Invisible cancers: Seeing, knowing, enacting and proving cancers in Haiti

In Haiti, pathological confirmation of a cancer diagnosis is often delayed or impossible, imaging is expensive and imperfect, and many tests are unavailable. Physicians frequently struggle to establish cancers at a level of certainty required by "evidence based" standards, delaying definitive diagnosis and rendering some cancers permanently "suspected." I use 22 months of participant observation at the two largest cancer treatment programs in Haiti, as well as throughout Haiti's fragmented healthcare system, to look closely at processes of diagnosis and management of suspected 'cancers' which may never fully come to be. I argue that as global oncology becomes increasingly standardized, local practices are forced into alignment with a global knowledge basis that governs the knowability/unknowability of cancer. Using three case studies drawn from this work, I examine relationships among visibility, power, expertise and the replication of inequity through the governance of knowledge production. Finally, I examine the implications of these processes for cancer care in the global south.

The invisibility of farmworkers: Implications and remedies

This article highlights the invisibility of farmworkers in Michigan, a state dependent on migrant labor for more than one hundred years. The study describes migrant housing camps using data from fieldwork, visits to housing camps, and the shadowing of outreach staff from service organizations. Although regulated, accommodations are minimal, substandard, and overcrowded, affecting the health and well-being of workers. The study describes what farmworkers do in their scant evening hours, the vulnerability of H-2A guest workers, the meticulousness accompanying outreach, and how farmworkers are visible to outreach staff. The study concludes by highlighting how farmworkers are just as invisible as are their housing camps, their contributions to the food movement, and their erasure from historic tales and promotional materials in local tourist towns, which stress the contributions of only some groups. The article underscores the value of outreach, the outstanding work performed by outreach staff, and avenues for increasing the visibility and advocacy on behalf of farmworkers.

India's lockdown: an interim report

The world has continued to change rapidly since the last version of this article was written on May 20, 2020. Yet, as this article goes to press, we are aware of two realities; first, that we cannot perennially chase a moving target, but second, that nothing about the fundamental trends that we have identified appear to have changed. India is firmly in the throes of a vicious pandemic that we can only hope will abate with the development of an effective vaccine. Our plea for the widespread provision of adequate health and medical facilities, adequate protection for the elderly, and transfers to those severely affected by the lockdown are absolutely unchanged in the face of the latest data. In contrast, the brutal enforcement of a lockdown with none of these accompanying measures can only worsen outcomes for the poorest and most vulnerable among the population.

Unconscious retinotopic motion processing affects non-retinotopic motion perception

Unconscious visual stimuli can affect conscious perception: For example, an invisible prime can affect responses to a subsequent target. The invisible interpretation of an ambiguous figure can have similar effects. Invisibility in these situations is typically explained by stimulus-suppression in early, retinotopic brain areas. We have previously argued that invisibility is closely linked to Gestalt ("object") organization principles. For example, motion is typically perceived in non-retinotopic, object-centered, and not in retinotopic coordinates. Such is the case for a bicycle-reflector that is perceived as circling, although its retinotopic trajectory is cycloidal. Here, we used a modified Ternus-Pikler display in which, just as in everyday vision, the retinotopic motion is invisible and the non-retinotopic motion is perceived. Nevertheless, the invisible retinotopic motion, can strongly degrade the conscious non-retinotopic motion percept. This effect cannot be explained by inhibition at a retinotopic processing stage.

Not Seeing is Believing: the Role of Invisibility in Human Lives

Our life is full of invisibility that exerts power on our acts, relationships, and construction of the self. This paper discusses psychological processes in which invisibility plays an essential role, and constructs a typology of invisibility in society and in our lives. After a brief look at the crucial role of invisibility in prevailing theories of psychology, I first show how invisibility works in children's meaning constructions, the process in which their selves become clear for observers (the presentational self, Komatsu 2010). The development of children's meaning making is led by different types of invisibility concerning the children themselves. Second, I extend the discussion from the development of individuals to the role of socially regulated invisibility that controls our acts and relationships with others, introducing examples concerning religious belief in history. After these discussions, I present a hierarchical classification of invisibility from a simple spatial-temporal separation of concretely existing objects and ourselves to an abstract aspect of invisibility in which the object and its meaning are unclear.

