This article, co-authored with William Beinart, has recently been published in the South African Historical Journal. Contact me for more information and a copy of the full article.
Read MoreImage credit: M Peretz, 1959
African Clawed Frog, Xenopus laevis, used in labs for pregnancy tests from the 1930s-1950s
Chemical messengers (a brief history of hormones)
What do I know about hormones? They're a familiar part of everyday life. They affect my emotions, sleep patterns, stress levels, desire, sexual and reproductive cycles, experience of aging, immune system and more…
Hormones are substances that connect: agents of communication within our bodies, and also secretions that travel across different bodies and ecosystems. The development of hormonal medicine – endocrinology – connects horses, pigs, slaughterhouses, glands, piss, prisons, soya beans, frogs, yams, sisal, Puerto Rican and American women, exploitation and liberation through networks of research and extraction for the medical-industrial complex…
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Sterkspruit Nature Reserve, Mpumalanga
Travels with my Dad and how knowledge travels
In January I traveled to South Africa on a research trip with my dad, William Beinart, following the story of a wild yam. Through this trip we are learning more about Dioscorea sylvatica, a wild yam known as 'Elephant's Foot' or 'ingwevu' in Zulu, that was heavily exploited by the British firm Boots for the production of cortisone in the 1950s – a story I've been digging into for over a year.
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Brendel botanical models at the World Museum, Liverpool
Intuiting the archive
In the past months I've spent time in medical archives and museums, accessing collections of images, artefacts, documents and objects, sifting for stories, making unexpected connections. I have been thinking a lot about how these things came to be here, what has been preserved, what's missing, and how particular narratives and realms of knowledge are constructed and reproduced by the value systems of dominant cultures.
I have been (deliberately) unmethodical in my research, following my nose, promiscuous with my attentions. I have started searches beginning with a particular plant, or drug, and allowed this to take me into exploded narratives of bodies, pharma-colonialism, identity, politics, hormones, piss, scientific innovation, belief, witches, extraction, exploitation, testing, failing, poisons and cures, magic bullets, not-knowing, bio-prospecting, life-saving, life-ending...
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