Browsing by Author "Rosenblatt, Adam"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Open Access
Agua es vida // Water is Life
(2023-04-20) Brennan Agarwal, Chaya
Open Access
Autism, Advocacy Organizations, and Past Injustice
(Disability Studies Quarterly) Rosenblatt, Adam
Fruitful connections can be made between Disability Studies and post-conflict transitional justice, two areas of scholarship concerned with human rights and the impacts of violence that have rarely been brought into critical dialogue with one another. For over a decade, one of the world's largest and best-known autism organizations, the US-based Autism Speaks, has been subject to criticisms and boycotts by autistic self-advocates and their allies. This article describes the forms of harm attributed to the organization, arguing that these harms can be viewed through the lens of what transitional justice scholar Jill Stauffer calls "ethical loneliness": "the experience of being abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard" (2015b, 1). I argue that Autism Speaks's recent reforms and responses to criticism, in focusing largely on present-day organizational policies and structures, fail to grasp the full temporal dimensions of ethical loneliness or the importance of addressing past injustice.
Open Access
Civic Engagement with the Dead: Notes on Theory and Practice in a Forensic Key
(The Applied Anthropologist) Rosenblatt, Adam
Open Access
Engraved: A Family Forensics
(2023-02-09) Rosenblatt, Adam
An essay I wrote and drew for the Society for Cultural Anthropology's Visual and New Media Review, as part of a series of responses to Writing with Light Magazine's Issue No. 1: Photography & Forensics. It's about my Grandfather, David Bialer (who was forced to work as an engraver for the Nazis), his wife Bella and daughter Mira who were killed in the Holocaust, and a photograph I’ve never seen but will always remember: “a broken forensics, inadmissible in any court, engraved into my imagination.”
Open Access
Healers and Helpers: Colonial Power Imbalances in Medical Missions and Global Health
(2024-04-10) Purnell, Catherine
This thesis is about colonial power imbalances within global healthcare provision. Evangelical Christian medical missionaries and many experts in field of global health both consider themselves to be “helpers” to populations of people they understand to be in need of help. This reinforces the flow of high income countries sending sometimes unwanted “assistance” to low and middle income areas, similar to colonialism. The movement to decolonize global health has added tools to remove colonialism from care, but has not yet been fully successful. I add to the wealth of information about decolonizing global health provision by integrating medical mission care and global health into the same conversation, and asks if it is possible for medical missions to decolonize in a manner that the ‘decolonizing global health’ movement seeks to do. I use the example of Partners in Health and its liberation theology-based method of care as an example of decolonized care. On the other hand, it is not possible to offer decolonized care under the label of “medical missions” as the field is currently defined.
Open Access
Known Unknowns: Forensic Science, the Nation-State, and the Iconic Dead
(2017-01-05) Wagner, Sarah E; Rosenblatt, Adam
Forensic Biohistory. Anthropological Perspectives The lives of kings, poets, authors, criminals, and celebrities are a perpetual fascination in the media and popular culture, and for decades anthropologists and other scientists have ...
Open Access
Living Life in the Face of Death: An Ethnographic Exploration of Healing, Temporality, and Connection in Suicide
(2024) Sperber, Benjamin
Suicidality is a visceral, frightening reality that many with mental illness face on a daily basis. Treated with contempt in society, much of the scholarship surrounding suicidality focuses on the family or the effectiveness of treatment options. This thesis represents an effort to hold space for those who suffer from suicidality. Through ethnographic research on reddit and through semi-structured interviews with those who have been involuntarily committed in the state of North Carolina, the author offers a new analysis of the contingencies of healing, time, and connection for those who fail in their aimed desire of death through suicide. Split into three chapters, the author first examines how western biomedicine and the telos of medicine (i.e., treating to cure) necessarily is complicated by mental illness, leaving those who experience suicidality to feel that they are incapable of healing. Moreover, the author undertakes an exploration of differing tropes within biomedicine in an attempt to shed light on how dominant notions of healing are confounded or complicated by suicidality. In Chapter Two, the author explores time; namely, how suicidality subverts productivity-centered, future-oriented understandings and experiences of time. To this end, the author poses a new temporal schema, suicidal temporality, which seeks to explain how those who fail at suicide attempts experience time, the accumulation of life stressors, administrative labor, and more. In the final chapter, the author explores two forms of relationships—those between patient and physician, as well as those between suicidal individuals—to demonstrate how differing contexts can afford or limit a suicidal person varying levels of connection, trust, and aid from their interlocutor. Offering no solutions to eradicate suicidality, the author instead hopes to allow readers to gain a greater understanding of the experiences, emotions, and sensorial experiences that accompany suicidality.
Open Access
Review of Missing Persons: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Disappeared, edited by Derek Congram
(Human Rights Quarterly: a comparative and international journal of the social sciences, humanities and law) Rosenblatt, Adam
Open Access
The Danger of a single story about forensic humanitarianism.
(Journal of forensic and legal medicine, 2019-02) Rosenblatt, Adam
Since the mid-1980s, forensic scientists have played a crucial role in the international response to mass violence, contributing evidence to war crimes tribunals and identifying bodies to end the tortuous uncertainty of loved ones. Recently, experts at the International Committee for the Red Cross have described these activities using the term "humanitarian forensic action," applying it from the field's origins in Argentina to the multiple organizations and types of projects that exist today. This article cautions against any account of the history of humanitarian forensic action, or its contemporary landscape, that is so simple and unified. It points to divergent mandates, working methods, and even definitions of humanitarianism, focusing especially on new ways in which forensic scientists are addressing the mass suffering caused by structural violence.