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.