James Belarde// “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” -Douglas Adams, in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe On April 29, 2006, an unexpected performance went exactly as anyone should have expected. Having been invited as the featured entertainer at that…
Tag: Politics
Attentional Avoidance: America’s “War” on COVID-19 and Narco-Terrorism
Salvador Herrera // In a White House press briefing on Wednesday, April 1st, 2020, the Trump administration and the Coronavirus Task Force announced their “enhanced counter-narcotics operations” under U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM).[1] Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump explained that these measures would include a doubling of USSOUTHCOM’s capabilities to surveil, disrupt, and seize drugs shipped overseas from…
Coronavirus at the Border: The Nation-State as Involuntary Quarantine
Bojan Srbinovski // On the evening of November 13, 2015, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks occurred in the metropolitan area of Paris. Six different locations were targeted in a combination of mass shootings and a suicide bombing. In the deadliest attack on France since World War II, and the deadliest attack on the…
Five Decades of “Semiotic” Fetal Imagery in the US: Part 2
This is the second of two articles on the history fetal imagery in the United States. The first post can be found here. The conflation of fetal rights and human rights extended into the 1990s and continued to obscure the rights of pregnant people. Liberals assembled around the rhetoric of “safe, legal, rare” to accommodate…
Light and Shadows: On Care and Loss
Sarah Roth // My mother and I divide up her Hospice bags: two nondescript fanny packs holding morphine, liquids, and nutrition. Artifacts of the land of the critically ill, they are contraband here in the clinic.
Immigrant Organizing for Care in the Territory of Hawai’i: The Chinese Old Men’s Home
Julia Katz // How do non-citizens lobby the states and societies that exclude them for greater investment in the welfare of their communities? The case of the Chinese in post-annexation Hawai‘i reveals a unique moment in the midst of global Progressive reform when racialized migrants ineligible for citizenship mobilized claims of economic exceptionalism and autonomous care…
Mental Health under the Hungarian People’s Republic
Molly Nebiolo // The fall of Communism in Eastern Europe happened nearly thirty years ago, but historians are still piecing together what life was like behind the Iron Curtain. Many of the narratives about Communist regimes gravitate towards the major countries that pursued reformist policies, like Russia and China, but few texts focus on many…