B Kasstan
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 43156 |
|---|---|
| NOME | B Kasstan |
| PRENOMES | B |
| SOBRENOME | Kasstan |
| ASSINATURA | KASSTAN B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9020-2954 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 62 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1970 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Observing the observatory on race and health
National Health Service England established the Race and Health Observatory as an independent expert body in 2021 to advance meaningful changes for Black and minority ethnic communities, patients, and healthcare professionals. It serves as a 'proactive investigator' by commissioning and facilitating research to achieve long-term transformation in health outcomes. However, medical anthropologists have largely overlooked the Observatory (and the re…
It’s Their Little Red Bible
Drawing on an ethnography of Nigerian migrant motherhood in London, we explore how the original design of children's health records, known as the Red Book, to log routine vaccinations has been transformed to document family proof of residency amidst Britain's "hostile environment." Nigerian migrant mothers use the Red Book as evidence of raising British children and to overcome their precarity. By resolutely documenting their children's immunizat…
Introduction
A normal nation in our land”
Polio, public health memories and temporal dissonance of re-emerging infectious diseases in the global north
“We're potentially worsening health inequalities”
A polio booster campaign targeting all children aged 1-9 was implemented across London between August-December 2022 as part of a national enhanced poliovirus incident response. Orthodox Jewish (OJ) children were particularly vulnerable to transmission due to disparities in childhood vaccination coverage and the transnational spread of poliovirus affecting linked populations in New York and Israel. This study aimed to evaluate how the polio booste…
Transgressive quest/ions? Navigating religion, institutional expectations, and sexuality education in modern Britain
Aporetic differences? Equality entitlements, religious schools, and contours of protection
The requirement for schools in England to implement equality education has led religious conservative minorities to voice a conflict between legally protected characteristics of religion and sexual orientation. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with Jewish orthodoxies in England, the article critiques these apparent aporetic differences by tracing the grammars of protection that are fielded by custodians of state governance and religio…
“A Free People, Controlled Only by God”
This paper explores how criticism surrounding the ethics and safety of biomedical technologies circulates and ‘converts’ through global–local religious encounters, producing new claims of moral opposition and rights to religious freedom. The paper is concerned with the question of what rhetorical devices make vaccine safety doubt relevant to religiously Orthodox settings and what implications arise? Based on an ethnographic study of vaccine decis…
We've all got the virus inside us now
The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted ethnic minorities in the global north, evidenced by higher rates of transmission, morbidity, and mortality relative to population sizes. Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in London had extremely high SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence rates, reflecting patterns in Israel and the US. The aim of this paper is to examine how responsibilities over health protection are conveyed, and to what extent responsibil…
But It's Not That They Don't Love Their Girls
Recent demographic analysis of sex ratios at birth in the UK has signaled the issue of "missing girls" in British Asian minority populations. This paper juxtaposes the processes of reproductive regulation set in motion by this new demographic knowledge of son preference, with lived experiences of gender equality and family-making practices. Ethnographic research conducted with British Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi families reveal diverse mec…
Everyone's Accountable? Peer Sexual Abuse in Religious Schools, Digital Revelations, and Denominational Contests over Protection
Since the emergence of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, online tracts have been employed to publicly reveal experiences of sexual abuse and assault among women and men in religious institutions and to shame abusers, which tend to be examined as an issue of women's rights or child protection from adult predators. Drawing on the use of digital reporting platforms to testify against peer offences within religious schools, this paper asks how do …
Viral Entanglements
This article contributes to anthropological debates surrounding borderlands and biosecurity by tracing the multiple pursuits of protection that emerge between the state and minorities during infectious disease outbreaks. Drawing on an ethnographic study of child health in Jerusalem following epidemics of measles and COVID-19, the article demonstrates how responses to public health interventions are less about compliance or indiscipline than a com…
If a rabbi did say 'you have to vaccinate,' we wouldn't
I Didn't Know How to Be with My Husband
Sex education presents a major dilemma for state-minority relations, reflecting a conflict between basic rights to education and religious freedom. In this comparative ethnography of informal sex education among ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) in Israel and England, we frame the critical difference between "age-appropriate" and "life-stage" (marriage and childbirth) models of sex education. Conceptualizing these competing approaches as disputes ove…
Vaccines and vitriol
This commentary addresses the issue of vaccine hesitancy and decision-making among religious minority groups in high-income country settings. Recent measles outbreaks have been attributed to lower-level vaccination coverage among religious minorities, which has inspired targeted as well as wholesale public health interventions and legislation in a range of jurisdictions. The commentary takes the case of self-protective ethnic and religious minori…
