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EiJ Concept: Median Income

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This essay explains the concept of "median income" and provides resources for teaching it in various contexts.

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joerene.aviles

The author is Didier Fassin, a French sociologist and anthropologist who was trained as a physician in internal medicine. He developed the field of critical moral anthropology and currently does research on punishment, asylum, and inequality. This research looks at the social and political forces that affect public health trends, so is not directly involved in emergency response.

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joerene.aviles

1. In this sense, gender-based violence makes it clear that the suffering body – while purportedly universal – requires certain political, historical and cultural attributes to render it visible and worthy of care.

2. It seems that humanitarianism, as universalism, both erases and depends on difference; on the one hand, it manages difference, declawing it so that it doesn’t tear apart the humanitarian kit, made to fit and rehabilitate everyone into a basic bare-bones humanity.

3. In this sense, bringing gender-based violence into the humanitarian mission has inadvertently opened up a space for confrontation with politically significant forms of difference and inequality in their real and rabid forms.