An article by Assistant Professor of History Rebecca Gruskin appears in a special issue of the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. “‘A Nonexistent Incapacity’: Tracing Chronic Injury through X-Ray Images in Colonial Tunisia’s Gafsa Phosphate Mines (1920s–1930s)” explores the use of X-rays in determining which mine workers’ injuries were real and which were fake.
“Rather than asking what X-ray images show diagnostically,” Gruskin said, the “article charts how the creation of visibility and invisibility was a political act, a tactic of capital accumulation, and an arena of contestation.”
Gruskin said the article emerged from her participation in a 2021 environmental humanities Mellon Sawyer Seminar. It appears in a section on “Following Absence,” along with articles by other seminar participants.
