“Dirty Work” in the Context of COVID-19: Sex Workers’ Adaptation in Taiwan

The COVID-19 pandemic primarily affects people in precarious conditions, and sex workers are in a vulnerable position because their occupation is usually considered “dirty work.” Examining the cases in Taiwan, we find that contrary to general imagination, sex workers managed to make their living not only by diversifying their economic activities but also by reorganizing their core services—sex. Moreover, they were able to adapt their relations with peers and clients and gained social capital that empowered them to alleviate negative impacts brought by the pandemic.

Identifying and Partnering Ecoallies through Perceived Natural Environment Futures in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa

Through an experiential, field-based investigative opportunity in the anthropology of climate change, this project introduced college and university students from the United States and Guinea-Bissau through active research encounters. This article examines one part of the larger project, perceptions of natural environment futures via 287 drawings collected by three United States-based undergraduate students from 145 college and university students and alumni (ages 18–53) in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. Guinea-Bissau is a climate change hotspot. This study’s specific focus was on how participants represent natural environmental change over time. Participants were asked to produce two drawings, one depicting their natural environment hundreds of years in the past (pre-European contact) and one representing their natural environment twenty years in the future. Using content analysis, descriptive statistics, Chi-squared test, and McNemar’s test, the study finds that (1a) participants’ depictions of the future contain statistically significantly more pollution, scarcity, deforestation, desertification, and less biodiversity than those in the past, and (1b) these depictions of environmental change hazards highly correlate; (2) participants draw the natural environment statistically significantly more in the past than in the future; (3a) women are statistically significantly more likely than men to draw environmental management in the past and future, and (3b) men are statistically significantly more likely than women to draw commercialization in the past and future; and (4) environmental sciences and teaching professionals are statistically significantly more likely than business professionals to draw environmental management in the past and future. The study found no differences in perceptions of the natural environment based on age, place of birth, or religion. Results indicate that people perceive real differences between their past and future natural environments, especially related to future environmental change hazards. Furthermore, gender and professional differences in participant drawings of environmental management suggest that women and non-business professionals are likely ecoallies. This concept is important from an applied perspective because through this research project, United States- and Guinea-Bissau-based undergraduate students and alumni are able to recognize in each other their shared advocacy capacities, acknowledge the systematic nature of the climate change problem, and establish a common cause around sustainable environmental management.

Marshallese Families’ Reported Experiences of Home-school Connections: An Asset-based Model for Critiquing “Parental Involvement” Frameworks and Understanding Remote Schooling during COVID-19

COVID-19 closed school buildings across the United States, forcing a shift to remote education. How families navigated remote schooling likely varied across class, racial, and ethnic differences, raising questions about how the pandemic might deepen educational inequities. We talked to Marshallese migrant families in a town in the South Central United States about their experiences with remote schooling in Spring 2020. Findings suggest families engaged in school activities at home and were invested in their children’s schooling. They reported numerous inequities tied to technology access and “time-collisions” between familial and educational schedules. They also reveal culturally specific patterns of home-school interactions we call “distributed involvement.” These issues are relevant during in-person as well as remote schooling. Families’ reports suggest problems with normative models of “parental involvement,” revealing ways to make home-school connections more culturally sustaining. A better understanding of reported COVID-19 experiences can inform educational policies and practices in post-pandemic futures.

Applied Medical Anthropology and Structurally Informed Emergency Care in the Evolving Context of COVID-19

This article describes the integration of medical anthropologists as direct members of health care teams within a large, urban teaching hospital as a means to address the role of structural inequality in unequal health care delivery within the context of COVID-19. The pandemic starkly underlined the role structural forces such as food insecurity, housing instability, and unequal access to health insurance play among vulnerable populations that seek health care, particularly within the emergency department (ED). There is a critical need to recognize the reality that disease acquisition is a cultural process. This is a significant limitation of the biomedical model, which often considers disease as a separate entity from the social contexts in which disease is found. Further, a focus on patient-centered care can open the door for critical, clinically applied, medical anthropologists to team with physicians, merging ethnographic methods with health data and the socially constructed realities of patients’ lived experience to build new pathways of care. These pathways may better prepare physicians and health care systems to respond to novel threats like COVID-19, which are rooted in pathophysiological origins but have outcome distributions driven by cultural and structural determinants. To this end, we propose a reconfiguration of dominant biomedical ideologies around disease acquisition and spread by examining our work since 2018, which sees anthropologists embedded both locally and systematically in the creation of anthropologically informed treatment pathways for socially complex disease states like HIV, Hepatitis C, and Opioid Use Disorder (Henderson 2018). Understanding how these socially complex diseases concentrate and interact in populations is a potential opportunity to model solutions for other widespread and complex health care crises, including COVID-19.

