Casey Golomski
Biographic Data
| ID | 96387 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Casey Golomski |
| GIVEN NAMES | Casey |
| FAMILY NAME | Golomski |
| SIGNATURE | GOLOMSKI C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of New Hampshire |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2322-8468 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Dementia Diagnosis in Postapartheid South Africa: Providers’ Perspectives in Ethnographic Context
Give yourself grace
Drawing on ethnographic research in a South African care facility, this editorial explores grace as both an analytical concept and practical resource for navigating difficult encounters in end‐of‐life care settings. The author demonstrates how staff and residents use grace — understood as temporary acceptance rather than moral absolution — to manage racial tensions, workplace adversity and ethical uncertainty. Grace functions as a survival strate…
God's Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life's End
Third Place in the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association's Society for Humanistic Anthropology Can older racists change their tune, or will they haunt us further once they're gone? Rich in mystery and life's lessons, God's Waiting Room considers what matters in the end for older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them. An innovation in creative nonfiction, Casey Golomski's st…
Multilevel factors influencing eHealth adoption among older adults during the pandemic
Introduction: While eHealth became prevalent in healthcare during the pandemic, eHealth adoption by older adults has been slow. This digital divide could lead to worsening health and healthcare disparities. Guided by the push-pull-mooring perspective, this study explored factors influencing eHealth adoption among older adults. Methods: Semi-structured virtual interviews were conducted in 2021 with 31 older adults with healthcare needs. Interviews…
Consequential exposures, or life writing on a wedding day
Ambiguous interventions: The social consequences of assistance in the field
This article examines how race, gender, and generation influence ethnographers' ethical decision-making in the field. We consider how decisions to intervene engage these complex variables, which are both cultural and historical constructs as well as lived experiences that researchers and interlocutors differently embody over time. We discuss this from the vantage point of postcolonial communities in South Africa's Eastern Cape and eSwatini, where…
Care, Life and Death in a Highly Racist World: Casey Golomski's God's Waiting Room
Quality of Life among Low-Income Older Residents in Subsidized Senior Housing: Rural vs. Suburban Comparisons
Older adults living in subsidized senior housing tend to be at risk for poor psychological well-being related to their advanced age and low income. This study aims to explore multilevel factors affecting perceived quality of life (QoL) among non-urban subsidized senior housing residents and to compare these factors between rural and suburban communities. Community/residential-level data were collected from the interviews with residential service …
The Impact of Sharing Recovery Stories in Public: Stigma, Trauma Response, and the Need for Multiple Pathways
There is increasing pressure on members of the substance use recovery community to share stories of their recovery process with health care professionals and the public to educate and destigmatize. This study examines the process and impact of this public sharing on recovery community members. This qualitative study used semi-structured, online interviews with 26 members of the recovery community who were recruited through a New England-based rec…
Hugo ka Canham. Riotous Deathscapes
Journal Article Hugo ka Canham. Riotous Deathscapes. Get access Hugo ka Canham. Riotous Deathscapes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. Pp. 288. Paper $26.95. Casey Golomski Casey Golomski University of New Hampshire, US Email: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2322-8468 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 357–358, ht…
Biopolitics from the Global South: A new generation takes on customary nationalism in eSwatini
Interrogating traditionalism: Gender and Swazi Culture in HIV/Aids policy
Since the late twentieth century, HIV/AIDS-related global public health discourses in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) have been driving cultural change there. Cultural change refers to local critical consciousness about the value of the royalist state’s traditionalist policies and projects that get branded as a ‘Swazi Culture’. Using feminist discourse analysis of health policy documents, supplemented by ethnographic insights, this article shows ho…
Customary nationalism in crisis: Protest, identity and politics in eSwatini
The Kingdom of eSwatini is undergoing its worst political and humanitarian crisis in postcolonial times. In June-July 2021, the indiscriminate killing and torturing of pro-democracy protesters by the military and the police force marked the terminal decline of the Swati postcolonial dispensation, centred around the rule of the monarchy in the name of 'custom'. This special issue explores multiple aspects of social and political life under this po…
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part V
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part IV
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…
Gentleness
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part II
Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part I
The day Mugabe died
On the day of Robert Mugabe's death, a group of white former colonists living at an old-age home participates in Bible study and reflects on the past, present, and future. They show us that no one makes it to the end of the road in total virtue and that survival can be a loss
Reimagining Social Medicine from the South. Abigail H. Neely, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, 169 pp
Visiting Hours: Spacetimes of Human-Animal Interaction in South African Elder Care
This article examines human-animal interaction in elder care by focusing on an old age home in postapartheid South Africa. Residents admire and desire to be near animals, but staff mostly prohibit pets and service animals due to regulations about hygiene and frailty. Instead, people make meaningful relationships with media representations of animals and wilder animals in the home's yard. This article uses the clinical timescale of visiting hours …
Dark Matter: Formations of Death Pollution in Southeastern African Funerals
Society for Humanistic Anthropology 2019 Writing Awards: Poetry First Prize
Countermythologies: Queering Lives in a Southern African Gay and Lesbian Pentecostal Church
Black gay and lesbian Christians belonging to a grassroots Pentecostal charismatic church spanning small towns in Southern Africa make everyday claims to normativity with interpretive recourse to biblical myths and church rituals. Members of the church embody a range of gendered and sexual self-expressions that also tend to reproduce prevailing masculine and feminine sexual roles and subject positions. By situating their identities, rituals, and …
Compassion technology: Life insurance and the remaking of kinship in Swaziland's age of HIV
An emergent life insurance market in Swaziland is prompting some families to remake kinship as the entrustment of a generation of deceased relatives' children. Coincident with high HIV/AIDS mortality and changing economic policies for the financial services sector, Swaziland saw an influx of foreign insurance companies in the early 2000s. Those companies offered incentives like burial coverage and cash stipends, and they compelled families' legal…
Elder Care and Private Health Insurance in South Africa: The Pathos of Race-Class
This article shows how age as a category of dependency upends popular consciousness about race and class within postcolonial health systems. White individuals working within South Africa's private health insurance (medical aid) market and allied fields face a conundrum with respect to elder care. Some policies accommodate older adults' needs, but being older is costly and long-term residential care is excluded. Critically, these workers' position…
Greying mutuality: Race and joking relations in a South African nursing home
This article describes how residents and staff of an eldercare and Alzheimer's home in a small South African town joke with each other. Residents are mostly white and staff mostly black, but there are exceptions, and both groups are multilingual. Jokes between the two groups in the home are racialized, if not sometimes racist, in light of historical and contemporary post-apartheid socio-political and economic circumstances. Yet the relations betw…
Countermythologies: Queering Lives in a Southern African Gay and Lesbian Pentecostal Church
Black gay and lesbian Christians belonging to a grassroots Pentecostal charismatic church spanning small towns in Southern Africa make everyday claims to normativity with interpretive recourse to biblical myths and church rituals. Members of the church embody a range of gendered and sexual self-expressions that also tend to reproduce prevailing masculine and feminine sexual roles and subject positions. By situating their identities, rituals, and …
Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is a Mystery: Dying in South African Frail Care
What happens when we die? This article traces answers to this question posed to staff and residents of a nursing (frail care) home in small-town South Africa run by a Christian women's charitable organization. The religious, cultural, and racial diversity of staff and residents, along with their different medical understandings of declining health and death constellate expansive perceptions of dying and life after death. Staff and residents share…
Outliving love: Marital estrangement in an African insurance market
Marital estrangement and formal divorce are vital conjunctures for married women’s kinship relations and life course, where a horizon of future possibilities are revalued and negotiated at the interstices of custom, law, and social and ritual obligations. In this article, after delineating the forms of customary and civil marriage and the possibilities for divorce or estrangement from each, I describe how some married women in Swaziland and South…
Wearing Memories: Clothing and the Global Lives of Mourning in Swaziland
This article situates a cultural phenomenon of women's memory work through clothing in Swaziland. It explores clothing as both action and object of everyday, personalized practice that constitutes psychosocial well-being and material proximities between the living and the dead, namely, in how clothing of the deceased is privately possessed and ritually manipulated by the bereaved. While human and spiritual self-other relations are produced throug…
Generational inversions: Working' for social reproduction amid HIV in Swaziland
