Living with Food Allergies: The Recalibratory Body

As a growing global public health concern, an increasing proportion of the UK’s population must live with and manage the chronic disease of food allergies. Through a multi-method approach of autoethnography, cognitive mapping, and interviewing, this research investigates what matters to the bodily experience of people living with food allergies. I work with the concepts of embodiment and affect to delineate a theorisation of the allergic body as recalibratory and argue that the adrenaline auto-injector (AAI)—the lifesaving medication prescribed to individuals with severe food allergies—is integral to the allergic recalibratory body. I demonstrate the multiple, dynamic ways in which those living with food allergies “affectively relate” to the AAI and what contributes to this. An account of the body as recalibratory is advanced to account for the dynamicism of the body’s affective relations. The recalibratory body becomes a valuable tool for understanding the ways that macro-issues of AAI production shortages and the tragic occurrence of allergy fatalities as well as micro-level everyday experiences matter to those living with food allergies. The essay concludes by exploring how the concept of recalibration can expand beyond allergic bodies to understand what the body—any body—can be, do, and mean.

Applications of Biopower to NGO-Donor Partnerships for HIV Prevention in Jordan

NGOs serving marginalized groups in the developing world often lie under heavy donor influence, so they must toe the line between compliance with and resistance against their funders to best promote the well-being of their beneficiaries. Jordanian health NGOs have grappled with these power dynamics since the 1990s when donor countries began pouring money into Jordan's private sector as part of structural adjustment. I use ethnographic data from a Jordanian HIV prevention NGO to analyze how Foucault’s (1978) theory of biopower applies to international NGO-donor relationships. I argue that the international aid chain transforms NGO staff and the populations they serve into biological subjects expected to adhere to norms set by American and European donors. Biopower manifests differently depending on donor approaches to project implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.

School Without Racism? How White Teachers in Germany Practice Anti-Racialism

This qualitative study investigates how white teachers at a German Catholic comprehensive school conceptualize issues of “race” and racism in the context of being a “School without Racism – School with Courage” (SOR-SMC). By collecting signatures and exhibiting yearly projects, more than 3,300 schools in Germany brand their school to be “without racism”. I found the branding of my researched school to be a form of “anti-racialism” that opposed “race” and racism as concepts but did not tackle any underlying racist structures (Goldberg 2009, 10). The teachers I interviewed took the SOR-SMC branding for granted and assumed that the school was racism-free. They thereby engaged in silent racism and reproduced racist connotations and structures without challenging them (Trepagnier 2001). Being anti -racist is not accomplished by declaring a school as racism-free. Instead, white teachers need to understand that anti-racism involves a deeper engagement with the structures that keep “racial” inequality in place (Goldberg 2009, 10).

“We Become Capable of Handling Everything”: Gender and Gulf Migration in Kerala, South India

Women have a uniquely gendered experience with worker migration from Kerala, South India to the Gulf, a phenomenon which touches virtually every household in this state. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kerala, this article examines the intersections of gender and migration; I argue that migration fuels significant social change in terms of gender expectations and the role of women as economic agents. My fieldwork reveals that women work abroad due to personal circumstances and to conform to local ideas about modernity. Migrants’ wives also experience increased autonomy in their daily lives. These two categories of women, migrant women and the wives of male migrants, are attuned to others’ perceptions of their roles vis-à-vis migration. Despite occasional negative feedback, women report that they are empowered by worker migration. This project builds on scholarship examining the status of women in Kerala (Eapen and Kodoth 2003), the experiences of migrant spouses (Osella 2016), and female Christian nurses’ Gulf migration (Percot 2006). I extend this work by analyzing the personal narratives of individual women who work in the Gulf, head their own households in Kerala, and experience stigmatization because of emigration. Finally, I explored the broader implications of migration for the lifestyles and aspirations of women in Kerala.

Implementation of Personalized Learning in a New Charter School

Personalized Learning (PL) is an educational approach that tailors instruction to the academic needs of each student. Most research on PL focuses on student achievement, technology, and implementation challenges. Little research has been conducted on the actual practices that teachers use to personalize instruction and on students’ and teachers’ feelings about being in a school that implements PL. I conducted a case study at a recently opened rural elementary charter school in the southern United States, which was implementing PL schoolwide. After attending a professional development workshop on PL hosted by the State Department of Education, I conducted classroom observations in a first-grade and a fifth/sixth-grade classroom. I interviewed the teachers of these classes, the school principal, and three students. Three themes emerged from my analysis of this material, relating to student engagement, teacher behaviors and dispositions, and student outcomes. Overall, I concluded that PL is not a quick or easy transition for a school to make, nor does it involve just changing the curriculum to individualize instruction for students. Personalized Learning requires an adaption of teacher and student mindsets and the development of a school culture that fosters both academic and social-emotional growth among the students.

