Giving Voice to Children's Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials

In this article, I explore the lessons that the anthropological debates of the 1980s about writing culture might have for contemporary childhood research within anthropology and the social sciences more generally. I argue that the current rhetoric about "giving voice to children," commonplace both inside and outside the academy, poses a threat to the future of childhood research because it masks a number of important conceptual and epistemological problems. In particular, these relate to questions of representation, issues of authenticity, the diversity of children's experiences, and children's participation in research, all of which need to be addressed by anthropologists in their own research practices with children. Unless anthropologists do so, childhood research risks becoming marginalized once more and will fail to provide an arena within which children are seen as social actors who can provide a unique perspective on the social world about matters that concern them as children.     

Maya mobile medicine in Guatemala: the "other" public health

Maya mobile medical providers in highland Guatemala and the goods and services that they offer from "soapboxes" on street corners, local markets, and on buses exemplify an important yet underinvestigated domain of localized health care, one that I refer to as the "other" public health. This medical and linguistic examination of traveling medical salespeople calls for a reconsideration (on a global scale) of what has come to be understood as "public health," arguing that "othered," local forms of public health that are often overlooked by anthropologists as "nontraditional" and delegitimized by bio-medicine as nonscientific merit serious consideration and investigation. This ethnography of marginalized forms of public health offers global insights into emerging heterodoxical forms of public health care that contest bio-medical authority and challenge our preexisting definitions of what counts as "access," wellness seeking, and even health care itself.     

Interspecies interactions within oral microbial communities.

While reductionism has greatly advanced microbiology in the past 400 years, assembly of smaller pieces just could not explain the whole! Modern microbiologists are learning "system thinking" and "holism." Such an approach is changing our understanding of microbial physiology and our ability to diagnose/treat microbial infections. This review uses oral microbial communities as a focal point to describe this new trend. With the common name "dental plaque," oral microbial communities are some of the most complex microbial floras in the human body, consisting of more than 700 different bacterial species. For a very long time, oral microbiologists endeavored to use reductionism to identify the key genes or key pathogens responsible for oral microbial pathogenesis. The limitations of reductionism forced scientists to begin adopting new strategies using emerging concepts such as interspecies interaction, microbial community, biofilms, polymicrobial disease, etc. These new research directions indicate that the whole is much more than the simple sum of its parts, since the interactions between different parts resulted in many new physiological functions which cannot be observed with individual components. This review describes some of these interesting interspecies-interaction scenarios.     

Being Seen and Heard: Listening to Young Women in Alternative Schools

This interview-based study examines nine young women's perceptions of their disconnection from high school and reconnection to school in an alternative program. Rather than focusing on a fixed notion of what "at-risk" students "need," the students and author note the importance of working with the messy, partial, and complicated sense of students' identities to gain better understandings of the schooling experiences of marginalized youth. With an eye toward practice- and theory-oriented representations and sense-makings, this article presents theoretical constructions of student disconnection and connection, student testimony as one useful pedagogy, and policy implications for schools.     

Strategic translation: pollution,data, and Indigenous Traditional Knowledge

This essay examines the role of data practices in the making and refuting of settler colonial environmental science. Investigating the epistemic contestation surrounding environmental contamination produced by the oil industry in Alberta, Canada, I discuss an alternative approach to toxicology: a community-based monitoring programme that uses a ‘three-track’ methodology to present data in three distinct forms. Using this method, First Nations communities engaged in strategic translation, balancing their aim of rendering Traditional Knowledge and community needs legible to policy-makers against their desire to protect Traditional Knowledge from being assimilated into the dominant data paradigm. This translation, I argue, enacts a form of resistance in an era of relentless datafication: making-things-into-data can reflect the exercise of agency rather than submission to external pressure. In this way, the three-track methodology models how marginalized communities can leverage data's productive capacities for their own ends and produce scientific knowledge on their own terms.     

The vitality of social media for establishing a research agenda on black lives and the movement

Social media provides scholars with important portals into the lives of marginalized communities and the movements organized to combat issues of race and racism in society. However, how to incorporate the seemingly unwieldy amount of social media data for research in our fields can pose challenges to further clarify how people navigate our social world and the issues with in it, but also how they organize to push for social change and equality. In what follows, the authors discuss how social media data can be used to enhance our studies of black lives in reflection of the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement on issues such as gun violence, public health, and higher education.     