The nullifying experience of self-objectification: The development and psychometric evaluation of the Self-Objectification Scale

Self-objectification is a process or state in which an individual loses his/her sense of subjectivity. Although several measures assess self-objectification as representing self-perception based on sexual and bodily appearance, there is a need for a measure assessing self-objectification as reflecting dehumanization. This study aims to evaluate the psychometric properties of a new measure, the Self-Objectification Scale (SOS). In Study 1, the SOS was administered to 373 students. In Study 2, the SOS was administered to 300 female students along with a battery of questionnaires, including the Experience of Shame Scale (ESS) and the Objectified Body Consciousness Scale (OBC). In addition, participants were asked about their history of childhood maltreatment, via the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), as well as about their experience of sexual and/or physical assault, at any age. Two reliable SOS subscales emerged from Study 1: Invisibility and Lack of Autonomy. In Study 2, a confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the scale's underlying factor structure, which was obtained in Study 1. The two factors were significantly correlated with measures of shame and body-objectification. Finally, individuals who reported childhood maltreatment, as well as those who reported sexual and/or physical assault at any age, had higher scores of Invisibility and Lack of Autonomy than those who did not have such experiences. The results of the present analyses suggest that the SOS has good psychometric properties, making it useful as an assessment tool in future research.

The development of children's concepts of invisibility

One of the most striking examples of appearance-reality discrepancy is invisibility - when something has no appearance yet still exists. The issue of invisibility sits at the juncture of two foundational ontological distinctions, that between appearance and reality and that between reality and non-reality. We probed the invisibility concepts of 47 3-7-year-olds using two sets of tasks: (1) an entity task, in which children were queried about the visibility and reality status of a variety of both visible and invisible entities, and (2) two standard appearance-reality tasks. Results showed that children's concepts of visibility and reality status are intertwined, and that an understanding that some entities are impossible to see develops between the ages of 3 and 7.

Although unseen, chronic pain is real-A phenomenological study

Background Research has emphasised the essential role of psychosocial risk factors in chronic pain. In practice, pain is usually verified by identifying its physical cause. In patients without any distinct pathology, pain is easily defined as imaginary pain. The aim of this qualitative study was to explore the invisibility of chronic pain, from the patients' perspective. Methods Thirty-four participants with chronic pain were interviewed. The mean age of the participants was 48 years, and 19 of them were women. For 21 of the participants, the duration of pain was more than five years, and most of the participants had degenerative spinal pain. The transcribed interviews were analysed using Giorgi's four-phase phenomenological method. Results The participants' chronic pain was not necessarily believed by health care providers because of no identified pathology. The usual statements made by health care providers and family members indicated speculation, underrating, and denial of pain. The participants reported experience of feeling that they had been rejected by the health care and social security system, and this feeling had contributed to additional unnecessary mental health problems for the participants. As a result from the interviews, subthemes such as "Being disbelieved", "Adolescents' pain is also disbelieved", "Denying pain", "Underrating symptoms", "The pain is in your head", "Second-class citizen", "Lazy pain patient", and "False beliefs demand passivity" were identified. Conclusions In health care, pain without any obvious pathology may be considered to be imaginary pain. Despite the recommendations, to see chronic pain as a biopsychosocial experience, chronic pain is still regarded as a symptom of an underlying disease. Although the holistic approach is well known and recommended, it is applied too sparsely in clinical practice. Implications The Cartesian legacy, keeping the mind and body apart, lives strong in treatment of chronic pain despite recommendations. The biopsychosocial approach seems to be rhetoric.