Collaborative Research Between Student Veterans and Faculty in Higher Education

A growing phenomenon of community writing groups, oral history projects, and college writing curricula with and for military veterans is predicated on the idea that writing and storytelling can have transformative potential.  In this article, we extend these efforts in new directions by advocating for collaborative research between student veterans and academic faculty on college and university campuses.  A civilian anthropologist faculty member and a then-undergraduate student and veteran of the US Marine Corps, the co-authors draw on our experiences working together on a 6-month exploratory ethnographic research project to detail the process and consider its implications, both scholarly and personal.  We offer observations and reflections of the amplifying possibilities that may open up when faculty researchers share control over the research agenda, process, and actions with student veteran researchers.  While the personal significance of collaboration for student veteran researchers may be varied and multiple – whether scholarly, social, political, therapeutic, or otherwise – these collaborations also have broader implications: namely, the inclusion of traditionally underrepresented military veterans in academic knowledge production about their experiences, priorities, and concerns.  Knowledge produced may in turn have wider relevance to government agencies, policy planners, scholars, and educational and clinical practitioners, while also serving to proliferate and diversify representations of veteran experiences and voices within and beyond the academy.</p

Tales of Decline: Reading Social Pathology into Individual Suicide in South India

In the south Indian state of Kerala, the nation’s so-called suicide capital, suicide can often appear self-evident in meaning and motivation to casual onlookers and experts alike. Drawing on explanatory accounts, rumors, and speculative tales of suicide collected between 2004 and 2007, this article explores the ontological power of certain deaths to assert themselves as always-already known on the basis of perceived and reported demographic patterns of suicide. I demonstrate the ways suicides are commonly read, less through the distinct details of their individual case presentations than “up” to broader scales of social pathology. Shaped by the intertwined histories of public health intervention and state taxonomic knowledge in India, these “epidemic readings” of suicide enact a metonymy between individual suffering and ideas of collective decline that pushes the suicide case to fit—and thus to stand for—aggregate trends at the level of populations. Focusing on how family navigated the generic meanings and motivations ascribed to the deaths of their loved ones, I argue that the ability of kin to resist, collude with, or strategically deploy epidemic readings in their search for truth and closure hinged significantly on their classed fluency in the social, legal, and bureaucratic discourses of suicide

Bloody war: menstruation, soldiering, and the "gender-integrated" United States military

Against the backdrop of an unprecedented number of women deploying in a new array of roles in the so-called "global war on terror" and the official opening of combat arms units to women in the United States military, menstruation has served as a key idiom in debates about what it means for women to wage war. In this article, I explore what public curiosity about and military anxieties over soldier menstruation can tell us about the banal and bodily nature of women’s militarization as a deeply affective, sensorial, and embodied process, and the tensions these anxieties reveal within liberal promises of a gender-integrated US military. Drawing on discourse analysis and ethnographic interviews, I examine efforts within US military medicine to hormonally regulate women soldiers’ menstrual cycles as a matter of military operational concern, alongside public narratives by women soldiers who deny the significance of menstruation to the work of soldiering. I argue that both of these discourses enact a conflation between womanhood and menstruation in the debate over women’s role in and at war, in a manner that circumscribes the possibilities of what we can apprehend–and feel–about war and soldiering as gendered experience

Making Time for the Children: Self‐Temporalization and the Cultivation of the Antisuicidal Subject in South India

This article examines suicide prevention among children in India's “suicide capital” of Kerala to interrogate the ways temporalization practices inform the cultivation of ethical, life‐avowing subjects in late capitalism. As economic liberalization and migration expand consumer aspiration in Kerala, mental health experts link the quickening of material gratification in middle‐class parenting to the production of insatiable, maladjusted, and impulsively suicidal children. Experiences of accelerated time through consumption in “modern” Kerala parenting practice reflect ideas about the threats of globalization that are informed both by national economic shifts and by nostalgia for the state's communist and developmentalist histories, suggesting that late capitalism's time–space compression is not a universalist phenomenon so much as one that is unevenly experienced through regionally specific renderings of the past. I demonstrate how experts position the Malayali child as uniquely vulnerable to the fatal dangers of immediate gratification, and thus exhort parents to retemporalize children through didactic games built around the deferral of desires for everyday consumer items. Teaching children how to wait as a pleasurable and explicitly antisuicidal way of being reveals anxieties, contestations, and contradictions concerning what ought to constitute “quality” investment in children as temporal subjects of late capitalism. The article concludes by bringing efforts to save elite lives into conversation with suicide prevention among migrants to draw out the ways distinct vulnerabilities and conditions of precarity situate waiting subjects in radically different ways against the prospect of self‐destruction

Insights into the soil microbial communities in New Zealand indigenous tussock grasslands

