Alex Nading
Biographic Data
| ID | 95286 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Nading |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Nading |
| SIGNATURE | NADING A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1731-321X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 297 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Comfort zones
First coined by American indoor climate engineers in the 1920s, the concept of the comfort zone has since gained traction beyond buildings and houses, in domains as varied as psychology, business management and education. This paper provides a genealogy of the term, tracing its roots in classical political economic theory. It situates comfort zones in a world ecology, from the domestic sphere to the farm, from the office to the factory floor. Tod…
Disposability, social security, and the facts of work in Nicaragua's sugarcane zone
This article explores the instability of facts surrounding former sugarcane workers in Nicaragua with Chronic Kidney Disease of Non-Traditional Causes (CKDnt). CKDnt is a progressive disease that has been linked, albeit inconclusively, to working conditions in sugarcane plantations and other extreme environments. It emerged in the early twenty-first century, at a time when the social and political value of agricultural labor in Nicaragua and acro…
The Plantation as Hotspot
Central American sugarcane plantations have become 'hotspots' of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Although CKD is frequently caused by diabetes or hypertension, most sugarcane plantation workers who have it have no history of either condition. They are among a growing number of people worldwide afflicted by chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes (CKDnt). The 'hotspot' concept resonates with those who study CKDnt in part because work-related…
Introduction
When Medical Anthropology Quarterly's editorial board met during 2021 and 2022, a consistent theme of its collective work was rethinking how the journal communicates its aims and commitments to the communities of practice that contribute to it. Our shared goal was to query the reproduction of power in the field of medical anthropology. Ideas for doing this included the publication of revised guidance for authors and peer reviewers focused on crea…
Playing ethnographically living well together
How can we live well together? The question is critical for cities, where "wicked problems" like failing infrastructure, natural and industrial disaster, and epidemic disease pose threats to diverse forms of life. Because such problems are by definition world-shattering, it is notoriously difficult for city-dwellers to agree on how to think about them, much less overcome them. This essay sketches a collaborative ethnographic approach for co-conce…
The end of the cooperative model (as we knew it)
Cooperatives produce commons, but how they do so-and what kinds of commons they produce-cannot be known in advance. Two cooperatives in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua illustrate how distinct cooperative assemblages actually take shape through particular patterns of commoning. First, members of a women's sewing cooperative called the Fair Trade Zone refuse open-membership. Claiming kinship as the logic of their membership, they describe the cooperative…
Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome
The human microbiome is an important emergent area of cross, multi and transdisciplinary study. The complexity of this topic leads to conflicting narratives and regulatory challenges. It raises questions about the benefits of its commercialisation and drives debates about alternative models for engaging with its publics, patients and other potential beneficiaries. The social sciences and the humanities have begun to explore the microbiome as an o…
State of Health
Reviewed by: State of Health: Pleasure and Politics in Venezuelan Health Care under Chavez by Amy Cooper Alex Nading Amy Cooper. State of Health: Pleasure and Politics in Venezuelan Health Care under Chavez. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. x + 206 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-520-29929-0). In State of Health, anthropologist Amy Cooper takes readers back to a time in the not-so-distant past, when the government of Hugo Chávez enacted a se…
Living in a Toxic World
While the proliferation of industrial toxic substances over the past century has had drastic environmental and bodily effects, conventional methods of measuring and mitigating those effects continue to produce uncertainty. The project of living in a toxic world entails ethical, technical, and aesthetic efforts to understand toxicity as a contingent encounter among beings, systems, and things, rather than as a fundamental characteristic of particu…
Medical Anthropology in the Time of Covid-19
Ethnography in a grievance
This essay discusses documentation as a critical practice that links ethnography and activism. It describes the efforts of Nicaraguan sugarcane workers to use World Bank mediation and corporate social responsibility 'mechanisms' to call attention to the health and environmental problems that attend plantation production. Documentation becomes essential to activism when the lines of cause and effect that link bodily conditions to ecological condit…
Introduction
This introductory article maps out the parameters of an emerging field of medical anthropology, human animal health, and its potential for reorienting the discipline. Ethnographic explorations of how animals are implicated in health, well-being, and pathogenicity allow us to revisit theorizations of central topics in medical anthropology, notably ecology, biopolitics, and care. Meanwhile, the conditions of the Anthropocene force us to develop new…
