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Eating Dirt, Treating Slaves

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By  Rana Hogarth Historians of slavery must often contend with how the power imbalances of the slave system continue to shape the archival record, and, more importantly, influence the types of stories that get told. I certainly found this to be the case when writing my first book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (University of North Carolina Press 2017). I felt overwhelmed as I weighed the written correspondence, published medical treatises, military records, and plantation records, medical lectures etc. by white physicians, military officers, colonial elites, and slave owners, against the dearth of written sources left behind by enslaved and free black people. Thus, it was a great challenge to construct a narrative using sources whose faithfulness in accounting for black people’s experiences in sickness and health were tenuous to say the least. Given the realities of the archives related to slavery, my approach to research became
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Problematic Icons: Greta Thunberg and Helen Keller

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By Emmeline Burdett   Spitting Image The British satirical puppet show Spitting Image was originally broadcast on the TV station ITV between 1984 and 1996, but it has recently been revived. As the show satirises politicians and other public figures, it is inevitable that the puppets featured in the revival are different from the ones in the original programme One of the puppets in the revival is of teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. This has led to claims that Spitting Image is not satirising Thunberg as an individual public figure, but instead encouraging the public to regard all autistic people as figures of fun. This is far from the first time that Thunberg’s autism has been portrayed as something which makes her very vulnerable, and means that criticism of her is unfair. Some of her detractors have gone further and suggested that it also means that her perception of reality is flawed , and thus that what she says about climate change is unreliable.   The inabili
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“Just like everyone else”: Studying constructions of ‘normality’ through attitudes towards conjoined twins

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By Helena Franzén, Uppsala University In 1996, the American conjoined twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel went on the Oprah Show and spoke about their daily lives and their wish to impress upon the viewers how they both were quite ordinary people. Documentaries followed and they got their own reality show at TLC. In the show, the audience could follow their everyday life; at home, in school, and when doing extracurricular activities such as taking their respective driver’s licences. The viewers were also allowed to access the twins’ hopes, dreams, and plans for the future. Abigail and Brittany portrayed themselves as having two quite different personalities and expectations on life, and went on air to counter preconceptions about conjoined twins. By showing the public how normal they actually were, they wanted to demystify the condition. They were two young girls who wanted to raise awareness and be treated as the regular persons they were. The Youtube clip below shows one of the first
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