Critical Care is the online publication of Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Critical Care provides anthropological insights about current events; creating space for public-facing writing, worldly and speculative interpretations of research, and dissemination of work to broader audiences. Critical Care combines the theoretical legacy of medical anthropology with applied, real-world engagements, providing careful responses to urgent matters demanding our attention.
Our editorial team is always looking for innovative and accessible contributions from medical anthropology and neighboring disciplines. Submissions will be reviewed by the MAQ Digital Editor and Editor, and we will work closely with authors on revisions. Multimedia or text submissions can take the form of:
- reflections on fieldwork in progress
- introduction of emergent methodologies or concepts
- medical anthropological perspectives on current events
- amplifying underrepresented voices in medical anthropology and in biomedicine/tech at large
- reports from events, workshops, conference sessions
We also welcome online series ideas, which can resemble a journal special issue or be a collected group of submissions focused around a common theme or topic. A series can be curated by a contributor or by the digital editor.
Please contact the MAQ Digital Editor, Jean Hunleth, with submissions and ideas:
[email protected]
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Still Life with Flowers
Jed Stevenson Many families in Ethiopia, including the one I married into, straddle divides between major ethnic groups and between urban and rural communities. As Ethiopian cities have expanded over the past decades and the balance of power among groups has shifted,…
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Silenced Stories and Fragmented Pasts
Ana Margarida Sousa Santos This flash ethnography tries to capture the heavy, awkward silences that surround the experience of the anti-colonial wars in Portugal. The responsibilities of storytelling and inquiring into this painful past, and the avoidance that accompanies them, are central…
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Empathy: Is It Enough?
Parbati Shrestha This piece of flash ethnography is based on a visit to a research participant, together with Dr. Liana Chase, a friend who is an anthropologist like me, but a foreigner. The visit evoked feelings of being both an outsider and…
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Friendship, Collaboration, and Participation in the Aftermath
Liana Chase This piece relates an encounter with two women friends who have also at times been interlocutors or collaborators in my research on global mental health initiatives in Nepal. It reflects on the ethical complexity of doing fieldwork across gradients of…
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Taking Responsibility for One’s Life
Loretta Lou For over a decade, I have been studying what motivates ordinary people to take environmental responsibility in Hong Kong. Following a period of political unrest that began in 2019, which resulted in a widespread mental health crisis in Hong Kong,…
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Bush Pig Pepper Soup
Jack Jenkins As a White European researcher studying bushmeat-related livelihoods in Sierra Leone, I initially faced challenges gaining access to markets due to traders’ mistrust of outsiders, rooted in their vulnerability to harassment by actors responsible for enforcing wildlife laws and public…