{"title":"Plastics and labor: The case of disposable medical plastics","authors":"Gauri Pathak","doi":"10.1111/maq.70063","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70063","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Plastics are ubiquitous in the contemporary practice of medicine, where they are tied to notions of hygiene and quality of care. However, when plastics first infiltrated global medical practice, they did so because of considerations related to patient comfort and durability. It was only after developments in the sterilization of plastics and the aggressive marketing of single-use plastics that medical plastics came to be emblematic of hygiene as they are today. In this article, drawing from historical data and fieldwork in India, I argue that dependence upon disposable medical plastics is not just about infection control but also about enabling reductions in labor at the site of use. This labor is displaced into the future—as new plastic production—and downstream, onto waste management. Medical plastics thus function as a materiality of displaced labor in clinical settings. Recognizing this displacement effect is crucial to plastic control interventions within sustainable healthcare.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"40 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/maq.70063","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147391619","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":"Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice , Elise Andaya, New York City, NY: New York University Press. 2024. 208 pp.","authors":"Kathleen Rice","doi":"10.1111/maq.70060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70060","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"40 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148274815","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":"Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru By Justin Perez, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025, 264 pp. Price: $27.95. ISBN: 978-1-4780-3180-2","authors":"Joseph Jay Sosa","doi":"10.1111/maq.70069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70069","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"40 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148274896","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":"Care without co-presence: Crafting alternative modes of involvement in UK intensive care in times of COVID-19","authors":"Annelieke Driessen, Lisa Hinton","doi":"10.1111/maq.70066","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70066","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article we analyze how family involvement in intensive care in the United Kingdom (UK) was reconfigured through the reordering of proximity and distance during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects thereof. The introduction of visiting restrictions disrupted established modes of involvement in intensive care, prompting family members, hospital staff and, when able, patients, to craft alternative modes of involvement. Drawing on narrative interviews with patients and family members, some of whom had clinical training themselves, we describe three ways in which they did so: establishing connections and communication, personalizing care at a distance, and making kin and virtual co-presence. We conclude that the ensuing subject positions afforded involvement of some kind, but also came at a cost. Our analysis furthers the conceptual understanding of care practices beyond their reliance on proximity and distance, and highlights that their choreography shapes new possibilities as well as vulnerabilities.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"40 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/maq.70066","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148018218","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":"The role of Abuela Doulas in advancing reproductive justice in the UK.","authors":"Mars Lord","doi":"10.1111/maq.70081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70081","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper explores the concept of reproductive justice within the UK context, focusing on the pivotal role of Abuela Doulas. It critiques the inadequate investment in grassroots activism led by Black individuals and examines the disparities in Black maternal health. Highlighting the work of Abuela Doulas and the emerging prominence of Black academics in this field, this essay aims to illustrate the crucial need for culturally competent care and systemic change.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70081"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148279259","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":"“It was tidak cocok (incompatible)”: Incompatibility, Decoloniality, and Vaccine Hesitancy in Banda Aceh, Indonesia","authors":"Dimas Iqbal Romadhon","doi":"10.1111/maq.70024","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70024","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 2018, vaccine hesitancy marked the nationwide measles-rubella vaccination campaign in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The hesitancy, which was supported by the provincial government, stemmed from concerns over porcine contamination in the vaccine product. “Tidak cocok” (incompatible) became a pervasive statement used to rationalize the refusal to participate in the vaccination program, permeated personal narratives, public responses to a vaccine allergy case, and an official meeting to determine the vaccination campaign's future. In this article, I theorize incompatibility as a lexical item of decoloniality. Incompatibility fosters a sense of liberation, paving a pathway to refuse tools and systems considered unfit according to locally situated knowledge and historical experience. It further reclaims what has been marginalized, delegitimized, and ignored by dominant epistemic and political structures. I also suggest that many Islamic expressions arising during the vaccine