Anna Skarr

GWU MPH (humanitarian health) c/o 2023
UC Davis BA in IR c/o 2020
medanthro enthusiast!
Progress thrives where systems fail.
she/her 🏳️‍🌈🇺🇸

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

So exciting to see harm reduction in action. Hoping these facilities can be expanded across the country with the right legislative barriers torn down.

[Jacob Soboroff @jacobsoboroff]

EXCLUSIVE: NYC opened USA’s first sanctioned facilities in which drug users can consume substances like heroin under supervision of professionals in order to stop ODs. Here I speak with a Marine Corps vet as he uses. More tonight on @NBCNightlyNews.

[ACLU @ACLU]

Biden must end both Title 42 and the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and restore our asylum system now.

Lives are at stake.

[ACLU @ACLU]

BREAKING: The Biden administration announced it is further extending the Trump-era program known as Title 42 that expels people seeking asylum without due process.

The Title 42 program is illegal and cruel.

[Partners In Health @PIH]

We’re live now with Dr. Paul Farmer on @reddit_AMA!

Tune in and ask your questions: https://t.co/UeaAFHXZ3g

[ACLU @ACLU]

Trans people exist.
Trans people belong.
We deserve our existence to be respected.

We honor trans lives on this Transgender Day of Remembrance. We will never stop fighting for our rights.

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

"You make us sound mad." ...
"No. You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?"

ibid.

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

"Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape... You have to start out learning to believe the little lies."
"So we can believe the big ones?"
"Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing."

Terry Pratchett, The Hogfather

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

Great issue; especially damning in its accounts of Australia's offshore refugee processing. The economic costs make the strategy impractical; the human costs make it inconceivable. No winners.

[Forced Migration Review @FMReview]

New issue of FMR now live online in English! Issue 68’s main feature is on ‘#Externalisation’, with a shorter feature on 'Mobility and agency in protracted #displacement’, in collaboration w/@TRAFIG_EU.

See: https://t.co/rf56xegol4

#ForcedMigration #AsylumSeekers #Refugees

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

Tricky to navigate in a sociopolitical context as a #humanitarian actor. No legitimacy or authority. But making a decision that aligns your position with those who suffer provides a guide and a barometer for assessing whether choice was correct & just.

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

Ethical dilemma in class regarding whether or not to intervene in a community if an individual with severe mental illness is imprisoned/treated poorly. Proposed solutions ranged from paying members of the community to care for the person to condemnation to ignoring it entirely.

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

“Medicine becomes pragmatic solidarity when it is delivered with dignity to the destitute sick.”

Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power p138

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

"Attention to the truth of another's condition: the name of this intense pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention is love."

Simone Weil, quoted in Hugo Slim's Humanitarian Ethics p51

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

"We are not sure that words can always save lives, but we know that silence can certainly kill."

Dr. James Orbinski, MSF Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech 1999

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

"They're in my head. Your head, too. They're inside the only thing that was ever really ours. Even our stories are not our stories. We tried to tell our own, Fa, and all we did was end up telling theirs."

-@GWillowWilson, The Bird King p241

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

"In the face of violence, disasters, and epidemics, and also poverty, insecurity, and misfortune, what is intolerable is not only the presence of the tragic but the in equality in which it is embedded."

Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason p252

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

Important addition: "But it does bear some of its markings."

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

"Humanitarian governance has expanded to the point that it can be mistaken for an empire of humanity.. but [it] looks more like a rival to empire, because it is dedicated to.. emancipation & empowerment, not.. oppression & subservience"

Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity p221

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

"'Don't study the poor and powerless, because everything you say about them will be used against them.'

I hope to have avoided lurid recountings that serve little other purpose than to show, as anthropologists love to do, that I was there."

Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power p26

[Anna Skarr @AnnaSkarr]

"There is no unalloyed good in the world of power. Even a healer has to choose whom to save."

Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant, pg. 395