A Political Medicine: Trust and Power in Ferguson
Anarchist Directions in Cultural Studies, forthcoming.
© 2015 A.G. Keller, CC BY-SA.
Outline
After participating as a street medic in the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, I collected archival documents and conducted focus groups to discover what street medics did, how participants defined politics, and how street medics helped or hindered political power.
I presented on the material at the 2015 Anarchism and the Body conference at Purdue University before writing the following paper. I found these conversations and this paper useful for understanding uprisings and how to do a better job preparing people to support participants in social unrest.
Download 34-page prepub version of paper.
PDF: polmed-2015dec-web.pdf (0.4 MB)
EPUB: polmed-2015dec-web.epub (0.05 MB).
| 1 Intro: Help This Woman! | 1 |
| 2 First Distinction: Nursing, Medicking, Ministering | 3 |
| 3 The Affective and Relational Field | 5 |
| 3.1 Gualaman | |
| 3.2 Andrea | |
| 3.3 Mama Cat | |
| 4 Internal Conflict | 9 |
| 5 Becoming Political | 11 |
| 5.1 The Status Quo | |
| 5.2 The Concept of the Political | |
| 5.3 Persuasion and Coercion | |
| 5.4 War | |
| 6 Becoming Powerful | 17 |
| 6.1 Political Power | |
| 6.2 Trust: How Power Grows Outside Law | |
| 7 Did Medic Practices Build Political Power? | 22 |
| 7.1 Evaluating Medics | |
| 8 Conclusion | 32 |
| 9 References | 33 |
You might also like to look at the outline and slides of the "A Political Medicine" oral presentation; Anarchism and the Body conference, Purdue University, Jun 2015.
