• Other research productsclose
• 2018-2022close
• Open Access close
• Other ORP type close
• DK close
• English close
• PURE Aarhus University close
• Theses@asb close

In the Covid-19 pandemic, it seems that African countries have been largely spared from the devastating effects observed elsewhere. Working and living in Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world located in West Africa, we wonder: How can the world know that there are only few Covid-19 cases in a country where the health system is weak and access to Covid-19 tests very limited? How can the world know that there is a low Covid-19 mortality in a country without a reliable civil registration and vital statistic system? In this article, we explore the (too) many unknowns of Covid-19 in Guinea-Bissau. The article was chosen as the 1st place winner of the 2020 Eye on Global Health Writing Competition.

Between April 11th and April 13th 2018 two-hundred delegates gathered at the University of Plymouth for the 9th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research This document collects their contributions to the conference in response to the following call: The provocation Artistic Research Will Eat Itself can be understood as a warning against the dangers of methodological introspection, or as a playful invitation to explore the possibilities of a field in a constant state of becoming. In this context, the ‘cannibalism’ of artistic research ‘eating itself’ embodies a dynamic tension between self-destruction and regeneration.If artistic research eats itself, digests itself and then releases its own waste, does it stink and linger, fertilise new growth or invade new destinations on the bottom of someone’s shoe? If we are to constantly defend and define, are we in danger of having no art left, only the claims for its ability to embody knowledge? When we bite off our own heads do we grow new tails?Critical perspectives on the discourse surrounding artistic research might be argued to already be too formulaic or self-defeating. Making a case for its own institutional legitimacy could unwittingly reinforce some of the very things artistic research aims to critique. Yet such onto-epistemological paradoxes can offer a rich territory for exploration along with generative practices that involve reflexivity, automorphogenesis, and recursive feedback loops. In recognising auto-cannibalism as an analogy for broader socio-political and environmental concerns, one of the challenges for artistic research is to respond imaginatively to the dynamic tensions between self-destruction and regeneration. [...]

Part of the Royal Geographical Society's 'Discovering Britain' series. The publication includes a Website, and Downloadable Written Guide, Audio Guide and App

Compilations of video clips of Italian mayors berating citizens breaking quarantine to walk dogs, jog, or play ping pong have become something of a ‘viral’ sensation both in Italy and globally. The clips are often amusing, featuring politicians accusing their constituents of vanity, incontinence, and other assorted sins. As anthropologists interested in the politics of accusation , these small-scale disputes allow us to think through the sorts of political horizons that the novel coronavirus is bringing into being. As the virus spreads, we seek to track the sorts of accusations that spread with it as they provoke what we call virological witch hunts. Unlike the episodes of public blaming and shaming some political figures have promoted through national media, virological witch hunts are small-scale, bottom-up, intimate, and usually amplified through local social networks. We link them to the phenomenon of the untori in XVI- XVII century Lombardy, another bottom-up surge of accusations against those believed to be spreading disease that authorities had to deal with. Relying on social media, we have been reaching out to quarantined residents of the province of Bergamo, in the Lombardy region who have been publicly shamed for perceived transgressions in the midst of the quarantine. The responses offer insight into how the pandemic has precipitated what Massimo, one of our interlocutors, has termed a “collective, hysterical version of preexisting individual patterns of blaming and shaming”.