Books
2017 | University of Toronto Press | ethnoGRAPHIC series
Co-Author Sherine Hamdy
Illustrators Sarula Bao & Caroline Brewer
As young girls in Cairo, Anna and Layla strike up an unlikely friendship that crosses class, cultural, and religious divides. Years later, Anna learns that she may carry the hereditary cancer gene responsible for her mother’s death. Meanwhile, Layla’s family is faced with a difficult decision about kidney transplantation. Their friendship is put to the test when these medical crises reveal stark differences in their perspectives…until revolutionary unrest in Egypt changes their lives forever.
The first book in a new series, Lissa brings anthropological research to life in comic form, combining scholarly insights and accessible, visually-rich storytelling to foster greater understanding of global politics, inequalities, and solidarity.
- Reviewed, excerpted, and featured in: American Anthropologist, Anthropology Now, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Jadaliyya, Somatosphere, The Lancet, CaMP, PEN Illustrated, POP Matters
- Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award for Anthropology/Sociology
Watch the trailer for the documentary film by Francesco Dragone about creating Lissa:
Articles
The Commons as Accumulation Strategy: Postgenomic Mutations in Biological Property
Social Text, 2019
Drawing the Revolution: The Practice and Politics of Collaboration in the Graphic Novel Lissa
ADA, 2018
Science and Performance: The(or)atrical Entanglements and Hauntological Relations
Introduction to guest edited special issue of Performance Matters, 2017
Cancer Previval and the Theatrical Fact
TDR, 2012
link to article online | sample page
Healthy women who are at hereditary risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer are surgically enacting the disease in material registers on their flesh in order to survive cancer in advance. In this practice of “previval,” the disease becomes itself, or gains biomedical substance, through its own theatrical gesture.
Untimely Economies of Survival
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2013
link to article online | sample page
This article takes the recent turn against hope in breast cancer activism as a point of entry into a broader examination of speculative economies of science that creatively imagine, materialize, and manage futures in the present. It argues that untimeliness – anticipatory, simultaneous, porous, and prognostic in its articulation – captures these alternate arrangements of life and action as they are mobilized in cancer research that hails healthy women as experimental subjects to participate in clinical studies.
Book Chapters
“Speculative Science: Genres of Future Life and the Matter of In-Vitro Meat.”
The Palgrave Handbook of 21st Century Science and Literature, Ed. Priscilla Wald. Palgrave Macmillan, Forthcoming
“Crafting Lissa, an Ethnographic Story: A Collaboration in Four Parts.”
Collaboration as Anthropological Method. Eds. George Marcus and Dominic Boyer. Cornell University Press. Co-author Sherine Hamdy, Forthcoming.
Online Publications
Creative Collaborations: The Making of “Lissa (Still Time): a graphic medical ethnography of friendship, loss, and revolution.”
Somatosphere, May 2016
Teaching Comics in a Medical Anthropology and Humanities Class
Teaching Culture, March 2015