Elena is an environmental and linguistic anthropologist, and a political ecologist, currently based at Leiden University (in the Netherlands), where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Asian Studies and International Studies, supervises graduate research on the environmental humanities and researches trasnsoceanic mobilities as they conceptualise environmental engagements. Amongst other things, she is interested in the permeable, elastic, sensorial and invisible spaces of conceptualising traditions, practices and tendencies across oceans and in the realms of the academe, whether standardised, legitimised, obscured, othered, rejected and counter-argued. Living, teaching and researching as part of a variety of locales has increased sensitivity to the epistemic limitations of most dualisms, especially that of signifier and signified. For Elena, voicing the world (s) of more-than-anthropos has always been a collective enterprise, an intimate exercise, a constant.
Wording sociality and health: COVID-19’s lexicon revisited
Anthr{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Elena Burgos Martinez. It is all a matter of words. The recent emergence of a wealth of COVID-19-related material shows that we all narrate this crisis. Daily concepts are de-constructed and re-constructed, re-produced and co-produced and, as users, we all inhabit the realms of terminology. But when parlance fails us, when the linguistic spaces of public inquiry fail to accommodate the sophistication of linguistic diversity, then what? Situated beyond the dualism of academia and policy, this {+}