Zopilotes, Alacranes, y Hormigas (Vultures, Scorpions, and Ants)
While scholars frequently frame conflicts over urban waste in terms of a politics of infrastructure, this article frames such conflicts in terms of a politics of organization. In 2008, self‐employed recyclers in and around Managua, Nicaragua blockaded local dumps in an effort to secure rights to scavenge for resellable material. Over the course of this “garbage crisis”, a material and semiotic entanglement of human labor organization with animal …
Social Justice as Epidemic Control
In this article, we draw on two cases-one of the reproductive justice movements in the wake of the Latin American Zika epidemic, and one of an environmental justice movements spurred by an epidemic of chronic kidney disease among sugarcane workers-to argue for social justice as an "elastic" technology of epidemic control. In its compressed form, social justice simply refers to the fair distribution of medical goods. In its expanded form, it empha…
Global health from the outside
Orientation and Crafted Bureaucracy
This article explores how food-safety inspectors (hygienistas) in Nicaragua monitor and certify foodservice workers and facilities. While inspectors are well versed in sanitary law, they describe their job not as law enforcement but as "orientation." Orientation integrates state regulation with interpersonal exchanges of gifts and jokes, which reinforce unwritten social norms. Such interpersonal exchanges are not simply signs of corruption or gov…
Local Biologies, Leaky Things, and the Chemical Infrastructure of Global Health
This article examines how two chemical substances are woven into the infrastructure of global health as well as into the social lives of health workers in urban Nicaragua. One chemical is temephos, an organophosphate used to control mosquitoes. The other is chlorine-based products, which are used to disinfect surfaces and water. While global health projects tend to treat these substances as stable objects, there are three ways in which they might…
Evidentiary Symbiosis
Though microbial infections are central concerns for public health workers in urban Nicaragua, health workers there rarely if ever speak of the existence of a ‘microbiome’ when they address such problems. Among scientists and the public in the United States, on the other hand, the microbiome, seen as the ‘internal ecosystem’ that regulates the workings of human guts, is a regular topic of conversation. This raises questions about how one might go…
Diseases That Don't Fit
From critique to practice
Goffey closes his essay by asking medical humanities scholars to give closer attention to ‘the uncertainties operative within immunology considered as a practice’.1 Echoing Isabelle Stengers’ call for a ‘humour of truth’ between humanities and natural sciences, Goffey encourages scholars in the medical humanities to embrace a ‘shared perplexity’ with working immunologists.2 This means that doing work in the medical humanities requires a recogniti…
Chimeric globalism
A laboratory-engineered, "chimeric" dengue fever vaccine entered late-stage clinical trials in the late 2000s. One possible way of interpreting the arrival of a technology like this is to see it as the end point of a unified global project. Alternatively, it can be understood as a "cosmopolitical event." Instead of reflecting unity, cosmopolitical events magnify social and technical differences, and they afford space to contemplate alternative fo…
Mosquito Trails
It is easy to think of mosquitoes as enemies. They not only bite us but also transmit diseases, including dengue fever, the world’s most prevalent mosquito-borne illness. Routine house-to-house mosquito control is a common feature of life in the low-income cities where dengue strikes most often, yet we know little about how people in those cities translate knowledge about mosquitoes into meaningful notions of health. Drawing on two years of ethno…
Mosquito Trails
Dengue fever is the world’s most prevalent mosquito-borne illness, but Alex Nading argues that people in dengue-endemic communities do not always view humans and mosquitoes as mortal enemies. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in urban Nicaragua and challenging current global health approaches to animal-borne illness, Mosquito Trails tells the story of a group of community health workers who struggle to come to terms with dengue epidem…
The lively ethics of global health GMOs
Humans, Animals, and Health
Medical and environmental social scientists have recently become interested in how health brings human and nonhuman animals together. is article discusses historical approaches to this question. It then explores applied disease ecology, which examines how anthropogenic landscape change leads to "disease emergence." The article goes on to review two critical approaches to the question. Critics of bio-security concern themselves with the ways in wh…
Living in a Toxic World
While the proliferation of industrial toxic substances over the past century has had drastic environmental and bodily effects, conventional methods of measuring and mitigating those effects continue to produce uncertainty. The project of living in a toxic world entails ethical, technical, and aesthetic efforts to understand toxicity as a contingent encounter among beings, systems, and things, rather than as a fundamental characteristic of particu…
Humans, Animals, and Health
Medical and environmental social scientists have recently become interested in how health brings human and nonhuman animals together. is article discusses historical approaches to this question. It then explores applied disease ecology, which examines how anthropogenic landscape change leads to "disease emergence." The article goes on to review two critical approaches to the question. Critics of bio-security concern themselves with the ways in wh…
