L A Meek
Biographic Data
| ID | 68619 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L A Meek |
| GIVEN NAMES | L A |
| FAMILY NAME | Meek |
| SIGNATURE | MEEK L A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8510-6255 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Against the uninterrupted writer: Nine tips for writing while parenting
This piece offers nine flash tips for writing while parenting young children. Against the fantasy of the autonomous, uninterrupted academic writer, I argue that writing while parenting makes visible the reproductive labor that academic work usually hides. But instead of treating parenting as an obstacle to writing, I approach it as a condition from which another writing praxis can emerge: one that is interrupted (a lot), takes place in unconventi…
Provincializing bodyminds, decolonizing disability
In critical disability studies and crip theory, a key intervention has been to challenge Cartesian dualism by using terms such as bodyminds, body-minds, mind/bodies, and other hybrids. While the concept of "bodyminds" integrates physical and cognitive experiences and challenges dualistic thinking, it has been criticized by scholars for prioritizing Eurocentric notions of the mind and subjectivity over other understandings of bodily normality and …
On epistemic aporias and the coloniality of (my) categories
This piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and uchawi (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about "head-switching operations" posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of uchawi nearly a century ago to demonstrate this disavowal's sim…
Shit Voyeurism, Anti-Blackness, and the Spherical: Rendering Antibiotic Use in Africa
This piece interrogates anti-Black racism and coloniality in global health reporting on antibiotic use in Africa. I focus on New York Times discourse, imagery, and films, reading these intertextually with wider political and public health rhetoric. In critically attending to mediated imaginaries of Nairobi, Kenya as “unhygienic,” I demonstrate how this figuration comes to index local pharmaceutical practices that appear “non-Scientific.” The situ…
African Experiments in Health and Healing: Science from the Home and Homestead
Through five ethnographic stories, this article rethinks science from the African home and homestead. Focused on our interlocutors' efforts to heal and protect themselves and their families, these stories of experimentation challenge the ways science is often understood in science studies. Drawing on the literature on science and technology studies (STS) in Africa, postcolonial and feminist STS, medical pluralism, and ontological approaches to he…
Countering the logics of war in global health policy: Fake Drugs, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Fugitive Science
Powerful pharmaceuticals are readily available for purchase throughout Tanzania and global health policy makers decry this situation as dangerous and disordered, as if no rules govern the use of drugs in Africa. In the prevailing global health understanding, 'truth' lies in the laboratory science that goes into the making and proper prescription of drugs, and such deviations as 'overuse' and 'misuse' result from the fact that locals supposedly mi…
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part V
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part IV
Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science
When I began fieldwork in Tanzania over a decade ago, I originally set out to observe the scientific practices through which counterfeit drugs were identified at a regional hospital in the Southern Highlands.1 This hospital had a mini-lab for conducting a Thin-Layer Chromatographic (TLC) test, but for years lacked the iodine detection reagent needed to carry it out. Instead, I came to learn, science was happening elsewhere; not always in the labo…
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part III
Medical Anthropology QuarterlyEarly View Opinion Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part III Laura A. Meek, Corresponding Author Laura A. Meek [email protected] Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Corresponding author: Laura A. Meek Email: [email protected] Abigail H. Neely Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorAbigail H. Neely, Corresponding Author Abigail H. Neely [e…
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part II
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part I
Beyond the Limits: Medicine, Healing, and Medical Anthropology
This collection contemplates that which resides at the limits of the anthropology of health and medicine. By "limit," we mean that "outside which there is nothing to be found" and "inside of which everything is to be found" (de la Cadena 2015: 14, citing Ranajit Guha 2002: 7). Our work takes place within many kinds of limits: epistemological frameworks, ethical and moral commitments, disciplinary norms, ontological certainties, political economie…
Fugitive Hong Kong
This photographic essay reflects on fugitive forms of protest in Hong Kong. Photographs span the peak of the prodemocracy movement in 2019 to current postactivist practices of protesting otherwise in 2023. In the face of state surveillance and repression, even the slogan 光復香港時代革命 (Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times!) became illegal, and spaces that were previously animated with revolutionary dreams now stand stark, quiet, and apparently …