Arbitrating Abortion
The UK's on-going sex-selective abortion (SSA) controversy remains a major obstacle to the liberalization of national abortion governance, and is an issue broadly attributed to a "cultural" preference for sons among South Asian women. We conceptualize how healthcare professionals "arbitrate" requests for SSA by exploring the tension between its legal status and how requests are encountered by abortion providers. SSA is framed in this article as a…
Sniff and Tell
Bio-Detection Dogs (BDDs) are used in some high-income countries as a diagnostic intervention, yet little is known about their potential in low/middle-income countries with limited diagnostic resources. This exploratory study investigated the opportunities and implications of deploying BDDs as a mobile diagnostic intervention to identify people with asymptomatic malaria, particularly at ports of entry, as an important step to malaria elimination …
Making Bodies Kosher
For Haredi Jews, reproduction is entangled with issues of health, bodily governance and identity. This is an analysis of the ways in which Haredi Jews negotiate healthcare services using theoretical perspectives in political philosophy. It is the first archival and ethnographic study of Haredi Jews in the UK and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and Jewish studies. It will allow readers to understand how reproductiv…
Making Bodies Kosher
Minority populations are often regarded as being ‘hard to reach’ and evading state expectations of health protection. This ethnographic and archival study analyses how devout Jews in Britain negotiate healthcare services to preserve the reproduction of culture and continuity. This book demonstrates how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology reveal multiple pursuits of protection between this religious minority and the st…
Irish voters repealed the eighth
This commentary discusses Ireland's 25 May 2018 Referendum result to repeal the Eighth Amendment and has two key aims. Firstly, it encourages policy-makers to grasp the full potential of legislative reform by enabling and protecting women's access to abortion care within a continuum of sexual and reproductive healthcare options. Secondly, it calls for urgent clarity about access to abortion care in the interim period of legislative transition
The taste of trauma
Drawing on ethnographic research in the UK’s only support facility for ageing Jewish Shoah survivors, this paper charts the ‘foodways’ in a Centre where satiety is experienced as an emotional as well as a physical need. How the experience of genocidal violence and displacement give rise to particular tastes of trauma is explored, firstly through the symbolism of bread which is metaphorically leavened with meanings and memories of survival – both …
Tokens of trauma
This paper explores the traumatic memories of ageing Shoah survivors who attend a Jewish social and therapeutic support facility in London (UK). The study investigates the perceived differences in trauma within a diverse group of members who partake in the day centre. The difference in Shoah experience contextualises how survivors of ghettos and concentration camps possess a salient relationship with food, notably bread which acts as an enduring …
Improvising Medicine
Julie Livingston. Published by Duke University Press, 2012, paperback, 248 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5342-3, £15.99. Written with harrowing honesty and rich emotion, Julie Livingston's book offers an insight into the extraordinary practice of the sole cancer ward in Botswana, and narrates the pathways of its patients, nursing staff and imported oncologist (Dr P). Botswana is unique in Southern Africa by having universal access to healthcare for its…
Positioning oneself and being positioned in the 'community'
This article offers a reflexive and anthropological contribution to the current volume of Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis. It reflects on the experience of conducting anthropological work at home – or across homes – I considered this research to be an experience of ‘Jewish ethnog-raphy’ as a Jewish ethnographer. However, my own ‘Jew-ish’ background meant that I had become ‘neither- fish nor fowl’ within the field-site, which proved both to …
If a rabbi did say 'you have to vaccinate,' we wouldn't
I Didn't Know How to Be with My Husband
Sex education presents a major dilemma for state-minority relations, reflecting a conflict between basic rights to education and religious freedom. In this comparative ethnography of informal sex education among ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) in Israel and England, we frame the critical difference between "age-appropriate" and "life-stage" (marriage and childbirth) models of sex education. Conceptualizing these competing approaches as disputes ove…
Vaccines and vitriol
This commentary addresses the issue of vaccine hesitancy and decision-making among religious minority groups in high-income country settings. Recent measles outbreaks have been attributed to lower-level vaccination coverage among religious minorities, which has inspired targeted as well as wholesale public health interventions and legislation in a range of jurisdictions. The commentary takes the case of self-protective ethnic and religious minori…
Aporetic differences? Equality entitlements, religious schools, and contours of protection
The requirement for schools in England to implement equality education has led religious conservative minorities to voice a conflict between legally protected characteristics of religion and sexual orientation. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with Jewish orthodoxies in England, the article critiques these apparent aporetic differences by tracing the grammars of protection that are fielded by custodians of state governance and religio…
Viral Entanglements
