K A Mason
Biographic Data
| ID | 67089 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K A Mason |
| GIVEN NAMES | K A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mason |
| SIGNATURE | MASON K A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1628-4207 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
It’s not where we are, it’s who we’re near
Cyberspatial agency
In this article, we show how the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated experimentation with gender expression via a process that we call cyberspatial agency . During the pandemic in the United States, millions of people were simultaneously physically isolated from one another while also experiencing an unprecedented level of digital hyper-connectedness. In avoiding the public gaze while also having the ability to carefully curate the online communities w…
Assembling vaccine perspectives
“You would think she would hug me”
Engaging Immigrant Women in Online Journaling as a Mode of Research and Psychosocial Support
Online journaling is a methodological tool that has also been shown to have therapeutic benefits for some populations. However, the potential value - and limitations - of online journaling within immigrant communities remain underexplored. We present a proof-of-concept analysis exploring the efficacy and feasibility of engaging immigrant women in an online journaling project. We report on a study that used online journaling as an approach to expl…
Infertile Environments
What does the wide-scale environmental contamination poisoning China's water, air, and food mean for our understandings of science, kinship, and reproduction in the twenty-first century? In this slim monograph, University of Arizona anthropologist Janelle Lamoreaux combines traditional laboratory ethnography with extensive reading of scientific and popular literature to argue that a distinctively Chinese variety of “epigenetics” might be able to …
I want the world back
Psychology has tended to conceptualize loneliness as a lack of intimate and social relationships. This analysis draws on the journal entries of 100 participants in the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP; a research study and online journaling platform that invited participants to chronicle their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic) to illustrate a more foundational sense of loneliness as a lack of bodily attunement, interaction, and intersecti…
Introduction
Seesaw Precarity
Our sacrifices were in vain
For the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, most urban Chinese displayed a high level of "willing compliance" with strict pandemic control measures. This willing compliance, however, collapsed in late 2022, as the state's promises of personal safety and financial well-being became harder to keep, and prolonged interruptions to everyday life due to pandemic control continued through a third year. People's trust in the competence and…
Introduction
In this article, we introduce the SSM-MH Special Issue “Journaling and Mental Health during COVID-19: Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project,” which presents findings from the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP). PJP is an online journaling platform and mixed-methods research study created in May 2020 to provide ordinary people around the world an opportunity to chronicle the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in their lives—for themselves and …
New life, new feelings of loss
In this article we analyze the longitudinal journals of 32 Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) participants who were pregnant, planned a pregnancy, or gave birth between January 2020 and July 2021. Employing a grounded theory approach, we coded journals in NVivo for emerging themes related to the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on perinatal experiences in North America and Europe. In the paper we first provide some brief background on perinatal …
Why they willingly complied
Blenders, Hammers, and Knives
Intrusive thoughts" are common symptoms of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders such as postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder. These thoughts can include horrific flashes of violence involving one's baby and frequently lead to shame and fear on the mother's part, but rarely result in real-world violence. Clinicians tend to downplay the importance of these images' content and calm women by reminding them that they will not act on their impulses…
Postpartum Maternal Tethering
This article proposes a new way of conceptualizing the ethical relationship between postpartum mothers and their newborn babies. I suggest that the intertwinement of mother and baby - and the tensions that this intertwinement produces - do not disappear with birth, but rather persist throughout the postpartum period in the form of postpartum maternal tethering . I draw upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork and training in the US and China to…
Virulent Zones
Reviewed by: Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter by Lyle Fearnley Katherine A. Mason Lyle Fearnley. Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 288 pp. In this exceptionally timely ethnography of avian husbandry and virological sciences in China, Lyle Fearnley answers a question that the catastrophic events of the past 14 months hav…
Epidemiologizing Culture
Drawing on 18 months of participation on an epidemiological research team and close analysis of in-depth interviews the team conducted with 30 Chinese immigrants to New York City, this article traces a process I call epidemiologizing culture. In producing qualitative interview data from Chinese immigrants at risk for HIV, team members smoothed over individual variation to extract elements thought to be relevant to population-level experiences of …
Did China’s Public Health Reforms Leave It Prepared for Covid-19
China faced the arrival of COVID-19 armed with new infrastructure, tools, and personnel that it had developed as part of a nationwide overhaul of its public health system in the wake of the 2003 SARS epidemic. The country learned two major lessons from SARS: it needed to increase its scientific professionalism and transparency, and it needed to build upon the successes of its authoritarian disease control capabilities. These two lessons were on f…
