Esther Melton, Leslie Riddle, Jennifer Elyse James
{"title":"Carework as resistance: How incarcerated women care for each other to survive carcerality amid a global pandemic.","authors":"Esther Melton, Leslie Riddle, Jennifer Elyse James","doi":"10.1111/maq.70034","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70034","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis in prisons and jails, with some of the largest outbreaks in the United States happening inside carceral facilities. In the absence of structural interventions to protect them, people inside prisons engaged in various forms of carework to support one another and to draw attention to the horrific conditions. We conducted interviews and focus groups with people who were incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic; healthcare workers in prisons and jails; and advocates and organizers supporting people in carceral settings. Interviews were triangulated with field notes from ethnographic observations of medical and legal advocacy efforts during the pandemic. We argue that the carework performed by people incarcerated is a key form of invisibilized labor and resistance within carceral settings. We describe how this labor is both relied on for prisons to function, particularly during a public health emergency, and an under-recognized element of abolitionist organizing in women's prisons.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70034"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13068207/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145490683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond safety net value(s): Tourist hotel rooms for people experiencing homelessness.","authors":"Naomi C Schoenfeld","doi":"10.1111/maq.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the shape of care and value through an ethnographic study of an intensive, temporary housing intervention for people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, California, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on a new anthropological theory of value, the results highlight the slipperiness between surveillance and care, and how value may be produced or diminished in specific, embodied ways through respite, space, privacy, and dignity. This article troubles the concept of the social \"safety net,\" suggesting instead that high-quality and even costly initial public investments for the poor generate public value.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70033"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145496979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"They Look At Us Like Parasites\": The Corporeal Stigmatization and Pathologization of Deportees in Tijuana, Mexico.","authors":"Carlos Martinez","doi":"10.1111/maq.70029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the embodied and institutional forms of marginalization experienced by Mexican deportees in Tijuana. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in clinics and social service organizations, it explores how deportees are corporeally stigmatized, denied legal recognition, and pathologized as addicts in need of coercive rehabilitation. Deportees are subjected to carceral and medicalized interventions that blur the boundaries between care and punishment. The article calls for greater attention to how deportation regimes operate transnationally to manage and discipline displaced populations through a convergence of biopolitical and necropolitical practices.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70029"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145402353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enacting embryos: Practices, ontologies, and politics of the IVF lab post-Dobbs","authors":"Manon Lefevre","doi":"10.1111/maq.12916","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.12916","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn the federal right to abortion, much public and political debate has surrounded gestating and in vitro embryos’ “personhood.” In this paper, I draw on 15 months of participant observation in biomedical spaces of infertility to reveal how embryos can be enacted as not only unborn children but as many different kinds of entities. I examine how embryos become “multiple” as in vitro fertilization (IVF) professionals inseminate, monitor, and transfer them into patients’ bodies: enacting them as makeable, contingent, recordable, animatable, predictable, introducible, praisable, and appraisable entities. Providing a new perspective into the varied ontologies of in vitro embryos, this paper has far-reaching implications for the anthropological study and politics of reproductive medicine and politics today</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143516993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“We Only Escort Women to the Health Facility”: Traditional birth attendants and the performance of indicator-driven care in rural Tanzania","authors":"Megan D. Cogburn, Mohamed Yunus Rafiq","doi":"10.1111/maq.12917","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.12917","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Global health regimes have reversed the role of traditional birth attendants (TBAs) from partners in the fight against maternal and child mortality to barriers to indicator-driven care. In rural Tanzania, widespread fear of government surveillance and punishment for non-compliant individuals and organizations that climaxed during the presidency of the late John Magufuli (2015–2021) put increased pressure on TBAs. To negotiate tensions, TBAs adopted the position that they <i>only</i> escort women to health facilities for birth. We argue that TBAs’ insistence on this <i>only</i> both occludes and protects their multiple caring roles and responsibilities in a context of harsher home birth penalties, yet limited efforts to improve systemic shortages in the rural health system. TBAs’ performance of “we only escort women” operates both as the sedimentation of policies, a way to resist them, and means to hold space for TBAs in the wake of ambiguous global and national health policies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143434033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Euthanasia as a safeguard for living: Anticipation and incurable cancer in a Colombian context","authors":"Camilo Sanz","doi":"10.1111/maq.70012","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70012","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article builds on years of ethnographic conversations I sustained with my father, 89, who lives in Colombia. Soon after getting diagnosed with an incurable Multiple Myeloma—a cancer known for unleashing prolonged and painful agonies—he withdrew from oncology treatments and secured access to euthanasia (assisted-dying) on his own, bypassing medico-insurance guidelines created to regulate this medical practice and prevent abuses. Eight years after withdrawing treatments, my dad is still alive. His case shines a light on how securing access to euthanasia may have had unintended therapeutic effects on existential fears, pain perception, and quality of life on his way to dying. My storytelling also seeks to discuss the ethical and legal dimensions of assisted-dying in Colombia, especially for patients who do not consider life as biological deterioration, and who are caught between aggressive treatments and painful agonies, on the one side, and burdensome medico-insurance bureaucracy, on the other.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/maq.70012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144327267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}