Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Francis has yet to deal with women’s bodies and their messy reproductive dilemmas, especially for women in poverty.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of medical anthropology at UC Berkeley, where she directs the doctoral program in Critical Studies in Medicine, Science and the Body. Scheper-Hughes is co-founder and director of Organs Watch, a medical human rights project, an adviser to the World Health Organization and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science in Princeton, NJ. Her research interests include the anthropology of violence, madness and culture, inequality and marginality and childhood and the family. She is known for her book on schizophrenia among bachelor farmers in County Kerry (Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland) and on the madness of hunger, maternal thinking, and infant mortality in Brazil (Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil).
Who Was Robert Kennedy?
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: When Bobby began to rail against the evil of defrauding workers of their wages, I took a deep breath. Did Bobby know that words like this could get a dissident arrested and tortured?
How to Talk (and Not to Talk) About School Shootings
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: We knew a lot less then about lone wolf shooters and the festering alienation of angry white men. Thus, the default was black youth violence. If violence was the question, black youth was the answer.
The Great Wall of UC Berkeley vs. Baby Face Shapiro
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: He’s a mean bully and the university is giving this arrogant clown all the publicity he wants, and he wants there to be riots – he tells the media that he expects riots, and he says it with a smirk. Gotcha, Berkeley!
Radical Hope in Difficult Times
Nancy Scheper-Hughes,: Now is the time to put our bodies on the line, literally… at Standing Rock and, if the threat to build a wall is not delusional, we have to get there, to the borderlands in droves
Into the Wasteland
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Our indifference and disregard for the suffering of white and rural ethnic minorities (many of them black and Latino) left adrift to rot in the rust belt, the tobacco belt, the shut down textile mill towns was also deplorable.
Brazil: Zika, Chika, coup d’état
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Dedicated, yet underpaid and under-trained, “barefoot” community health workers managed the epidemic in the absence of any resident public health SUS doctors. The only exception was a single Cuban doctor working in a small peripheral rural villa.
Shaming Welfare Recipients
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: The worst part of living on the dole was the anxiety each month on the day the check was due to arrive.
Two Cents for Welfare
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: California Gov. Jerry Brown and the California legislature agreed to end the cap on support for families in need, most of them single mothers and their children. It took 20 years for California to reject a program based on the Clinton-era attack on “welfare as we knew it.”
A Nation on the Brink
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Beyond undoing the damage and human rights violations committed in our prisons, jails, courtrooms, police stations, and the horrendous militarization of police weaponry, we urgently need an official reckoning with the past.
Radical Evil: A Reflection on the Orlando Massacre
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Most shooters, death squad leaders, mass murders, exterminators have no ideology, no political theory, no spirituality.