Contested Truths Over Covid-19 in East Africa: Examining Opposition to Public Health Measures in Tanzania and Uganda
The comparative analysis of three "contested truths" around COVID-19 in East Africa demonstrates that knowledge is a product of knotted, uneven, and disputed epistemological practices tied to structures of power. Lee, Meek, and Katumusiime examine: (1) the construction of a pan-African skepticism of COVID-19 that drew on anti-imperialist discourses; (2) social media posts through which Tanzanian digital publics critically evaluated steam inhalati…
Otherwise
In this article we offer the term otherwise as a keyword for feminist vocabulary. We consider how the otherwise is simultaneously a concept, an analytics, a method, and an ethico‐onto‐political commitment to the insistence of the possible against the pull of the probable. The otherwise conjures latent possibilities and potentialities held within a situation or formation—which we might only glimpse obliquely, yet which holds or opens to liberatory…
Azizi: Gender, Relationality, and the Embodiment of Mawazo in Tanzania
This piece traces the intercorporeal embodiment of an ailment in Tanzania called mawazo, the Swahili term for "ideas" or "thoughts." As a condition, mawazo is somewhat akin to stress: a cumulative compounding of many problems (shida nyingi) that leads to confused, muddled, and tangled thoughts, as well as physical symptoms like painful, inflamed eyes. Over my three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Iringa, Tanzania, my female collocutors who suf…
The Grammar of Leprosy: Temporal Politics and the Impossible Subject
This research article critically interrogates the implications and unintended consequences of the World Health Organization's purported elimination of leprosy as a public health problem. I explore how leprosy has been portrayed (for nearly a century) as something from the past, recalcitrantly lingering on into the present, but surely about to be gone-a temporal framing I call the 'grammar of leprosy'. I recount the experiences of Daniel, my inter…
Bibi’s uchungu
Recent Indian Ocean world scholarship shows how biomedicine and “traditional” medicine have been coproduced through their encounters, such that even the notions of “medical pluralism” and “hybridity” are insufficient to capture the ways in which such healing regimes comingle. This chapter contributes to such work by exploring the role of bodily sensoriums and the practice of “eating” medicines as pharmaceuticals move across – and co-construct – h…
Drugs and Uncertainty in Tanzania
African Experiments in Health and Healing: Science from the Home and Homestead
Through five ethnographic stories, this article rethinks science from the African home and homestead. Focused on our interlocutors' efforts to heal and protect themselves and their families, these stories of experimentation challenge the ways science is often understood in science studies. Drawing on the literature on science and technology studies (STS) in Africa, postcolonial and feminist STS, medical pluralism, and ontological approaches to he…
The Grammar of Leprosy: Temporal Politics and the Impossible Subject
This research article critically interrogates the implications and unintended consequences of the World Health Organization's purported elimination of leprosy as a public health problem. I explore how leprosy has been portrayed (for nearly a century) as something from the past, recalcitrantly lingering on into the present, but surely about to be gone-a temporal framing I call the 'grammar of leprosy'. I recount the experiences of Daniel, my inter…
Countering the logics of war in global health policy: Fake Drugs, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Fugitive Science
Powerful pharmaceuticals are readily available for purchase throughout Tanzania and global health policy makers decry this situation as dangerous and disordered, as if no rules govern the use of drugs in Africa. In the prevailing global health understanding, 'truth' lies in the laboratory science that goes into the making and proper prescription of drugs, and such deviations as 'overuse' and 'misuse' result from the fact that locals supposedly mi…
Contested Truths Over Covid-19 in East Africa: Examining Opposition to Public Health Measures in Tanzania and Uganda
The comparative analysis of three "contested truths" around COVID-19 in East Africa demonstrates that knowledge is a product of knotted, uneven, and disputed epistemological practices tied to structures of power. Lee, Meek, and Katumusiime examine: (1) the construction of a pan-African skepticism of COVID-19 that drew on anti-imperialist discourses; (2) social media posts through which Tanzanian digital publics critically evaluated steam inhalati…
Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science
When I began fieldwork in Tanzania over a decade ago, I originally set out to observe the scientific practices through which counterfeit drugs were identified at a regional hospital in the Southern Highlands.1 This hospital had a mini-lab for conducting a Thin-Layer Chromatographic (TLC) test, but for years lacked the iodine detection reagent needed to carry it out. Instead, I came to learn, science was happening elsewhere; not always in the labo…