Cycling in(to) Society: Integration and Social Mobility in Copenhagen

Integration and the processes involved are increasingly becoming more important in anthropological studies as the world is globalising. However, individual experiences of migrants, especially those of women, are often not considered in academic research. Therefore, I aim to include personal experiences of migrant women by studying those in the context of integration in Copenhagen. I conducted fieldwork over two months in the city of Copenhagen through participant observation in a cycling course created by the Red Cross, along with several informal interviews and five in-depth interviews with key informants. This article examines how integration is perceived, whether intersecting physical and social mobility can aid integration, and what impact gender has on these processes. Integration in this context is argued to be a form of social mobility, one that describes a forward movement into society. The process of integration for the women considered in this research is aided by cycling, as moving through the city physically promotes social mobility. Cyclists learn to navigate both the social and physical environment around them, and they gain access to services as well as opportunities in the labour market.

“Hey there, Brian”: Voicing Mormon Cosmopolitanism in a College Apartment

In this paper, I discuss a humorous form of voicing called Brian Voice (BV) used by myself and my former roommates, all of whom are students at Brigham Young University and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bringing the tools and methods of linguistic anthropology together with the anthropology of morality (especially ordinary ethics), I demonstrate the ways in which my roommates and I use this voicing to simultaneously inhabit the two seemingly contradictory identities of, on the one hand, a reverent Mormon and, on the other, a modern cosmopolitan. BV facilitates this identity by enabling speakers to voice both irreverence and anti- cosmopolitanism without incurring the normal social consequences associated with those stances. I contend that BV accomplishes this mitigation of negative consequences through indexing ridiculousness and absurdity. By situating BV within its Mormon context, I demonstrate that in distancing speakers from both hyper-reverence and irreverence, BV entails a practical engagement with the ethics, principles, and ideals of both Mormon morality and cosmopolitan morality, thus allowing speakers to inhabit a simultaneously Mormon and cosmopolitan self.

The Social Functions of College Drinking: Pregaming, Priming, and Protecting the Liminoid Experience

The Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study has concluded that, on average, one in three college students abuses alcohol regularly. However, while highlighting potential risks, academic literature largely neglects the social functions students derive from consuming alcohol. College represents an important milestone in an individual’s life and is characterized by what Turner (1969) called liminoid experiences, which involve a temporary suspension of social status, at bars, clubs, concerts, festivals, and college parties, often closely connected to alcohol consumption. This paper explores how women students’ practice of “pregaming,” that is, drinking alcohol in smaller groups before attending a social event such as a party, enables individuals to achieve the liminoid state while also providing opportunities to resist potential negative consequences of intoxication. College women use pregaming to build a support network with close friends, enabling them to ensure their physical safety. Beyond the integrity of their bodies, women also ensure that their actions during the liminoid experience of a college party are consistent with ideas they have of their personal identity. Although they temporarily suspend their social and personal identities during college parties, women prevent unwanted permanent changes of their sense of self by holding each other accountable to rules they establish during the pregame.

The Gendered Construction of Border-Crossing in Canada: Immigrant and Indigenous Women’s Life Histories in the Tracks of Gloria Anzaldúa

Our paper offers a new direction for Canadian scholarship on women and border studies by contextualizing women border- crossers within Anzaldúa’s conocimiento model. Based on the narratives of six women border-crossers in Canada, we argue that citizenship is a form of regulatory state-power where “belonging” is bureaucratically defined. For these women, belonging to a homeland is embodied in the interplay between Anzaldúa’s facultad and shadowbeast—between the agency of spirituality and the vagaries of political subjectivity. They crossed the border into Canada, and as a result, the whole of Canada became a borderzone within which they negotiated nepantla (the experience of being “in-between” culture and identity categories). We demonstrate how applying Anzaldúa’s framework to the Canadian context yields new insights into secularism, citizenships, multiculturalism, and belonging.

Upscaling Downtown: Interpersonal Dynamics of Nightlife Revelers in Geneva, New York

Bars have long been recognized as the intersection of a city’s culture and commerce. They provide opportunities for social interaction, contain a multitude of local memories, and serve as sources of identity. The American Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Stonewall riots all developed out of local bars. So, what does it mean when the character of bars in a neighborhood begins to change? How do these changes to commercial spaces affect the social fabric of a city? Using a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I explore the upscaling of the downtown bar scene in Geneva, New York to unpack what these commercial changes mean for the disparate groups that frequent the downtown space. I argue that instead of simply diversifying the types of businesses available to consumers in Geneva, this development has altered the very character and social fabric of downtown. Rather than creating an integrated and cohesive nightlife scene in which disparate groups come together in shared space and time, this development manifests in the fragmentation of the downtown scene in new ways that increase the segregation of people in social space.