How do people envision social reproduction when regular modes of generational succession and continuity are disrupted in the context of HIV/AIDS? How and where can scholars identify local ideas for restoring intergenerational practices of obligation and dependency that produce mutuality rather than conflict across age groups? Expanding from studies of HIV/AIDS and religion in Africa, this article pushes for an analytic engagement with ritual as a…
Visiting Hours: Spacetimes of Human-Animal Interaction in South African Elder Care
This article examines human-animal interaction in elder care by focusing on an old age home in postapartheid South Africa. Residents admire and desire to be near animals, but staff mostly prohibit pets and service animals due to regulations about hygiene and frailty. Instead, people make meaningful relationships with media representations of animals and wilder animals in the home's yard. This article uses the clinical timescale of visiting hours …
Urban cemeteries in Swaziland: Materialising Dignity
This photo essay traces the materiality of urban cemeteries in Swaziland to underscore the production of dignity in contemporary funeral culture. Increasingly, death and burial in town are realities for many people who have lost social ties or land tenure in rural areas where burials customarily take place. Urban burials register anxieties about cultural and socio-economic change and the value of human life, but new mortuary consumer markets have…
Generational inversions: Working' for social reproduction amid HIV in Swaziland
How do people envision social reproduction when regular modes of generational succession and continuity are disrupted in the context of HIV/AIDS? How and where can scholars identify local ideas for restoring intergenerational practices of obligation and dependency that produce mutuality rather than conflict across age groups? Expanding from studies of HIV/AIDS and religion in Africa, this article pushes for an analytic engagement with ritual as a…
Wearing Memories: Clothing and the Global Lives of Mourning in Swaziland
This article situates a cultural phenomenon of women's memory work through clothing in Swaziland. It explores clothing as both action and object of everyday, personalized practice that constitutes psychosocial well-being and material proximities between the living and the dead, namely, in how clothing of the deceased is privately possessed and ritually manipulated by the bereaved. While human and spiritual self-other relations are produced throug…
Compassion technology: Life insurance and the remaking of kinship in Swaziland's age of HIV
An emergent life insurance market in Swaziland is prompting some families to remake kinship as the entrustment of a generation of deceased relatives' children. Coincident with high HIV/AIDS mortality and changing economic policies for the financial services sector, Swaziland saw an influx of foreign insurance companies in the early 2000s. Those companies offered incentives like burial coverage and cash stipends, and they compelled families' legal…
Urban cemeteries in Swaziland: Materialising Dignity
This photo essay traces the materiality of urban cemeteries in Swaziland to underscore the production of dignity in contemporary funeral culture. Increasingly, death and burial in town are realities for many people who have lost social ties or land tenure in rural areas where burials customarily take place. Urban burials register anxieties about cultural and socio-economic change and the value of human life, but new mortuary consumer markets have…
Religion and Migration: Cases for a Global Material Ethics
This review article describes three ethnographies, two on peculiar churches in Africa and their relationship to the global, and one on the biographies of Africans who migrate globally in search of a better life. I elucidate several intersecting themes in these ethnographies – perception and materiality; ethical life; existential mobility – which suggestively point to a concept I term global material ethics, one that innovates studies of religion,…
Risk, Mistake, and Generational Contest in Bodily Rituals of Swazi Jerikho Zionism
This article situates an approach to ritual efficacy and risk by focusing on bodily rituals of the Swazi Zionist Jerikho church in socio-historical context. The Jerikho church distinguishes itself by the use of purgative hallucinogenics and a circular march-run, both of which are meant to invoke the embodiment of holy spirits. This article analyzes the risk inherent in the procedures of rituals and how risk manifested in two cases in 2010 and 201…
Blind spot
Outliving love: Marital estrangement in an African insurance market
Marital estrangement and formal divorce are vital conjunctures for married women’s kinship relations and life course, where a horizon of future possibilities are revalued and negotiated at the interstices of custom, law, and social and ritual obligations. In this article, after delineating the forms of customary and civil marriage and the possibilities for divorce or estrangement from each, I describe how some married women in Swaziland and South…
Game Walk at Pilanesberg
This is an ethnographically inspired poem based on a guided game walk taken with fellow anthropologists Anne Allison and Vinh-Kim Nguyen at the Pilanesberg National Park, the site of a former apartheid-era native reserve (Bantustan) of Bophuthatswana, in the North West Province of South Africa on July 4, 2015. The venture was part of the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism, convened around the theme of “Bios, Techne and the Manufacture …