At the Intersection of Harm Reduction and COVID-19: The Role of Anthropologists during and Post-Pandemic

Harm reduction is a public health approach that emphasizes reducing the negative effects of drug use rather than eliminating it. It has been practiced for decades; however, the COVID-19 pandemic poses new challenges for people who use drugs (PWUD) and harm reduction providers. In the United States, public health recommendations to curb the pandemic are complicating harm reduction efforts. Harm reduction programs are rethinking how they engage with PWUD to comply with these recommendations while also providing essential services. In this article, we draw on academic literature, news articles, and information distributed by harm reduction programs to discuss issues currently faced by PWUD and harm reduction providers across the country. This discussion focuses on policy changes and programming adaptations related to three harm reduction interventions—syringe services programs, overdose prevention, and medications for opioid use disorder—that have emerged or gained traction during the pandemic. We argue that anthropologists should play a key role in addressing the obstacles and opportunities for harm reduction in the United States during and post-pandemic. Ethnographic research can generate important knowledge of how pandemic-related service and policy changes are localized by providers and experienced by PWUD and uncover how race, class, and gender may shape access to and experiences with modified harm reduction services. Applied anthropologists also have an important role in collaborating with harm reduction programs to ensure that the voices of marginalized individuals are not ignored as policy and programming changes take place during and after the pandemic.

“Whoever Dies, Dies”: A Pedagogical Model forUnderstanding the COVID-19 Outbreak in United States Prisons

A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of the United States prison population, or five times the rate found in the general population, had been infected. Limited social distancing and difficult to implement preventative measures helped to spread COVID-19 in prisons, while many incarcerated individuals felt that government policy prevented their ability to self-care. These feelings of alienation reflect a history of policy that links disease to deviance and social death. Based on the written self-reflections of anthropology students in Wisconsin prisons, this article outlines an ethnographic and pedagogical model for analyzing pandemic policy. Students learned to relate anthropological terminology to their critiques of policy and revealed how prisoners adapted to feelings of invisibility and hopelessness during a pandemic.

Re-imagining Corporate Community Involvement during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Pharmaceutical Companies in Guangdong Province, China

In this paper, we examine the participation of commercial firms in the fight against COVID-19 through the lens of Corporate Community Involvement (CCI). To display CCI as part of ethical and responsible corporate behavior, CCI studies often use a business-centered approach while paying less attention to the role of the state. Based on the stories of some pharmaceutical companies in Guangdong province joining China’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, we argue that the state may play a crucial role in shaping CCI activities and in making companies partner with the government under a state of emergency. We also point out that it is likely for these companies to translate their involvement in solving public health problems into profit-seeking opportunities. As such, this paper contributes to CCI studies by introducing a state-led approach and suggesting a form of “state-led and market-driven” CCI. Moreover, this study provides fresh information about the effects of corporations on social life and the practice of socially responsible corporate behavior in a state of public health emergency to anthropologists in the new subfields of anthropology of corporate social responsibility and anthropology of business corporations.

Through the Eyes on the Ground: Re-positioning Rural Agrarian Actors as Leaders in the Local Food Movement during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Despite Costa Rica’s efforts to promote international tourism, the economy continues to struggle with unprecedented unemployment rates due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is especially concerning for tourism-dependent regions, such as the Monteverde Zone, where most residents have abandoned land-based livelihoods in favor of tourism. This study uses photovoice to illustrate the ways that small-scale food producers have adapted to the unique challenges of the COVID-19 global pandemic in a region that was already experiencing a loss of agrarian identity. Overall, local food producers have been affected by the diminished tourism economy through the closing of restaurants and the decrease in tourists, causing them to experience crop loss. Food producers have adapted to the economic impacts of the pandemic by re-investing their efforts into a local economy. As part of this shifting strategy, some food producers have begun to expand, diversify, and embrace an approach to growing food that is in line with building more resilient models of food production and engaging with their clients in different ways. Using community-based participatory methods, this study illustrates how food producers have adapted to changes brought on by the pandemic, re-positioning some of these rural agrarian actors as prominent figures in the local food movement.

Maasai Girls’ Experiences of Ukimwi ni Homa (AIDS Is a Fever): Idioms of Vulnerability and HIV Risk in East Africa

There have been enormous strides in response to the AIDS epidemic in the past decades; however, adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) remain at high risk for new HIV infection throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Recognizing this continued discrepancy, I call for more attention to girls’ perceptions of vulnerabilities by revisiting an ethnographic study of HIV risk carried out in 2004 in a rural community in Kenya. My analysis situates Maasai AGYW perceptions and understandings of HIV risk as a culturally constructed idiom of distress: “Ukimwi ni Homa” (AIDS is a fever). I examine the emic perspectives of HIV vulnerability and the association of sexual relationships within the context of economic precarity. Findings demonstrate how references to fevers expressed feelings of helplessness, which increased indifference to HIV risk. This indifference led AGYW to prioritize imminent economic needs over long-term effects of a viral infection that they perceived as inevitable. Critically reflecting on AGYW understandings of their own risk perceptions can influence effective HIV intervention design. My conclusions support the need for tailoring combination prevention approaches to address perceived vulnerabilities within populations. Such perspectives add valuable insights to studies rooted in cultural constructions of illness perspective.