A report from America: Baby M

Rachels reviews the social and legal facts of the celebrated "Baby M" case, in which surrogate Mary Beth Whitehead attempted to keep the daughter she had borne under contract to William Stern. The first phase of the legal battle between the parents ended in March 1988, when New Jersey Superior Court Judge Harvey R. Sorkow upheld the validity of the surrogacy contract, terminated Whitehead's parental rights, and awarded custody of the child to Stern. Rachels comments on public reaction to "Baby M," on Sorkow's decision, and on the impact the case may have on legislative attempts to regulate surrogacy. He also uses the example of "Baby M," as well as that of California heart transplant patient "Baby Jesse," to discuss how the media sensationalize controversial issues.     

“Robin Hood” of Techno-Turkey or Organ Trafficking in the State of Ethical Beings

Dr S. is a famous transplant surgeon in the Middle East. He operates "underground" on wealthy patients in different countries, from Israel to Turkey to Russia. The media refer to him as the "Organ Mafia doctor," and patients diagnosed with renal failure speak of him sardonically as "Robin Hood," acknowledging that he takes organs from the poor to give to the rich. But ethical issues of organ trafficking are not limited to marginal private clinics and "Mafia" doctors. All-living related organ transplants in Turkey involve similar ethical dilemmas: many related or nonrelated organ recipients pay their donors, and demand continues to rise. This paper explores practices in state and university hospitals and the ethical dilemmas doctors encounter to understand where and how judicial, cultural, and social categories of "human rights" and "crime" are constructed in our high-tech world.     

Depredation of domestic herds by pumas based on farmer’s information in Southern Brazil

Background

We can conserve cultural heritage and gain extensive knowledge of plant species with pharmacological potential to cure simple to life-threatening diseases by studying the use of plants in indigenous communities. Therefore, it is important to conduct ethnobotanical studies in indigenous communities and to validate the reported uses of plants by comparing ethnobotanical studies with phytochemical and pharmacological studies.

Materials and methods

This study was conducted in a Tamang community dwelling in the Makawanpur district of central Nepal. We used semi-structured and structured questionnaires during interviews to collect information. We compared use reports with available phytochemical and pharmacological studies for validation.

Results

A total of 161 plant species belonging to 86 families and 144 genera to cure 89 human ailments were documented. Although 68 plant species were cited as medicinal in previous studies, 55 different uses described by the Tamang people were not found in any of the compared studies. Traditional uses for 60 plant species were consistent with pharmacological and phytochemical studies.

Conclusions

The Tamang people in Makawanpur are rich in ethnopharmacological understanding. The present study highlights important medicinal plant species by validating their traditional uses. Different plant species can improve local economies through proper harvesting, adequate management and development of modern techniques to maximize their use.     

Choice of topology estimators in Bayesian phylogenetic analysis

Wheeler WC and Pickett KM (2008. Topology-Bayes versus clade-Bayesin phylogenetic analysis. Mol Biol Evol. 25:447–453.)discuss two ways of summarizing the posterior probability distributionof a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis, which they refer to as"topology-Bayes" and "clade-Bayes." They claim that the clade-Bayesapproach leads to problems such as "exaggerated clade support,inconsistently biased priors, and the impossibility of topologyhypothesis testing," which are not problems for the topology-Bayesapproach. However, their argument for topology-Bayes over clade-Bayesis based on errors in the interpretation of summary statisticsassociated with Bayesian phylogenetic analysis. Although thereis a well-documented difference between the maximum posteriorprobability topology and the majority-rule consensus topology(the established terms for topology-Bayes and clade-Bayes summaries,respectively), both have a place in phylogenetic analysis. Choiceof summarization strategy should be driven by choice of parametersthat need to be estimated versus those to be marginalized giventhe evolutionary questions being asked or hypotheses being tested.     

HIV, gender, race, sexual orientation, and sex work: a qualitative study of intersectional stigma experienced by HIV-positive women in Ontario, Canada

Background

HIV infection rates are increasing among marginalized women in Ontario, Canada. HIV-related stigma, a principal factor contributing to the global HIV epidemic, interacts with structural inequities such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. The study objective was to explore experiences of stigma and coping strategies among HIV-positive women in Ontario, Canada.