Love Isn't There in Your Stomach
Drawing on participant-observation in Nicaraguan dengue prevention campaigns and a series of semistructured interviews with Nicaraguan health ministry personnel, this article shows how community health workers (CHWs) balanced two kinds of "medical citizenship." In some situations, CHWs acted as professional monitors and models of hygienic behavior. At other times, CHWs acted as compassionate advocates for their poor neighbors. In 2008, Nicaragua'…
Local Biologies, Leaky Things, and the Chemical Infrastructure of Global Health
This article examines how two chemical substances are woven into the infrastructure of global health as well as into the social lives of health workers in urban Nicaragua. One chemical is temephos, an organophosphate used to control mosquitoes. The other is chlorine-based products, which are used to disinfect surfaces and water. While global health projects tend to treat these substances as stable objects, there are three ways in which they might…
Dengue Mosquitoes Are Single Mothers
Nicaraguan Ministry of Health protocols for the control of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that transmits dengue fever, hinge on an aesthetic ordering of the urban household, one in which mosquitoes, like garbage and dirt, do not belong. Management regimes such as this appear to rely on an alienation of people-and in the case of dengue, women in particular-from the urban natures in which they live. In this article, I draw on 18 months of research wit…
Global health from the outside
Introduction
This introductory article maps out the parameters of an emerging field of medical anthropology, human animal health, and its potential for reorienting the discipline. Ethnographic explorations of how animals are implicated in health, well-being, and pathogenicity allow us to revisit theorizations of central topics in medical anthropology, notably ecology, biopolitics, and care. Meanwhile, the conditions of the Anthropocene force us to develop new…
Evidentiary Symbiosis
Though microbial infections are central concerns for public health workers in urban Nicaragua, health workers there rarely if ever speak of the existence of a ‘microbiome’ when they address such problems. Among scientists and the public in the United States, on the other hand, the microbiome, seen as the ‘internal ecosystem’ that regulates the workings of human guts, is a regular topic of conversation. This raises questions about how one might go…
Orientation and Crafted Bureaucracy
This article explores how food-safety inspectors (hygienistas) in Nicaragua monitor and certify foodservice workers and facilities. While inspectors are well versed in sanitary law, they describe their job not as law enforcement but as "orientation." Orientation integrates state regulation with interpersonal exchanges of gifts and jokes, which reinforce unwritten social norms. Such interpersonal exchanges are not simply signs of corruption or gov…
The lively ethics of global health GMOs
Chimeric globalism
A laboratory-engineered, "chimeric" dengue fever vaccine entered late-stage clinical trials in the late 2000s. One possible way of interpreting the arrival of a technology like this is to see it as the end point of a unified global project. Alternatively, it can be understood as a "cosmopolitical event." Instead of reflecting unity, cosmopolitical events magnify social and technical differences, and they afford space to contemplate alternative fo…
The end of the cooperative model (as we knew it)
Cooperatives produce commons, but how they do so-and what kinds of commons they produce-cannot be known in advance. Two cooperatives in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua illustrate how distinct cooperative assemblages actually take shape through particular patterns of commoning. First, members of a women's sewing cooperative called the Fair Trade Zone refuse open-membership. Claiming kinship as the logic of their membership, they describe the cooperative…
Ethnography in a grievance
This essay discusses documentation as a critical practice that links ethnography and activism. It describes the efforts of Nicaraguan sugarcane workers to use World Bank mediation and corporate social responsibility 'mechanisms' to call attention to the health and environmental problems that attend plantation production. Documentation becomes essential to activism when the lines of cause and effect that link bodily conditions to ecological condit…
Medical Anthropology in the Time of Covid-19
The Plantation as Hotspot
Central American sugarcane plantations have become 'hotspots' of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Although CKD is frequently caused by diabetes or hypertension, most sugarcane plantation workers who have it have no history of either condition. They are among a growing number of people worldwide afflicted by chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes (CKDnt). The 'hotspot' concept resonates with those who study CKDnt in part because work-related…
Social Justice as Epidemic Control
In this article, we draw on two cases-one of the reproductive justice movements in the wake of the Latin American Zika epidemic, and one of an environmental justice movements spurred by an epidemic of chronic kidney disease among sugarcane workers-to argue for social justice as an "elastic" technology of epidemic control. In its compressed form, social justice simply refers to the fair distribution of medical goods. In its expanded form, it empha…
Zopilotes, Alacranes, y Hormigas (Vultures, Scorpions, and Ants)
