No time to say goodbye: ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths in the pandemic

COVID has deprived people of a ‘good death’ and disrupted rituals, mourning and funerals. Nikita Simpson (LSE) says Britain now needs to prioritise the million people bereaved by the virus

Kamzori: aging, care, and alienation in the post-pastoral Himalaya

As the Gaddi community of Himalayan India transition from agro–pastoralism to waged labor, configurations of kinship and care have shifted. Such shifts have introduced relational tensions, especially between elderly women, who have labored in the house and fields, expecting care in old age, and younger generations, who experience their own pressures of class aspiration. This article examines how the myriad tensions of the post-pastoral economy are experienced in the bodies of elderly women. It presents insights on kamzori, bodily weakness that is experienced by women who feel that their contribution of labor and care is unreciprocated by their kin or wider milieu. It recuperates alienation as a concept that captures distressed social relations. Alienation might be used by anthropologists studying aging, care, and debility to envisage the body in scalar relation to people, things and places, and illness or distress as disruption of such relations. [weakness, aging, care, gender, alienation]

Tension: an ethnographic study of women’s mental distress in rural North India

The aim of this thesis is to examine the embodied and mental forms of distress - expressed as tension – experienced by women of the Gaddi tribal community of Kangra, Himachal Pradesh, India. Tension is a polysemic term used across South Asia to describe the strains and scrapes of life, similar to ‘worry’ or ‘stress’ in Euro-American discourse. Amongst the Gaddi, the term provides a unique window into the intimate, embodied experience of politico-economic and social transformation. This community has experienced a rapid shift in livelihood over the past century, from agro-pastoralism to military service or waged labour. This has been paralleled by a transformation in structures of kinship, marriage and respectability, where the breakdown of the pastoral economy has precipitated the nuclearisation of the Gaddi household, increased control over women’s work and sexuality, and rising wealth inequality between households. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (October 2017-December 2018), this thesis investigates tension as an expression of the hopes, aspirations, speculations and fears that women have for upward social mobility. It works towards an emic bio-moral theory of tension as an imbalance of bodily humours that index strained domestic or community relations, and hence new inequalities of gender, class, caste and tribe. By paying attention to tension as it runs along the fissures of kinship, care and exchange networks, it is also the first application of a novel analytical approach that can be used to interrogate the relationship between intersectional inequality, social change and mental distress

Covid and care: how a ‘stacked’ care system could help places like Hackney

The weakness of local support networks, already cut to the bone, has been cruelly exposed by the pandemic. The LSE’s COVID and Care Research Group looks at the situation in Hackney and explains how an alternative ‘stacked’ care system could help

Covid and care: how to make job support schemes better

Rishi Sunak’s job support schemes were ambitious – at least initially. But did they work? In fact, argue the LSE COVID and Care Research Group, they were conceived with a particular kind of worker in mind: an able-bodied white British national who could easily work from home. Future support schemes need to reflect the large numbers of people in precarious, informal work

Stretched during COVID, Britain’s social infrastructure needs an urgent boost

Besides ‘the economy’ and ‘health’ lies a neglected area of human life during the pandemic: social infrastructures. These vital links, sustained by families and communities, now need to be a priority. The LSE COVID and Care Recovery Group call for both urgent and long term help for voluntary and community groups

Khuluma : using participatory, peer-led and digital methods to deliver psychosocial support to young people living with HIV in South Africa

Khuluma is a psychosocial and peer-to-peer mHealth intervention that uses text messaging to facilitate support groups for adolescents living with HIV (ALWH) with the aim of contributing toward positive health outcomes. Although use of mobile technology in the form of mHealth interventions has proliferated recently in the field of health, published literature describing methods and processes of its application are limited. We present a set of methods and processes utilised to develop and pilot the Khuluma mHealth intervention amongst young people (15–20 years) in South Africa. We recruited and enrolled 52 adolescents (15–20-year olds) from four clinics in Pretoria and Cape Town to participate in a 6-month pilot of Khuluma. Participants were ALWH, aware of their status, on antiretroviral therapy for more than 12 months, and not suffering from severe depression. We conducted four pre and post intervention focus group discussions (FGDs) with a proportion of ALWH (n = 36) enrolled in the pilot study using participatory methods. Several processes were utilised to then implement this pilot study. These included engaging ALWH for minor study implementation modifications; forming virtual groups; activating the mHealth platform; facilitating and delivering the Khuluma intervention. The acceptability of the intervention was informed by follow-up focus group discussions and text message data. The initial participatory processes helped to tailor the intervention design to participants’ needs. The peer-led facilitation of the groups allowed for the provision of sensitive psychosocial support that allowed young people to express themselves freely, develop a sense of self-worth, and interact more. The nature of themobile technology also allowed participants to build friendships beyond their geographic area and interact with their peers in real time. Within the evolving context of COVID-19, establishing evidence-based processes and methods for intervention design and curation in virtual spaces is critical.SHM Foundation. Text messages were donated by Vodacom SA.https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/reproductive-health#am2022Psycholog