New Zealand indigenous tussock grassland ecosystems are highly valued for their biodiversity, as well as their natural and cultural heritage values. Extensive conversion of grasslands to agricultural land through burning, grazing and oversowing has led to calls for conservation of tussock grasslands. Areas of tussock grassland are gradually being converted into reserves for conservation and scientific research. Grassland soils harbour a diverse group of microorganisms that regulate and contribute to many biogeochemical processes. To better understand and predict how soil microbial communities will respond to environmental change, it is important to first examine the baseline microbial communities in undisturbed grasslands. Specifically this work assessed whether active and total microbial community composition and abundance differed between edaphically different indigenous grassland soils dominated by two Chionochloa tussock species. In this thesis, the abundances of nitrogen (N) cycling genes were correlated with differences in edaphic properties of the two grassland soils. High-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene identified significant differences in the microbial communities between two grassland soils dominated by closely related Chionochloa tussock grasses. These differences in composition and relative abundances were evident in both the active (rRNA-based) and total (rDNA-based) microbial communities. Amplicon sequencing of the nifH gene, encoding for nitrogenase gene, also identified differences in the total nitrogen (N2)-fixing communities between the two grassland soils. The active community was less diverse than the total community in both soils, and many rare phyla were enriched in the active microbial community. Results from this study showed that more than half of all operational taxonomic units (OTUs) in the Chionochloa grassland soils could be dormant. Furthermore, transcript ratios of nifH and amoA (encoding for ammonia-monooxygenase) to rpoB showed significant inter-site variation, as quantified by RT-qPCR. This thesis showed differential abundances of N cycling genes in the active microbial community in natural, undisturbed grassland soils with different edaphic properties. Characterising the structure, abundance and functional potential of microbial communities is important as they may serve as bioindicators reflecting not only the N status of soils, but general health of soils in the event of anthropogenic and natural disturbances

Fog of War: Psychopharmaceutical “Side Effects” and the United States Military

The unprecedented reliance today on psychiatric drugs to maintain mission readiness in war and to treat veterans at home has been the subject of ethical debate in the United States. While acknowledging these debates, I advocate for an ethnography of how US soldiers and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars themselves articulate political and ethical tensions in their experiences of psychiatric drug treatment. Detailing one army veteran’s interpretations of drug effects as narrated through the lens of his current antiwar politics, I examine the radicalizing transformations of self and subjectivity that he attributes both to his witnessing drug use in Iraq and to the neurochemical effects of his own medications. Playing on the biomedical notion of “side effects,” I highlight surprising political and ethical openings that can surface when psychopharmaceuticals and war intersect. Psychotropic medication use offers a critical realm for furthering the ethnographic study of the lived tensions and contradictions of military medicine and medicalization as revealed in militarized embodied experience

The Register of “Complaint”: Psychiatric Diagnosis and the Discourse of Grievance in the South Indian Mental Health Encounter

In the language of the medical file, “complaint” refers to the symptoms and ailments reported by the patient. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2007 in the mental healthcare setting in South India to argue that the typology of “complaint” and the dialogic exchanges involved in its production mark a far wider catchment area for the allegations and grievances that circulate between patient, kin, clinician, and observing anthropologist. I propose the notion of the register of complaint as a hermeneutic for grappling with the emotionally charged, interactional processes of accusation, arbitration, and reportage that drive clinical modes of inquiry and evaluation in the South Indian mental health encounter. Ethnographic case studies suggest that grievance and accusation command both a vital directive force and evidentiary role in the social, moral, and emotional work of psychiatric diagnosis

Medication by Proxy: The Devolution of Psychiatric Power and Shared Accountability to Psychopharmaceutical Use Among Soldiers in America’s Post-9/11 Wars

With the United States military stretched thin in the “global war on terror,” military officials have embraced psychopharmaceuticals in the effort to enable more troops to remain “mission-capable.” Within the intimate conditions in which deployed military personnel work and live, soldiers learn to read for signs of psychopharmaceutical use by others, and consequently, may become accountable to those on medication in new ways. On convoys and in the barracks, up in the observation post and out in the motor pool, the presence and perceived volatility of psychopharmaceuticals can enlist non-medical military personnel into the surveillance and monitoring of medicated peers, in sites far beyond the clinic. Drawing on fieldwork with Army personnel and veterans, this article explores collective and relational aspects of psychopharmaceutical use among soldiers deployed post-9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan. I theorize this social landscape as a form of “medication by proxy,” both to play on the fluidity of the locus of medication administration and effects within the military corporate body, and to emphasize the material and spatial ways that proximity to psychopharmaceuticals pulls soldiers into relationships of care, concern and risk management. Cases presented here reveal a devolution and dispersal of biomedical psychiatric power that complicates mainstream narratives of mental health stigma in the US military

The Masquerades of a Childhood Ciliary Body Medulloepithelioma: A Case of Chronic Uveitis, Cataract, and Secondary Glaucoma

Ciliary body medulloepitheliomas in childhood often masquerade other intraocular conditions due to its insidious nature as well as its secondary effects on proximal intraocular tissues in the anterior chamber. We report a case where a ciliary body medulloepithelioma in a two-year-old boy presents with chronic uveitis, cataract, and an uncontrolled secondary glaucoma after an innocuous blunt ocular trauma. The diagnosis was only made after the occurrence of a ciliary body mass. We discuss the clinical features of ciliary body medulloepitheliomas, the implications of a delayed diagnosis and treatment as well as the concern of periorbital tumor seeding with the use of an aqueous shunt implant in this case

Increased SPARC expression in primary angle closure glaucoma iris

Molecular Vision141886-189