Everyday Disruptions and Jewish Dilemmas
Everyday Disruptions and Jewish Dilemmas:Preliminary Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project Sarah S. Willen (bio), Sebastian Wogenstein (bio), and Katherine A. Mason (bio) I went to visit my grandma for my birthday but had to keep socially distanced, which was heartbreaking. . . . I don't know what's inside my own body. Can I kill someone if I hug them? This is how a newly minted college graduate, and Jewish granddaughter, from the US Midw…
When the Ghosts Live in the Nursery
In Luzhou, China, where grandmothers often serve as primary caregivers for infants, the past and the future haunt new mothers suffering from postpartum depression. In this article, I draw upon longitudinal interviews conducted with 10 families in Luzhou as part of a larger multisited ethnography of postpartum depression and anxiety. I argue that the grandmother-mother-baby triad model of infant care in interior urban China accentuates the pain of…
Chrono-Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
This article addresses the management and control of time in contemporary urban China. It traces how competing claims to, and experiences of, time as a limited resource shape the terms of moral engagement among middle-class women, their families, their employers, and their friends. Drawing upon two distinct periods of fieldwork among middle-class families in urban China between 2007 and 2017, I show how Chinese subjects balance private, public, a…
Increasing the perceived malleability of gender bias using a modified Video Intervention for Diversity in STEM (Vids)
Scholars are increasingly responding to calls for interventions to address persistent gender disparities in the sciences. Yet, interventions that emphasize the pervasiveness of bias may inadvertently damage efficacy to confront sexism by creating the perception that bias is immutable. We examined this possibility in the context of a successful bias literacy program, Video Interventions for Diversity in STEM (VIDS; Moss-Racusin et al., in press). …
Quantitative care
Academic quantitative population health scientists (AQPHS) in the United States care for populations with an ostensibly apolitical set of quantitative methods. This quantitative care has three interconnected components: AQPHS care about populations, they care for their data sets and models, and they care with these models' outputs. In the process their ideals of objectivity compete with, and enable, a moral ideal of political advocacy. Slipping b…
Fungible Life
Nearly 20 years after Flexible Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1999) remade the way that anthropologists think about transnational networks—and what it means to be ‘Chinese’ in a globalised wor
Teaching "Stratified Reproduction" in Practice
Mobile Migrants, Mobile Germs
Shenzhen, a city located on the border between Mainland China and Hong Kong, is populated primarily by internal Chinese migrants. After the 2003 SARS epidemic, the pressure in Shenzhen to contain infectious disease has been considerable. By engaging with issues of global biosecurity, migration and citizenship, and intersubjectivity in medicine, I argue that in their attempts to prevent another SARS and protect their own subject positions as moder…
To Your Health! Toasting, Intoxication and Gendered Critique among Banqueting Women
Women entered government public health institutions in China in large numbers in the 2000s, thanks to a national professionalization project prioritizing meritocratic recruitment. To their disappointment, one of the consequences of their new professional involvement was that they were expected to drink heavily alongside men at frequent guanxi-building banquets. They responded by redefining heavy alcohol consumption as a morally deficient act that…
Why they willingly complied
When the Ghosts Live in the Nursery
In Luzhou, China, where grandmothers often serve as primary caregivers for infants, the past and the future haunt new mothers suffering from postpartum depression. In this article, I draw upon longitudinal interviews conducted with 10 families in Luzhou as part of a larger multisited ethnography of postpartum depression and anxiety. I argue that the grandmother-mother-baby triad model of infant care in interior urban China accentuates the pain of…
Quantitative care
Academic quantitative population health scientists (AQPHS) in the United States care for populations with an ostensibly apolitical set of quantitative methods. This quantitative care has three interconnected components: AQPHS care about populations, they care for their data sets and models, and they care with these models' outputs. In the process their ideals of objectivity compete with, and enable, a moral ideal of political advocacy. Slipping b…
Asian flus in ethnographic and political context
This collection highlights some of the social, cultural, political and economic factors that must be considered in developing a biosocial approach to pandemic influenza control and prevention. To date, most discussions of the current spread of avian influenza and a predicted human influenza pandemic have lacked rigorous analysis of the local contexts in which flus arise and in which the effects of a pandemic would most strongly be felt. Such loca…
I want the world back
Psychology has tended to conceptualize loneliness as a lack of intimate and social relationships. This analysis draws on the journal entries of 100 participants in the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP; a research study and online journaling platform that invited participants to chronicle their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic) to illustrate a more foundational sense of loneliness as a lack of bodily attunement, interaction, and intersecti…
H1N1 Is Not a Chinese Virus
Chrono-Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
This article addresses the management and control of time in contemporary urban China. It traces how competing claims to, and experiences of, time as a limited resource shape the terms of moral engagement among middle-class women, their families, their employers, and their friends. Drawing upon two distinct periods of fieldwork among middle-class families in urban China between 2007 and 2017, I show how Chinese subjects balance private, public, a…