Christians’ cut: Popular religion and the global health campaign for medical male circumcision in Swaziland
Swaziland faces one of the worst HIV epidemics in the world and is a site for the current global health campaign in sub-Saharan Africa to medically circumcise the majority of the male population. Given that Swaziland is also majority Christian, how does the most popular religion influence acceptance, rejection or understandings of medical male circumcision? This article considers interpretive differences by Christians across the Kingdom's three e…
Authority
A short poem about psychopharmaceutical prescription and addiction in the United States
Funeral Culture: Aids, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom
Work of a Nation: Christian Funerary Ecumenism and Institutional Disruption in Swaziland
This article traces how contemporary funerary practices – foodways, prayer and burial co-operative participation – configure a Christianised public culture in Swaziland that draws from ordinary citizens’ religious, ritual and political work and membership in diverse Christian churches. This kind of grassroots ecumenism importantly challenges the potency of orthodox institutional ecumenical projects of religious elites in the kingdom. These projec…
Elder Care and Private Health Insurance in South Africa: The Pathos of Race-Class
This article shows how age as a category of dependency upends popular consciousness about race and class within postcolonial health systems. White individuals working within South Africa's private health insurance (medical aid) market and allied fields face a conundrum with respect to elder care. Some policies accommodate older adults' needs, but being older is costly and long-term residential care is excluded. Critically, these workers' position…
Thumb War
Society for Humanistic Anthropology 2019 Writing Awards: Poetry First Prize
Countermythologies: Queering Lives in a Southern African Gay and Lesbian Pentecostal Church
Black gay and lesbian Christians belonging to a grassroots Pentecostal charismatic church spanning small towns in Southern Africa make everyday claims to normativity with interpretive recourse to biblical myths and church rituals. Members of the church embody a range of gendered and sexual self-expressions that also tend to reproduce prevailing masculine and feminine sexual roles and subject positions. By situating their identities, rituals, and …
Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is a Mystery: Dying in South African Frail Care
What happens when we die? This article traces answers to this question posed to staff and residents of a nursing (frail care) home in small-town South Africa run by a Christian women's charitable organization. The religious, cultural, and racial diversity of staff and residents, along with their different medical understandings of declining health and death constellate expansive perceptions of dying and life after death. Staff and residents share…
Greying mutuality: Race and joking relations in a South African nursing home
This article describes how residents and staff of an eldercare and Alzheimer's home in a small South African town joke with each other. Residents are mostly white and staff mostly black, but there are exceptions, and both groups are multilingual. Jokes between the two groups in the home are racialized, if not sometimes racist, in light of historical and contemporary post-apartheid socio-political and economic circumstances. Yet the relations betw…
Dark Matter: Formations of Death Pollution in Southeastern African Funerals
Reimagining Social Medicine from the South. Abigail H. Neely, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, 169 pp
Visiting Hours: Spacetimes of Human-Animal Interaction in South African Elder Care
This article examines human-animal interaction in elder care by focusing on an old age home in postapartheid South Africa. Residents admire and desire to be near animals, but staff mostly prohibit pets and service animals due to regulations about hygiene and frailty. Instead, people make meaningful relationships with media representations of animals and wilder animals in the home's yard. This article uses the clinical timescale of visiting hours …
Biopolitics from the Global South: A new generation takes on customary nationalism in eSwatini
Interrogating traditionalism: Gender and Swazi Culture in HIV/Aids policy
Since the late twentieth century, HIV/AIDS-related global public health discourses in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) have been driving cultural change there. Cultural change refers to local critical consciousness about the value of the royalist state’s traditionalist policies and projects that get branded as a ‘Swazi Culture’. Using feminist discourse analysis of health policy documents, supplemented by ethnographic insights, this article shows ho…
Customary nationalism in crisis: Protest, identity and politics in eSwatini
The Kingdom of eSwatini is undergoing its worst political and humanitarian crisis in postcolonial times. In June-July 2021, the indiscriminate killing and torturing of pro-democracy protesters by the military and the police force marked the terminal decline of the Swati postcolonial dispensation, centred around the rule of the monarchy in the name of 'custom'. This special issue explores multiple aspects of social and political life under this po…
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (21 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · History (10 works)