Beyond the Limits: Medicine, Healing, and Medical Anthropology
This collection contemplates that which resides at the limits of the anthropology of health and medicine. By "limit," we mean that "outside which there is nothing to be found" and "inside of which everything is to be found" (de la Cadena 2015: 14, citing Ranajit Guha 2002: 7). Our work takes place within many kinds of limits: epistemological frameworks, ethical and moral commitments, disciplinary norms, ontological certainties, political economie…
Provincializing bodyminds, decolonizing disability
In critical disability studies and crip theory, a key intervention has been to challenge Cartesian dualism by using terms such as bodyminds, body-minds, mind/bodies, and other hybrids. While the concept of "bodyminds" integrates physical and cognitive experiences and challenges dualistic thinking, it has been criticized by scholars for prioritizing Eurocentric notions of the mind and subjectivity over other understandings of bodily normality and …
On epistemic aporias and the coloniality of (my) categories
This piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and uchawi (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about "head-switching operations" posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of uchawi nearly a century ago to demonstrate this disavowal's sim…
Fugitive Hong Kong
This photographic essay reflects on fugitive forms of protest in Hong Kong. Photographs span the peak of the prodemocracy movement in 2019 to current postactivist practices of protesting otherwise in 2023. In the face of state surveillance and repression, even the slogan 光復香港時代革命 (Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times!) became illegal, and spaces that were previously animated with revolutionary dreams now stand stark, quiet, and apparently …
Azizi: Gender, Relationality, and the Embodiment of Mawazo in Tanzania
This piece traces the intercorporeal embodiment of an ailment in Tanzania called mawazo, the Swahili term for "ideas" or "thoughts." As a condition, mawazo is somewhat akin to stress: a cumulative compounding of many problems (shida nyingi) that leads to confused, muddled, and tangled thoughts, as well as physical symptoms like painful, inflamed eyes. Over my three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Iringa, Tanzania, my female collocutors who suf…
Drugs and Uncertainty in Tanzania
Bibi’s uchungu
Recent Indian Ocean world scholarship shows how biomedicine and “traditional” medicine have been coproduced through their encounters, such that even the notions of “medical pluralism” and “hybridity” are insufficient to capture the ways in which such healing regimes comingle. This chapter contributes to such work by exploring the role of bodily sensoriums and the practice of “eating” medicines as pharmaceuticals move across – and co-construct – h…
The Grammar of Leprosy: Temporal Politics and the Impossible Subject
This research article critically interrogates the implications and unintended consequences of the World Health Organization's purported elimination of leprosy as a public health problem. I explore how leprosy has been portrayed (for nearly a century) as something from the past, recalcitrantly lingering on into the present, but surely about to be gone-a temporal framing I call the 'grammar of leprosy'. I recount the experiences of Daniel, my inter…
Otherwise
In this article we offer the term otherwise as a keyword for feminist vocabulary. We consider how the otherwise is simultaneously a concept, an analytics, a method, and an ethico‐onto‐political commitment to the insistence of the possible against the pull of the probable. The otherwise conjures latent possibilities and potentialities held within a situation or formation—which we might only glimpse obliquely, yet which holds or opens to liberatory…
Azizi: Gender, Relationality, and the Embodiment of Mawazo in Tanzania
This piece traces the intercorporeal embodiment of an ailment in Tanzania called mawazo, the Swahili term for "ideas" or "thoughts." As a condition, mawazo is somewhat akin to stress: a cumulative compounding of many problems (shida nyingi) that leads to confused, muddled, and tangled thoughts, as well as physical symptoms like painful, inflamed eyes. Over my three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Iringa, Tanzania, my female collocutors who suf…
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part V
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part IV
Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science
When I began fieldwork in Tanzania over a decade ago, I originally set out to observe the scientific practices through which counterfeit drugs were identified at a regional hospital in the Southern Highlands.1 This hospital had a mini-lab for conducting a Thin-Layer Chromatographic (TLC) test, but for years lacked the iodine detection reagent needed to carry it out. Instead, I came to learn, science was happening elsewhere; not always in the labo…
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part III
