and health in the African diaspora
Issues of health and illness in the African diaspora will be the focus of a year-long series of talks being launched this month.
Titled "Race, Health and Medicine," the series was organized by Paul Gilroy, professor and chair of African American studies and professor of sociology, and Alondra Nelson, assistant professor of African American studies and sociology.
"Among the renowned speakers participating in the series are historians of science and medicine, social scientists, a physician and a science writer," says Gilroy. "They will consider health as an index of social status and social stratification, as a context for the processes of racialization, as an object of political contestation and as a crucial site for fully understanding the history and experiences of black people."
Nelson adds, "Topics discussed will include health and anti-colonial movements; bioethics; 'race' and theories of human origins; cancer and the politics of racial health; bio-anthropological concepts of race in Brazil and their implications for healthcare; and the 'dual loyalty' of medical professionals under the apartheid regime in South Africa."
The series will begin on Thursday, Oct. 23, with a talk titled "Out of Africa, Thank God!: Race in Recent Theories of Human Origins" by Robert Proctor, the Ferree Professor of the History of Science and co-director of the Science, Medicine, and Technology in Culture Program at Pennsylvania State University. (See Visiting on Campus.)
The next talk, "How Cancer Crossed the Color Line: The Strange Career of Race and Disease in 20th Century America," will be presented on Monday, Nov. 10, by Keith Wailoo, a professor in Rutgers University's Department of History and its Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.
Both lectures will take place at 4 p.m. in Rm. 211 of the Hall of Graduate Studies, 320 York St. Like all of the events in the series, they are free and open to the public.
In the spring semester, the series will continue as monthly colloquia. Featured speakers will include medicine and science writer Rebecca Skloot, author of the forthcoming book, "He La: The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks," about an African-American woman whose cancerous cells were taken for scientific research in the 1950s without her or her family's permission, and continue to be used in laboratories today; Nikolas Rose, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and director of the recently inaugurated BIOS Research Centre for the Study of Bioscience; Naomi Rogers, assistant professor of women's studies and the history of medicine at Yale; Laurel Baldwin-Ragaven, the Luce Professor in Health and Human Rights at Trinity College; and Livio Sansone, of the Federal University of Brazil at Bahia.
The "Race, Health and Medicine" series is sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, the African Studies Council and the Department of African American Studies.
More information about the series is available at the African American Studies department website at www.yale.edu/afamstudies/events.html, or by contacting Alondra Nelson at (203) 432-1176 or alondra.nelson@yale.edu.
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