The second installment of a series of dialogues on COVID-19 and Racism of the SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race (TRAR) Collective is now live on the UCHRI Foundry website! Check out “Metrics, Enumeration, and the Politics of Knowledge in Estimating Racial Health Disparities in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Dialogue with Alexis Madrigal, Co-Founder of The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project.”
This dialogue follows the first in the series entitled “Black Geographies of Quarantine.” In this dialogue, SJRC affiliate faculty and Assistant Professor of Sociology Jaimie Morse, with Film & Digital Media graduate student Dorothy Santos, and UCSC undergraduate student alum Aitanna Parker (as part of the TRAR Collective) are in dialogue with Alexis Madrigal, journalist and co-founder of The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project that operated from April 2020 to March 2021. The Atlantic is a major media outlet that produced alternative statistics on COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths during the first year of the pandemic, acting as a watchdog on the federal government’s data and reporting. The Atlantic was among the first media outlets to report racial health disparities through its COVID Racial Data Tracker before the CDC released data by race. In this dialogue with Alexis Madrigal, we explore the politics of knowledge production and how data can advance racial justice. What follows is an edited, condensed transcript of the dialogue.
Contributors
Alexis Madrigal is a journalist. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic and co-founder of The COVID Tracking Project. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Information School and the Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine. He is an affiliate with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He is the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
Jaimie Morse is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University. She studies knowledge, technology, and policy in biomedicine and public health, with a focus on the interplay of law, health, and human rights in processes of policy change.
Aitanna Parker is a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz, with a BA in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and a BS in Technology and Information Management. She plans to use her technical abilities for social good. Aitanna is a former fellow at the Science & Justice Research Center, looking at datasets to understand how Covid is negatively impacting racialized populations in the United States. She furthers her study at Lund University pursuing a Masters in Information Systems.
Dorothy R. Santos is pursuing her Ph.D in Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz with a designated emphasis on Computational Media. Her dissertation project examines voice recognition and assistive technologies through the lens of feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, tech, race, and ethics.