Medical Anthropology QuarterlyEarly View Opinion Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part III Laura A. Meek, Corresponding Author Laura A. Meek [email protected] Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Corresponding author: Laura A. Meek Email: [email protected] Abigail H. Neely Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorAbigail H. Neely, Corresponding Author Abigail H. Neely [e…
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part II
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part I
Beyond the Limits: Medicine, Healing, and Medical Anthropology
This collection contemplates that which resides at the limits of the anthropology of health and medicine. By "limit," we mean that "outside which there is nothing to be found" and "inside of which everything is to be found" (de la Cadena 2015: 14, citing Ranajit Guha 2002: 7). Our work takes place within many kinds of limits: epistemological frameworks, ethical and moral commitments, disciplinary norms, ontological certainties, political economie…
Fugitive Hong Kong
This photographic essay reflects on fugitive forms of protest in Hong Kong. Photographs span the peak of the prodemocracy movement in 2019 to current postactivist practices of protesting otherwise in 2023. In the face of state surveillance and repression, even the slogan 光復香港時代革命 (Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times!) became illegal, and spaces that were previously animated with revolutionary dreams now stand stark, quiet, and apparently …
Contested Truths Over Covid-19 in East Africa: Examining Opposition to Public Health Measures in Tanzania and Uganda
The comparative analysis of three "contested truths" around COVID-19 in East Africa demonstrates that knowledge is a product of knotted, uneven, and disputed epistemological practices tied to structures of power. Lee, Meek, and Katumusiime examine: (1) the construction of a pan-African skepticism of COVID-19 that drew on anti-imperialist discourses; (2) social media posts through which Tanzanian digital publics critically evaluated steam inhalati…
Shit Voyeurism, Anti-Blackness, and the Spherical: Rendering Antibiotic Use in Africa
This piece interrogates anti-Black racism and coloniality in global health reporting on antibiotic use in Africa. I focus on New York Times discourse, imagery, and films, reading these intertextually with wider political and public health rhetoric. In critically attending to mediated imaginaries of Nairobi, Kenya as “unhygienic,” I demonstrate how this figuration comes to index local pharmaceutical practices that appear “non-Scientific.” The situ…
African Experiments in Health and Healing: Science from the Home and Homestead
Through five ethnographic stories, this article rethinks science from the African home and homestead. Focused on our interlocutors' efforts to heal and protect themselves and their families, these stories of experimentation challenge the ways science is often understood in science studies. Drawing on the literature on science and technology studies (STS) in Africa, postcolonial and feminist STS, medical pluralism, and ontological approaches to he…
Countering the logics of war in global health policy: Fake Drugs, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Fugitive Science
Powerful pharmaceuticals are readily available for purchase throughout Tanzania and global health policy makers decry this situation as dangerous and disordered, as if no rules govern the use of drugs in Africa. In the prevailing global health understanding, 'truth' lies in the laboratory science that goes into the making and proper prescription of drugs, and such deviations as 'overuse' and 'misuse' result from the fact that locals supposedly mi…
Provincializing bodyminds, decolonizing disability
In critical disability studies and crip theory, a key intervention has been to challenge Cartesian dualism by using terms such as bodyminds, body-minds, mind/bodies, and other hybrids. While the concept of "bodyminds" integrates physical and cognitive experiences and challenges dualistic thinking, it has been criticized by scholars for prioritizing Eurocentric notions of the mind and subjectivity over other understandings of bodily normality and …
On epistemic aporias and the coloniality of (my) categories
This piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and uchawi (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about "head-switching operations" posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of uchawi nearly a century ago to demonstrate this disavowal's sim…
Against the uninterrupted writer: Nine tips for writing while parenting
This piece offers nine flash tips for writing while parenting young children. Against the fantasy of the autonomous, uninterrupted academic writer, I argue that writing while parenting makes visible the reproductive labor that academic work usually hides. But instead of treating parenting as an obstacle to writing, I approach it as a condition from which another writing praxis can emerge: one that is interrupted (a lot), takes place in unconventi…
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Conversation (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Library science (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Politics (5 works)