Images are increasingly used in health research as a complement to discursive methods, to elicit more and different types of knowledge and experience from participants. The use of image-based research, such as drawing and photography, then, holds promises for understanding health in new ways. However, such promises fall short when researchers and audiences treat images as realist representations of participants’ lives. Images are never clear representations of an objective reality- this is not their value either during or after research. In this photo essay, we show and discuss how we countered image positivism in the PHRAME study, Photographing Health by Rural Adolescents in the Midwest. The photos shown in this essay take viewers into our interviews in PHRAME and then out to our modes of audience engagement. Throughout, play served as a critical orientation and form of listening. We show this, first, through glimpses into our interviews, where we engaged in play that transformed meanings of photos taken by the young people. Then we show how we engaged public health, academic audiences, and popular audiences of the young people’s photos in play where audiences were invited to co-produce meaning through interactive activities, rather than reading to extract meaning from the photos. In conclusion, we suggest that play as a mode of research and exchange holds transformative potential, taking health research beyond the image positivism that has constrained the methodology to expand visions of what health is and might be.

Special Section Introduction

This article is about anthropological research ethics amid the simultaneous hyper-valuation of young people’s voices and the disarticulation (the process of making inarticulate) of their mental health needs. I reflect on my experience of recording a podcast about mental health treatment with young people in a moral context where ‘voicework’ was prominent. Following feminist critiques of ‘voice’ and ‘choice’, I argue that critical concerns usually associated with ‘giving voice’—authenticity and empowerment—are limiting as means of ethically relating to needs, since they presume personhood rests on coherence, intentionality and articulate expression. Instead, I resolve to adopt a research ethics that focuses on articulating needs, rather than platforming voices. This account urges researchers—myself included—to do better in confronting the non-responsiveness of care systems.

What can we learn about the therapeutic landscapes of in-patient psychiatric care by focusing on the invisible, the seemingly unimportant? To explore how mental affliction and caregiving acts are connected to other-than-human dimensions and sensory experience, I analyse the role of trees and forests in a Swiss in-patient psychiatric clinic. Using ethnographic vignettes and introducing the forest as a therapeutic landscape, I discuss the role of trees in a ward’s day-to-day life, a psychiatric sufferer’s modes of self-perception in the forest, and a physiotherapist’s active ‘tinkering’. My central argument addresses a problematic element in the research on psychiatric care in Switzerland: it is largely devoid of anthropological attentiveness to sensory perception and the atmospheric. I propose an alternative view where the experiences of illness, recovery, and violence are fundamentally co-created by a sensory context—including its marginalised, nonhuman, and atmospheric dimensions—and a conceptual framework informed by an anthropological adaption of feminist notions of ‘matters of care’ as well as sensory and ecological anthropology.

Editorial for the Spring issue, 2025.

During research on love songs and political poetry in Somaliland, one of my closest interlocutors has been a poet named Weedhsame who describes his work as arising from a duty to ‘give voice to the voiceless’. Collaborating with a musician and singer to ‘give voice’ to otherwise mute love-sufferers, Weedhsame is revered as a ‘love doctor’ whose words provide therapeutic relief to his ‘patients’. His political maanso poems also powerfully ‘give voice’—sonically and textually—to the otherwise inaudible concerns of marginalised communities. My conversations with Weedhsame have provided me with a compelling emic perspective on what it means to ‘give voice’ to others, and the intimately social work of vocal mediation. They have also challenged me to think about my own anthropological voicing practices. In this reflection, I use my conversations with Weedhsame to consider the politics and practices of ‘giving voice’ in Somaliland, in matters of love and politics, before turning these lessons back on my own practice. I focus especially on what these practices might mean for how anthropologists gather, assemble and sound the stories and ‘voices’ of others in our work.

‘Giving voice’ can be an empowering metaphor for the process of creating space for another’s perspective, allowing for their experience to be noted and attended to. Yet it is also a metaphor that relies on a particular form of articulation. Voice and narrative share many of the same strengths and limitations: for some, they are powerful tools of sense making and communication; but for others they can elude important forms of experience and fail to capture many of the more inchoate aspects of lived life in general. What happens in those moments when words fail, or are simply absent? In addressing this question via fieldwork in a community space in Osaka, I explore how silence can constitute an affective space of care. Shared silences are felt in their duration, the passing of time brings them about. In these contexts, silence is not merely an absence, but an index of presence.

In this Field Note, I take the opportunity to reflect on some of the concrete dilemmas that I was faced with in trying to negotiate, secure and maintain access to my field-site. These reflections derive from my engagement with infectious diseases physicians, at a renowned corporate tertiary care hospital in Southern India, who are working towards mitigating antibiotic/antimicrobial resistance. By drawing on the difficulties of felicitously translating my concerns, as an ethnographer, to the epistemological universe that animated (but did not wholly determine) my site of investigation allows me to think through what might or might not emerge as strategically useful in the varied loci that anthropologists are increasingly engaged with.

In this article, I investigate the case of a deaf woman, Silivia, who lived in western Uganda. Silivia did not use standardised sign language and was commonly considered to be ‘mad.’ However, some of her interlocutors disagreed, arguing that perceptions of madness arose because those around Silivia did not invest enough in attempting to communicate with her. I use experiential and analytical reflection on the methodological challenges of working with Silivia to explore what difficult moments tell us about how communication and everyday assessments of cognitive function are mutually implicated for deaf people in Uganda. Adopting a theoretical approach that understands languaging as a collective or distributed process, I argue that comprehensibility is not something that is determined by the qualities of a person’s expression, but rather something that happens to and through communication, mediated through social and environmental constraints. These include normative linguistic ideologies and frames of comprehensibility that may encode ableist expectations (for example, that ‘good’ communication is quick and efficient). In this context, I argue, interpretative difficulties that arise in the use of less conventionalised forms of visual languaging make some deaf people particularly subject to stigmatisation.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam, the media has meticulously covered disease prevention and reported on infection cases. This article will explore the current and shifting gender relations of Vietnam’s state and societal expectations by comparing Patient 17, a female Vietnamese citizen, and Patient 91, a British male pilot. While Patient 91 has received sympathy and international acclaim, Patient 17 has been heavily criticised and shunned from Vietnamese society. Through these case studies, I seek to understand how individual patient cases reflect the nuances of nationalism in Vietnam and how online citizens interpret the quintessential traits of Vietnamese character. Drawing on media analyses from an online news outlet, I delve into themes of media representation, gender, class, and race. By exploring how media coverage and online commentators shape perceptions of these patients, I aim to shed light on how patient stories can transcend individual experiences and become emblematic of broader societal ideals.