Our sacrifices were in vain
For the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, most urban Chinese displayed a high level of "willing compliance" with strict pandemic control measures. This willing compliance, however, collapsed in late 2022, as the state's promises of personal safety and financial well-being became harder to keep, and prolonged interruptions to everyday life due to pandemic control continued through a third year. People's trust in the competence and…
Epidemiologizing Culture
Drawing on 18 months of participation on an epidemiological research team and close analysis of in-depth interviews the team conducted with 30 Chinese immigrants to New York City, this article traces a process I call epidemiologizing culture. In producing qualitative interview data from Chinese immigrants at risk for HIV, team members smoothed over individual variation to extract elements thought to be relevant to population-level experiences of …
Seesaw Precarity
Cyberspatial agency
In this article, we show how the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated experimentation with gender expression via a process that we call cyberspatial agency . During the pandemic in the United States, millions of people were simultaneously physically isolated from one another while also experiencing an unprecedented level of digital hyper-connectedness. In avoiding the public gaze while also having the ability to carefully curate the online communities w…
Blenders, Hammers, and Knives
Intrusive thoughts" are common symptoms of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders such as postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder. These thoughts can include horrific flashes of violence involving one's baby and frequently lead to shame and fear on the mother's part, but rarely result in real-world violence. Clinicians tend to downplay the importance of these images' content and calm women by reminding them that they will not act on their impulses…
Increasing the perceived malleability of gender bias using a modified Video Intervention for Diversity in STEM (Vids)
Scholars are increasingly responding to calls for interventions to address persistent gender disparities in the sciences. Yet, interventions that emphasize the pervasiveness of bias may inadvertently damage efficacy to confront sexism by creating the perception that bias is immutable. We examined this possibility in the context of a successful bias literacy program, Video Interventions for Diversity in STEM (VIDS; Moss-Racusin et al., in press). …
The correct secret
In this article I argue that the global biosecurity project that arose out of the events of the SARS epidemic of 2003 created a new balance of secrecy and transparency within the public health arm of the Chinese state. In an effort to meet national and international demands for greater transparency in support of a "common good," local public health officials engaged in what I call hypertransparency. This hypertransparency took two forms: the real…
Asian flus in ethnographic and political context
This collection highlights some of the social, cultural, political and economic factors that must be considered in developing a biosocial approach to pandemic influenza control and prevention. To date, most discussions of the current spread of avian influenza and a predicted human influenza pandemic have lacked rigorous analysis of the local contexts in which flus arise and in which the effects of a pandemic would most strongly be felt. Such loca…
Becoming Modern after Sars. Battling the H1N1 Pandemic and the Politics of Backwardness in China′s Pearl River Delta
This article traces the early evolution of the H1N1 pandemic as it played out in China′s Pearl River Delta in the spring and summer of 2009, as local public health professionals there tried to contain the virus when their American counterparts did not do so. My informants′ difficulties in escaping their perceived status as a source, rather than a victim, of dangerous viruses; their use of disease control tactics that were portrayed abroad as exce…
A Comparison of HIV Infection and Related Risks Among Male Sex Workers in Different Venues in Shenzhen, China
Mobile Migrants, Mobile Germs
Shenzhen, a city located on the border between Mainland China and Hong Kong, is populated primarily by internal Chinese migrants. After the 2003 SARS epidemic, the pressure in Shenzhen to contain infectious disease has been considerable. By engaging with issues of global biosecurity, migration and citizenship, and intersubjectivity in medicine, I argue that in their attempts to prevent another SARS and protect their own subject positions as moder…
To Your Health! Toasting, Intoxication and Gendered Critique among Banqueting Women
Women entered government public health institutions in China in large numbers in the 2000s, thanks to a national professionalization project prioritizing meritocratic recruitment. To their disappointment, one of the consequences of their new professional involvement was that they were expected to drink heavily alongside men at frequent guanxi-building banquets. They responded by redefining heavy alcohol consumption as a morally deficient act that…
H1N1 Is Not a Chinese Virus
The correct secret
In this article I argue that the global biosecurity project that arose out of the events of the SARS epidemic of 2003 created a new balance of secrecy and transparency within the public health arm of the Chinese state. In an effort to meet national and international demands for greater transparency in support of a "common good," local public health officials engaged in what I call hypertransparency. This hypertransparency took two forms: the real…
Teaching "Stratified Reproduction" in Practice
Increasing the perceived malleability of gender bias using a modified Video Intervention for Diversity in STEM (Vids)
Scholars are increasingly responding to calls for interventions to address persistent gender disparities in the sciences. Yet, interventions that emphasize the pervasiveness of bias may inadvertently damage efficacy to confront sexism by creating the perception that bias is immutable. We examined this possibility in the context of a successful bias literacy program, Video Interventions for Diversity in STEM (VIDS; Moss-Racusin et al., in press). …
Quantitative care