This article contributes to anthropological debates surrounding borderlands and biosecurity by tracing the multiple pursuits of protection that emerge between the state and minorities during infectious disease outbreaks. Drawing on an ethnographic study of child health in Jerusalem following epidemics of measles and COVID-19, the article demonstrates how responses to public health interventions are less about compliance or indiscipline than a com…
Arbitrating Abortion
The UK's on-going sex-selective abortion (SSA) controversy remains a major obstacle to the liberalization of national abortion governance, and is an issue broadly attributed to a "cultural" preference for sons among South Asian women. We conceptualize how healthcare professionals "arbitrate" requests for SSA by exploring the tension between its legal status and how requests are encountered by abortion providers. SSA is framed in this article as a…
A normal nation in our land”
Irish voters repealed the eighth
This commentary discusses Ireland's 25 May 2018 Referendum result to repeal the Eighth Amendment and has two key aims. Firstly, it encourages policy-makers to grasp the full potential of legislative reform by enabling and protecting women's access to abortion care within a continuum of sexual and reproductive healthcare options. Secondly, it calls for urgent clarity about access to abortion care in the interim period of legislative transition
But It's Not That They Don't Love Their Girls
Recent demographic analysis of sex ratios at birth in the UK has signaled the issue of "missing girls" in British Asian minority populations. This paper juxtaposes the processes of reproductive regulation set in motion by this new demographic knowledge of son preference, with lived experiences of gender equality and family-making practices. Ethnographic research conducted with British Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi families reveal diverse mec…
Positioning oneself and being positioned in the 'community'
This article offers a reflexive and anthropological contribution to the current volume of Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis. It reflects on the experience of conducting anthropological work at home – or across homes – I considered this research to be an experience of ‘Jewish ethnog-raphy’ as a Jewish ethnographer. However, my own ‘Jew-ish’ background meant that I had become ‘neither- fish nor fowl’ within the field-site, which proved both to …
Improvising Medicine
Julie Livingston. Published by Duke University Press, 2012, paperback, 248 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5342-3, £15.99. Written with harrowing honesty and rich emotion, Julie Livingston's book offers an insight into the extraordinary practice of the sole cancer ward in Botswana, and narrates the pathways of its patients, nursing staff and imported oncologist (Dr P). Botswana is unique in Southern Africa by having universal access to healthcare for its…
The taste of trauma
Drawing on ethnographic research in the UK’s only support facility for ageing Jewish Shoah survivors, this paper charts the ‘foodways’ in a Centre where satiety is experienced as an emotional as well as a physical need. How the experience of genocidal violence and displacement give rise to particular tastes of trauma is explored, firstly through the symbolism of bread which is metaphorically leavened with meanings and memories of survival – both …
Tokens of trauma
This paper explores the traumatic memories of ageing Shoah survivors who attend a Jewish social and therapeutic support facility in London (UK). The study investigates the perceived differences in trauma within a diverse group of members who partake in the day centre. The difference in Shoah experience contextualises how survivors of ghettos and concentration camps possess a salient relationship with food, notably bread which acts as an enduring …
Irish voters repealed the eighth
This commentary discusses Ireland's 25 May 2018 Referendum result to repeal the Eighth Amendment and has two key aims. Firstly, it encourages policy-makers to grasp the full potential of legislative reform by enabling and protecting women's access to abortion care within a continuum of sexual and reproductive healthcare options. Secondly, it calls for urgent clarity about access to abortion care in the interim period of legislative transition
Sniff and Tell
Bio-Detection Dogs (BDDs) are used in some high-income countries as a diagnostic intervention, yet little is known about their potential in low/middle-income countries with limited diagnostic resources. This exploratory study investigated the opportunities and implications of deploying BDDs as a mobile diagnostic intervention to identify people with asymptomatic malaria, particularly at ports of entry, as an important step to malaria elimination …
Making Bodies Kosher
For Haredi Jews, reproduction is entangled with issues of health, bodily governance and identity. This is an analysis of the ways in which Haredi Jews negotiate healthcare services using theoretical perspectives in political philosophy. It is the first archival and ethnographic study of Haredi Jews in the UK and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and Jewish studies. It will allow readers to understand how reproductiv…
Making Bodies Kosher
Minority populations are often regarded as being ‘hard to reach’ and evading state expectations of health protection. This ethnographic and archival study analyses how devout Jews in Britain negotiate healthcare services to preserve the reproduction of culture and continuity. This book demonstrates how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology reveal multiple pursuits of protection between this religious minority and the st…
Vaccines and vitriol
This commentary addresses the issue of vaccine hesitancy and decision-making among religious minority groups in high-income country settings. Recent measles outbreaks have been attributed to lower-level vaccination coverage among religious minorities, which has inspired targeted as well as wholesale public health interventions and legislation in a range of jurisdictions. The commentary takes the case of self-protective ethnic and religious minori…
Arbitrating Abortion
