Solicitude and Solitude: Care, Ethics, and the Vulnerability of Front-Line Social Work in the US.

The moral terrain of caring in a social work context is often treacherous. During ethnographic fieldwork with front-line workers at an organization providing services for unhoused individuals in a U.S.

Odds and ends: risk, mortality, and the politics of contingency.

Medical anthropology's cogent rethinking of conventional biomedical categories has largely overlooked the core problems of one key concept of both biomedical and social scientific analysis: risk. In particular, the use of the term in medical anthropology (and the social sciences more generally) frequently rests on two assumptions: (1) that contingency necessarily constitutes a threat to individual experience or social order; and (2) that a risk management paradigm that relies on a model of statistical probability is the ontologically preeminent way of engaging chance. Other approaches which do not take risk as the starting point for understanding contingency also have problems; they too assume that contingency is necessarily cause for crisis.