Teaching forensic science under conditions of humanitarian crisis: Toward a critically-informed experiential approach.

This article examines the use of critical pedagogy practices for teaching students the forensic science of migrant death and identification in the US borderland. Critical pedagogy, a philosophy of education that centers issues of social justice and human rights in the classroom, insists that teaching is inherently political, and challenges students to recognize and address power structures which perpetuate an unjust status quo. Drawing examples from qualitative data gathered during two field seasons in South Texas with the University of Indianapolis Forensic Science Team and narrative analysis of students team members' daily reflections about their work within structures designed to address the US border crisis, this article illuminates challenges and possibilities for teaching in learning in a context of mass violence.

"They read [the truth] in your blood": African American women and perceptions of HIV health.

In this article I examine variations in the ways in which low-income HIV-positive African American women in Midway, North Carolina engaged with and made meaningful laboratory-based knowledge of HIV disease. I highlight how women's engagement with "blood-work," as it was popularly called, reflected perceptions of survival with HIV disease and the material conditions and social relations in which these perceptions were embedded. Focusing less on the diagnostics themselves and more on the social contexts in which they became socially significant for study participants, I assert that "blood-work" provided a multiply constituted lens through which women expressed their subject positions and attendant material conditions within the context of a public health care program shaped by values associated with global neoliberalism.