While scholars frequently frame conflicts over urban waste in terms of a politics of infrastructure, this article frames such conflicts in terms of a politics of organization. In 2008, self‐employed recyclers in and around Managua, Nicaragua blockaded local dumps in an effort to secure rights to scavenge for resellable material. Over the course of this “garbage crisis”, a material and semiotic entanglement of human labor organization with animal …
Introduction
When Medical Anthropology Quarterly's editorial board met during 2021 and 2022, a consistent theme of its collective work was rethinking how the journal communicates its aims and commitments to the communities of practice that contribute to it. Our shared goal was to query the reproduction of power in the field of medical anthropology. Ideas for doing this included the publication of revised guidance for authors and peer reviewers focused on crea…
Playing ethnographically living well together
How can we live well together? The question is critical for cities, where "wicked problems" like failing infrastructure, natural and industrial disaster, and epidemic disease pose threats to diverse forms of life. Because such problems are by definition world-shattering, it is notoriously difficult for city-dwellers to agree on how to think about them, much less overcome them. This essay sketches a collaborative ethnographic approach for co-conce…
Cities, Infectious Diseases and the Embodiment of Place
in focus, place, infectious disease, medical anthropology, cholera, dengue, vaccine, biosecurity
Cities, Infectious Diseases and the Embodiment of Place
in focus, place, infectious disease, medical anthropology, cholera, dengue, vaccine, biosecurity
Dengue Mosquitoes Are Single Mothers
Nicaraguan Ministry of Health protocols for the control of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that transmits dengue fever, hinge on an aesthetic ordering of the urban household, one in which mosquitoes, like garbage and dirt, do not belong. Management regimes such as this appear to rely on an alienation of people-and in the case of dengue, women in particular-from the urban natures in which they live. In this article, I draw on 18 months of research wit…
Humans, Animals, and Health
Medical and environmental social scientists have recently become interested in how health brings human and nonhuman animals together. is article discusses historical approaches to this question. It then explores applied disease ecology, which examines how anthropogenic landscape change leads to "disease emergence." The article goes on to review two critical approaches to the question. Critics of bio-security concern themselves with the ways in wh…
Love Isn't There in Your Stomach
Drawing on participant-observation in Nicaraguan dengue prevention campaigns and a series of semistructured interviews with Nicaraguan health ministry personnel, this article shows how community health workers (CHWs) balanced two kinds of "medical citizenship." In some situations, CHWs acted as professional monitors and models of hygienic behavior. At other times, CHWs acted as compassionate advocates for their poor neighbors. In 2008, Nicaragua'…
Mosquito Trails
It is easy to think of mosquitoes as enemies. They not only bite us but also transmit diseases, including dengue fever, the world’s most prevalent mosquito-borne illness. Routine house-to-house mosquito control is a common feature of life in the low-income cities where dengue strikes most often, yet we know little about how people in those cities translate knowledge about mosquitoes into meaningful notions of health. Drawing on two years of ethno…
Mosquito Trails
Dengue fever is the world’s most prevalent mosquito-borne illness, but Alex Nading argues that people in dengue-endemic communities do not always view humans and mosquitoes as mortal enemies. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in urban Nicaragua and challenging current global health approaches to animal-borne illness, Mosquito Trails tells the story of a group of community health workers who struggle to come to terms with dengue epidem…
The lively ethics of global health GMOs
From critique to practice
Goffey closes his essay by asking medical humanities scholars to give closer attention to ‘the uncertainties operative within immunology considered as a practice’.1 Echoing Isabelle Stengers’ call for a ‘humour of truth’ between humanities and natural sciences, Goffey encourages scholars in the medical humanities to embrace a ‘shared perplexity’ with working immunologists.2 This means that doing work in the medical humanities requires a recogniti…
Chimeric globalism
A laboratory-engineered, "chimeric" dengue fever vaccine entered late-stage clinical trials in the late 2000s. One possible way of interpreting the arrival of a technology like this is to see it as the end point of a unified global project. Alternatively, it can be understood as a "cosmopolitical event." Instead of reflecting unity, cosmopolitical events magnify social and technical differences, and they afford space to contemplate alternative fo…
Evidentiary Symbiosis
Though microbial infections are central concerns for public health workers in urban Nicaragua, health workers there rarely if ever speak of the existence of a ‘microbiome’ when they address such problems. Among scientists and the public in the United States, on the other hand, the microbiome, seen as the ‘internal ecosystem’ that regulates the workings of human guts, is a regular topic of conversation. This raises questions about how one might go…
Diseases That Don't Fit
Global health from the outside
Orientation and Crafted Bureaucracy
This article explores how food-safety inspectors (hygienistas) in Nicaragua monitor and certify foodservice workers and facilities. While inspectors are well versed in sanitary law, they describe their job not as law enforcement but as "orientation." Orientation integrates state regulation with interpersonal exchanges of gifts and jokes, which reinforce unwritten social norms. Such interpersonal exchanges are not simply signs of corruption or gov…