hesitancy have given a distinct local flavor to the decolonial critique on vaccination. [Aceh, decoloniality, incompatibility, Indonesia, Islam, vaccine hesitancy]</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"40 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145330546","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":"Living with industrial glue by being sanay in a small-scale shoemaking community in Marikina city, the Philippines.","authors":"Precious Angelica A Echague","doi":"10.1111/maq.70080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70080","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Dolores St. is an alley in Marikina City, the Philippines, where a small-scale pagawaan (shoemaking workshop) continues to stand among residential buildings and provides informal employment to its neighbors. Here, the shoemakers and other residents have a complex relationship with shoemaking, an industry embedded in their community for over a century. They are sanay (habituated) to toxic industrial glue. This paper offers perspectives into peoples' understanding and experiences of harm and health through participant observation, interviews, and focus group discussions, revealing how being sanay to the pandikit (industrial glue) is embodied and is an active process through how shoemakers sense, know, and act in response to living with chemicals.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70080"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148260121","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":"\"Why can't they put us to sleep if we are suffering?\": La Nada and the desire for euthanasia among institutionalized older adults in Peru.","authors":"Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori","doi":"10.1111/maq.70079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70079","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, I examine how institutionalized older adults in Peru articulate suffering through the idiom of la nada-\"nothingness\"-and how this shapes desires for euthanasia. Moving from close ethnography of bodies in space and time to structural and ethical discourses on euthanasia, I argue that calls for euthanasia arise not only from biomedical suffering or terminal illness, but also from socially produced experiences of relational erosion, confinement, and moral invisibility. Residents' refrain-\"no tengo nada\"-signals not only material lack but the collapse of reciprocal ties, autonomy, and recognition. Euthanasia thus becomes a moral claim that life cannot be defined by biological survival, absent dignity and belonging. The article challenges narrow bioethical frameworks and shows how end-of-life suffering is constituted through structural abandonment and social death, reframing the wish for euthanasia as a protest against life reduced to mere endurance without dignity.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70079"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148260116","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":"(Re)Turning to Black feminist consciousness: Deconstructing the politics of reproductive racism in Britain.","authors":"Princess Banda","doi":"10.1111/maq.70076","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70076","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Using ethnographic vignettes from my doctoral research, this article contextualizes and analyses Britain's Black maternal health crisis- a crisis of reproductive racism- through a Black feminist lens. The inequities Black mothers face has a strong Black (and) feminist history of being analyzed in relation to the politics of anti-Black racism and misogynoir as they are upheld and sanctioned by the State and the maternity services. This article, therefore, positions Black feminist consciousness as the overarching ethical and analytical framework that contemporary researchers must (re)turn to when studying reproductive racism in Britain. In light of this argument, I draw attention to the Black feminist articulations of racism, uneven reproduction, and reproductive necropolitics (introducing the idea of \"necropolitical mythopoeia\"), arguing that they are robust analytical tools that can kickstart the epistemological (r)evolution that is desperately needed in the British research landscape.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70076"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148253922","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":"Hermeneutic reflexivity and the ethics of ambiguity: Rethinking disclosure in visual HIV research.","authors":"Angélica Cabezas-Pino, Giuseppe Troccoli","doi":"10.1111/maq.70073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70073","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>HIV research often assumes that disclosure during research is both necessary and desirable for participants. This article challenges that assumption by proposing hermeneutic reflexivity as a practice-based mode of enquiry that does not depend on full disclosure of HIV experiences or coherent illness narratives, but rather on co-creation. Drawing on a multimodal ethnographic project with people living with HIV in Chile, we explore how silence, ambiguity and speculation can become central to image-making and sense-making. Hermeneutic reflexivity foregrounds aesthetic sensitivity, mutual questioning and shared authorship in co-creating collaborative mise-en-scène, fostering an ethnographic context in which forms of expression emerge that would not have surfaced through conventional narrative or testimonial methods. Grounded in phenomenological approaches to situated knowledge, this method reduces the risk of re-traumatization while fostering narrative agency, offering an ethical alternative for participatory health research in contexts where full disclosure may be risky for participants.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70073"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148253842","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}