Academic quantitative population health scientists (AQPHS) in the United States care for populations with an ostensibly apolitical set of quantitative methods. This quantitative care has three interconnected components: AQPHS care about populations, they care for their data sets and models, and they care with these models' outputs. In the process their ideals of objectivity compete with, and enable, a moral ideal of political advocacy. Slipping b…
Fungible Life
Nearly 20 years after Flexible Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1999) remade the way that anthropologists think about transnational networks—and what it means to be ‘Chinese’ in a globalised wor
Did China’s Public Health Reforms Leave It Prepared for Covid-19
China faced the arrival of COVID-19 armed with new infrastructure, tools, and personnel that it had developed as part of a nationwide overhaul of its public health system in the wake of the 2003 SARS epidemic. The country learned two major lessons from SARS: it needed to increase its scientific professionalism and transparency, and it needed to build upon the successes of its authoritarian disease control capabilities. These two lessons were on f…
Everyday Disruptions and Jewish Dilemmas
Everyday Disruptions and Jewish Dilemmas:Preliminary Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project Sarah S. Willen (bio), Sebastian Wogenstein (bio), and Katherine A. Mason (bio) I went to visit my grandma for my birthday but had to keep socially distanced, which was heartbreaking. . . . I don't know what's inside my own body. Can I kill someone if I hug them? This is how a newly minted college graduate, and Jewish granddaughter, from the US Midw…
When the Ghosts Live in the Nursery
In Luzhou, China, where grandmothers often serve as primary caregivers for infants, the past and the future haunt new mothers suffering from postpartum depression. In this article, I draw upon longitudinal interviews conducted with 10 families in Luzhou as part of a larger multisited ethnography of postpartum depression and anxiety. I argue that the grandmother-mother-baby triad model of infant care in interior urban China accentuates the pain of…
Chrono-Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
This article addresses the management and control of time in contemporary urban China. It traces how competing claims to, and experiences of, time as a limited resource shape the terms of moral engagement among middle-class women, their families, their employers, and their friends. Drawing upon two distinct periods of fieldwork among middle-class families in urban China between 2007 and 2017, I show how Chinese subjects balance private, public, a…
Postpartum Maternal Tethering
This article proposes a new way of conceptualizing the ethical relationship between postpartum mothers and their newborn babies. I suggest that the intertwinement of mother and baby - and the tensions that this intertwinement produces - do not disappear with birth, but rather persist throughout the postpartum period in the form of postpartum maternal tethering . I draw upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork and training in the US and China to…
Virulent Zones
Reviewed by: Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter by Lyle Fearnley Katherine A. Mason Lyle Fearnley. Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 288 pp. In this exceptionally timely ethnography of avian husbandry and virological sciences in China, Lyle Fearnley answers a question that the catastrophic events of the past 14 months hav…
Epidemiologizing Culture
Drawing on 18 months of participation on an epidemiological research team and close analysis of in-depth interviews the team conducted with 30 Chinese immigrants to New York City, this article traces a process I call epidemiologizing culture. In producing qualitative interview data from Chinese immigrants at risk for HIV, team members smoothed over individual variation to extract elements thought to be relevant to population-level experiences of …
Introduction
In this article, we introduce the SSM-MH Special Issue “Journaling and Mental Health during COVID-19: Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project,” which presents findings from the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP). PJP is an online journaling platform and mixed-methods research study created in May 2020 to provide ordinary people around the world an opportunity to chronicle the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in their lives—for themselves and …
New life, new feelings of loss
In this article we analyze the longitudinal journals of 32 Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) participants who were pregnant, planned a pregnancy, or gave birth between January 2020 and July 2021. Employing a grounded theory approach, we coded journals in NVivo for emerging themes related to the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on perinatal experiences in North America and Europe. In the paper we first provide some brief background on perinatal …
Why they willingly complied
Blenders, Hammers, and Knives
Intrusive thoughts" are common symptoms of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders such as postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder. These thoughts can include horrific flashes of violence involving one's baby and frequently lead to shame and fear on the mother's part, but rarely result in real-world violence. Clinicians tend to downplay the importance of these images' content and calm women by reminding them that they will not act on their impulses…
Our sacrifices were in vain
For the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, most urban Chinese displayed a high level of "willing compliance" with strict pandemic control measures. This willing compliance, however, collapsed in late 2022, as the state's promises of personal safety and financial well-being became harder to keep, and prolonged interruptions to everyday life due to pandemic control continued through a third year. People's trust in the competence and…
Assembling vaccine perspectives
“You would think she would hug me”
Medicine (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (15 works) · China (14 works) · Pandemic (13 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Law (8 works) · Disease (7 works)