Local Biologies, Leaky Things, and the Chemical Infrastructure of Global Health
This article examines how two chemical substances are woven into the infrastructure of global health as well as into the social lives of health workers in urban Nicaragua. One chemical is temephos, an organophosphate used to control mosquitoes. The other is chlorine-based products, which are used to disinfect surfaces and water. While global health projects tend to treat these substances as stable objects, there are three ways in which they might…
Zopilotes, Alacranes, y Hormigas (Vultures, Scorpions, and Ants)
While scholars frequently frame conflicts over urban waste in terms of a politics of infrastructure, this article frames such conflicts in terms of a politics of organization. In 2008, self‐employed recyclers in and around Managua, Nicaragua blockaded local dumps in an effort to secure rights to scavenge for resellable material. Over the course of this “garbage crisis”, a material and semiotic entanglement of human labor organization with animal …
Social Justice as Epidemic Control
In this article, we draw on two cases-one of the reproductive justice movements in the wake of the Latin American Zika epidemic, and one of an environmental justice movements spurred by an epidemic of chronic kidney disease among sugarcane workers-to argue for social justice as an "elastic" technology of epidemic control. In its compressed form, social justice simply refers to the fair distribution of medical goods. In its expanded form, it empha…
Ethnography in a grievance
This essay discusses documentation as a critical practice that links ethnography and activism. It describes the efforts of Nicaraguan sugarcane workers to use World Bank mediation and corporate social responsibility 'mechanisms' to call attention to the health and environmental problems that attend plantation production. Documentation becomes essential to activism when the lines of cause and effect that link bodily conditions to ecological condit…
Introduction
This introductory article maps out the parameters of an emerging field of medical anthropology, human animal health, and its potential for reorienting the discipline. Ethnographic explorations of how animals are implicated in health, well-being, and pathogenicity allow us to revisit theorizations of central topics in medical anthropology, notably ecology, biopolitics, and care. Meanwhile, the conditions of the Anthropocene force us to develop new…
Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome
The human microbiome is an important emergent area of cross, multi and transdisciplinary study. The complexity of this topic leads to conflicting narratives and regulatory challenges. It raises questions about the benefits of its commercialisation and drives debates about alternative models for engaging with its publics, patients and other potential beneficiaries. The social sciences and the humanities have begun to explore the microbiome as an o…
State of Health
Reviewed by: State of Health: Pleasure and Politics in Venezuelan Health Care under Chavez by Amy Cooper Alex Nading Amy Cooper. State of Health: Pleasure and Politics in Venezuelan Health Care under Chavez. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. x + 206 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-520-29929-0). In State of Health, anthropologist Amy Cooper takes readers back to a time in the not-so-distant past, when the government of Hugo Chávez enacted a se…
Living in a Toxic World
While the proliferation of industrial toxic substances over the past century has had drastic environmental and bodily effects, conventional methods of measuring and mitigating those effects continue to produce uncertainty. The project of living in a toxic world entails ethical, technical, and aesthetic efforts to understand toxicity as a contingent encounter among beings, systems, and things, rather than as a fundamental characteristic of particu…
Medical Anthropology in the Time of Covid-19
The end of the cooperative model (as we knew it)
Cooperatives produce commons, but how they do so-and what kinds of commons they produce-cannot be known in advance. Two cooperatives in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua illustrate how distinct cooperative assemblages actually take shape through particular patterns of commoning. First, members of a women's sewing cooperative called the Fair Trade Zone refuse open-membership. Claiming kinship as the logic of their membership, they describe the cooperative…
Playing ethnographically living well together
How can we live well together? The question is critical for cities, where "wicked problems" like failing infrastructure, natural and industrial disaster, and epidemic disease pose threats to diverse forms of life. Because such problems are by definition world-shattering, it is notoriously difficult for city-dwellers to agree on how to think about them, much less overcome them. This essay sketches a collaborative ethnographic approach for co-conce…
The Plantation as Hotspot
Central American sugarcane plantations have become 'hotspots' of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Although CKD is frequently caused by diabetes or hypertension, most sugarcane plantation workers who have it have no history of either condition. They are among a growing number of people worldwide afflicted by chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes (CKDnt). The 'hotspot' concept resonates with those who study CKDnt in part because work-related…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Medicine (10 works) · Zoonotic diseases and public health (9 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Dengue fever (6 works) · Public relations (6 works)