An epidemic on wheels? Road safety,public health and injury politics in Africa (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Anthropologists have showed only marginal interest in road safety, despite the loss of some 1.3 million people killed in road crashes every year, the bulk of which occurs in ‘developing’ countries. 2011 marks the beginning of a UN Decade of Action for Road Safety. Its scope is ambitious: to save five million lives and fifty million injuries by the end of the ‘decade’ in 2020. In this article, the author examines the way public health professionals and educators have appropriated the language of epidemiology to argue that road death and injury can be viewed as an ‘epidemic on wheels’ or a ‘disease of development’, to mention two often cited epithets among participants in the global road safety lobby. One major consideration of interest to anthropologists and policy makers is to what extent this effectively essentializes road death in Africa and depoliticises its injury politics. Bearing in mind the historical context of medical interventions in Africa, the article examines the global road safety lobby and its affinity with public health as a form of transnational governance, arguing alternatively that if the UN Decade of Action on Road Safety is to have any significant impact, it must recognize more clearly the political stakes being raised in claims to reduce deaths and injuries caused by automobility.     

Modern observations: new ornithology and the science of ourselves, 1920–1940

The emergence and organisation of amateur networks of observation in Britain in the period between 1920 and 1940 are addressed in this paper. It examines the geographical, organisational and epistemological associations between networks of ornithological observation (traced through the British Trust for Ornithology), which emerged from the 1920s, and amateur ethnography (traced through Mass-Observation) which emerged in the late 1930s. I approach these ‘observational cultures’ as spaces which brought together new concepts of the local, of everyday nature and society, as well as the possibilities of changing the everyday. The paper suggests that popular observation during the period partly constituted a reframing of ways of knowing Britain differentiated through the everyday production of natural and social knowledge and the construction of the active citizen and new communities of practice.     

‘Slowing down the going-away process’ — Tom Stoppard and Soviet Dissent

Tom Stoppard is a playwright most noted for his ferocious wordplay and playful approach to reality. In the 1970s and 1980s, his concern for like-minded prisoners of conscience in the Soviet bloc informed his activism on their behalf, utilising his public profile in an attempt to reposition their plight in the West. Stoppard’s activism was largely informed by his involvement with a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working to publicise human rights violations in the Soviet Union, who provided him with the most up to date information on these abuses, and gave him access to dissidents. This article explores Stoppard’s activism on behalf of Soviet prisoners of conscience, highlighting the impact that these organisations had on his activism. Through an assessment of Stoppard’s efforts, it highlights the important role that NGOs and celebrity politics played during the cold war.