectives and ideas in each article. [1] [2] However, what can we think of the potent combination of research and academic work…
Reflections from a first-year doctor in the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City
Mona Fayad and Michelle Lee // We were doctors in the first inpatient COVID-19 unit formed at Mount Sinai West Hospital. At the time, we were undergoing our internship year, which is the first year we practice as physicians after graduating medical school. Needless to say, we were thrown into the fire when COVID-19 hit…
Fighting a Pandemic: Camus’s “The Plague” and the Physician’s Struggle to Treat in the COVID-19 Outbreak
James Belarde// “To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.” -Franz Kafka, in “A Country Doctor” On January 30th, 1962, three girls at a boarding school in the village of Kashasha, Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika) started to laugh uncontrollably. Though efforts were made to restrain the unusual…
Why Hoard Toilet Paper? Dirt and Disorder in the 21st Century
Sarah L. Berry // “Of all dangers, those allied to pestilence, by being mysterious and unseen, are the most formidable.” — Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, Chapter 28. Contagion breeds panic, as the early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown pointed out in Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793, a fictional chronicle of the…
Coronashame
Dr. Brian J. Troth // In my last contribution to Synapsis, I wrote about what it means to be responsible in times of epidemic and pandemics. As the weeks have passed and tensions run higher surrounding the uncertainties that face all people around the world, it’s clear that making a responsible decision is not merely…
Feeling Remote: COVID-19 in an Isolated State
Bríd Phillips // For those of you who have never had to wonder about Western Australia (WA) or indeed Australia itself beyond the beautiful beaches, kangaroos, and Crocodile Dundee, here are a few facts to help you put the country and its people into context. The population of Australia sits just under 26 million, and…