Methods and Findings

We conducted a community-based qualitative investigation using focus groups to understand experiences of stigma and discrimination and coping methods among HIV-positive women from marginalized communities. We conducted 15 focus groups with HIV-positive women in five cities across Ontario, Canada. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis to enhance understanding of the lived experiences of diverse HIV-positive women. Focus group participants (n = 104; mean age = 38 years; 69% ethnic minority; 23% lesbian/bisexual; 22% transgender) described stigma/discrimination and coping across micro (intra/interpersonal), meso (social/community), and macro (organizational/political) realms. Participants across focus groups attributed experiences of stigma and discrimination to: HIV-related stigma, sexism and gender discrimination, racism, homophobia and transphobia, and involvement in sex work. Coping strategies included resilience (micro), social networks and support groups (meso), and challenging stigma (macro).

Conclusions

HIV-positive women described interdependent and mutually constitutive relationships between marginalized social identities and inequities such as HIV-related stigma, sexism, racism, and homo/transphobia. These overlapping, multilevel forms of stigma and discrimination are representative of an intersectional model of stigma and discrimination. The present findings also suggest that micro, meso, and macro level factors simultaneously present barriers to health and well being—as well as opportunities for coping—in HIV-positive women''s lives. Understanding the deleterious effects of stigma and discrimination on HIV risk, mental health, and access to care among HIV-positive women can inform health care provision, stigma reduction interventions, and public health policy. Please see later in the article for the Editors'' Summary     

Can there be a "cultural epidemiology"?

A brief excursion through the history of social medicine suggests that, at least in principle, epidemiology and anthropology are natural allies in the study of disease in human populations. In practice, however, this alliance has been limited and remains problematic. This article examines the possibilities for interdisciplinary research, taking cancer epidemiology as a case in point. I argue, on the basis of participant-observation over a period of nearly two years in the epidemiology department of a medical research institute in Catalonia (Spain), that bioscientific uses of the concept of culture have led, disappointingly, to its reification as "beliefs" and its incorporation into the naturalist epistemology of Western institutional medicine. The unfortunate consequence is the medicalization of culture understood as "difference," which often stands in for social class.     

Microbial diversity in coastal subsurface sediments: a cultivation approach using various electron acceptors and substrate gradients

Microbial communities in coastal subsurface sediments are scarcely investigated and have escaped attention so far. But since they are likely to play an important role in biogeochemical cycles, knowledge of their composition and ecological adaptations is important. Microbial communities in tidal sediments were investigated along the geochemical gradients from the surface down to a depth of 5.5 m. Most-probable-number (MPN) series were prepared with a variety of different carbon substrates, each at a low concentration, in combination with different electron acceptors such as iron and manganese oxides. These achieved remarkably high cultivation efficiencies (up to 23% of the total cell counts) along the upper 200 cm. In the deeper sediment layers, MPN counts dropped significantly. Parallel to the liquid enrichment cultures in the MPN series, gradient cultures with embedded sediment subcores were prepared as an additional enrichment approach. In total, 112 pure cultures were isolated; they could be grouped into 53 different operational taxonomic units (OTU). The isolates belonged to the Proteobacteria, "Bacteroidetes," "Fusobacteria," Actinobacteria, and "Firmicutes." Each cultivation approach yielded a specific set of isolates that in general were restricted to this single isolation procedure. Analysis of the enrichment cultures by PCR and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis revealed an even higher diversity in the primary enrichments that was only partially reflected by the culture collection. The majority of the isolates grew well under anoxic conditions, by fermentation, or by anaerobic respiration with nitrate, sulfate, ferrihydrite, or manganese oxides as electron acceptors.     

The Difference that Diaspora Makes: Thinking through the Anthropology of Immigrant Education in the United States

In this article, I examine the possibility of a productive dialogue between diaspora studies and the anthropology of immigrant education in the United States. Arguing that their respective views on the nation-state is a key source for their different orientations toward migrant social and cultural worlds, I nevertheless argue that an engagement between these two fields of study will yield more critical understandings of nationalism, the category of the "immigrant," and multiculturalism within both these areas of scholarship.     

Discriminatory public policies and the New York City tuberculosis epidemic, 1975-1993

Discriminatory public policies removed over ten percent of the fire companies in New York City from 1972-1975, mainly from poor communities of color with very old multiple-dwellings. Hundreds of thousands of housing units were destroyed between 1972 and 1978. Patterns of housing overcrowding changed rapidly and social networks were broken. Tuberculosis went into obvious epidemic in 1979. The temporal and geographic dynamics of the TB epidemic is described here as are the lessons for Europe with respect to treatment of marginalized populations.