The UK's on-going sex-selective abortion (SSA) controversy remains a major obstacle to the liberalization of national abortion governance, and is an issue broadly attributed to a "cultural" preference for sons among South Asian women. We conceptualize how healthcare professionals "arbitrate" requests for SSA by exploring the tension between its legal status and how requests are encountered by abortion providers. SSA is framed in this article as a…
If a rabbi did say 'you have to vaccinate,' we wouldn't
I Didn't Know How to Be with My Husband
Sex education presents a major dilemma for state-minority relations, reflecting a conflict between basic rights to education and religious freedom. In this comparative ethnography of informal sex education among ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) in Israel and England, we frame the critical difference between "age-appropriate" and "life-stage" (marriage and childbirth) models of sex education. Conceptualizing these competing approaches as disputes ove…
“A Free People, Controlled Only by God”
This paper explores how criticism surrounding the ethics and safety of biomedical technologies circulates and ‘converts’ through global–local religious encounters, producing new claims of moral opposition and rights to religious freedom. The paper is concerned with the question of what rhetorical devices make vaccine safety doubt relevant to religiously Orthodox settings and what implications arise? Based on an ethnographic study of vaccine decis…
We've all got the virus inside us now
The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted ethnic minorities in the global north, evidenced by higher rates of transmission, morbidity, and mortality relative to population sizes. Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in London had extremely high SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence rates, reflecting patterns in Israel and the US. The aim of this paper is to examine how responsibilities over health protection are conveyed, and to what extent responsibil…
But It's Not That They Don't Love Their Girls
Recent demographic analysis of sex ratios at birth in the UK has signaled the issue of "missing girls" in British Asian minority populations. This paper juxtaposes the processes of reproductive regulation set in motion by this new demographic knowledge of son preference, with lived experiences of gender equality and family-making practices. Ethnographic research conducted with British Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi families reveal diverse mec…
Everyone's Accountable? Peer Sexual Abuse in Religious Schools, Digital Revelations, and Denominational Contests over Protection
Since the emergence of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, online tracts have been employed to publicly reveal experiences of sexual abuse and assault among women and men in religious institutions and to shame abusers, which tend to be examined as an issue of women's rights or child protection from adult predators. Drawing on the use of digital reporting platforms to testify against peer offences within religious schools, this paper asks how do …
Viral Entanglements
This article contributes to anthropological debates surrounding borderlands and biosecurity by tracing the multiple pursuits of protection that emerge between the state and minorities during infectious disease outbreaks. Drawing on an ethnographic study of child health in Jerusalem following epidemics of measles and COVID-19, the article demonstrates how responses to public health interventions are less about compliance or indiscipline than a com…
“We're potentially worsening health inequalities”
A polio booster campaign targeting all children aged 1-9 was implemented across London between August-December 2022 as part of a national enhanced poliovirus incident response. Orthodox Jewish (OJ) children were particularly vulnerable to transmission due to disparities in childhood vaccination coverage and the transnational spread of poliovirus affecting linked populations in New York and Israel. This study aimed to evaluate how the polio booste…
Transgressive quest/ions? Navigating religion, institutional expectations, and sexuality education in modern Britain
Aporetic differences? Equality entitlements, religious schools, and contours of protection
The requirement for schools in England to implement equality education has led religious conservative minorities to voice a conflict between legally protected characteristics of religion and sexual orientation. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with Jewish orthodoxies in England, the article critiques these apparent aporetic differences by tracing the grammars of protection that are fielded by custodians of state governance and religio…
A normal nation in our land”
Polio, public health memories and temporal dissonance of re-emerging infectious diseases in the global north
Observing the observatory on race and health
National Health Service England established the Race and Health Observatory as an independent expert body in 2021 to advance meaningful changes for Black and minority ethnic communities, patients, and healthcare professionals. It serves as a 'proactive investigator' by commissioning and facilitating research to achieve long-term transformation in health outcomes. However, medical anthropologists have largely overlooked the Observatory (and the re…
It’s Their Little Red Bible
Drawing on an ethnography of Nigerian migrant motherhood in London, we explore how the original design of children's health records, known as the Red Book, to log routine vaccinations has been transformed to document family proof of residency amidst Britain's "hostile environment." Nigerian migrant mothers use the Red Book as evidence of raising British children and to overcome their precarity. By resolutely documenting their children's immunizat…
Introduction
Sociology (17 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Gender Studies (10 obras) · Medicine (9 obras) · Gender Studies (8 obras) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (8 obras) · Anthropology (7 obras) · Judaism (7 obras) · Law (6 obras)