April 24, 2014 | Precision Public Health After Covid-19

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

4:00-5:30 PM

SJRC Common Room Oakes 231 + Zoom (registration)

Join SJRC scholars in Oakes 231 (or on Zoom) for an open discussion! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work! At this session, we will hear from Martha Kenney (Department Chair, Women & Gender Studies, San Francisco State University) and Laura Mamo (Health Equity Institute Professor of Public Health, San Francisco State University) on precision public health after Covid-19.

In the mi-2010s, a new paradigm called precision public health has emerged—part genomics, part informatics, part public health, and part biomedicine, touted as a data-driven public health revolution. This presentation reflects on the promises of precision public health in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, looking at how the “precision imaginary” has shifted when confronted with a global health crisis that exacerbated health inequities worldwide.

Martha Kenney (Ph.D. History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz) is a feminist science studies scholar whose research explores the poetics and politics of biological storytelling. Her current project examines and intervenes in the narratives emerging from the new field of environmental epigenetics, which studies how signals from the environment affect gene expression. Specifically, she looks at how assumptions about gender, race, class and sexuality influence the design of epigenetic experiments on model organisms and how we understand the relationship between bodies and environments. She has recent and forthcoming articles in Social Studies of Science, Science as Culture, Biosocieties and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Dr. Kenney teaches courses on the politics of science, technology, medicine and the environment.

Laura Mamo is the Health Equity Institute Professor of Public Health. Her work lies at the intersection of medical sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. Her research and teaching focus on sexuality and its politics in medicine, science, and health discourse, practice, and resistance. Mamo is the author of the forthcoming book, Sexualizing Cancer: HPV and the Gendered Politics of Cancer Prevention (University of Chicago Press, 2023); Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Duke University Press, 2007); co-author of Living Green: Communities that Sustain (New Society Press, 2010); and co-editor of Biomedicalization Studies: Technoscience and Transformations of Health, Illness and U.S. Biomedicine (Duke University Press, 2010). Mamo is the co-founder of The Beyond Bullying Project, a multimedia school-based queer sexuality and gender project with Jessica Fields, Jen Gilbert and Nancy Lesko. Mamo’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and others. Mamo earned her PhD in 2002 from UCSF and BA from University of Wisconsin, Madison. She joined the faculty at SFSU as Health Equity Professor of Public Health in 2010 following appointments as Assistant Professor and Associated Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Theorizing Race After Race: Race, Contagion, and the Nation: A Dialogue with Pedro Valdez, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, and Jenny Reardon

Over the past year SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race (TRAR) research cluster has produced a series of dialogues grappling with COVID-19 and Racism. The first two dialogues, hosted on UCHRI’s Foundry site, cover Black geographies of quarantine and Metrics, enumeration, and the politics of knowledge.

During August 2021, TRAR student researchers hosted a third dialogue with four scholars from around the Americas discussing how COVID-19 has revivified or changed existing debates about race and racism in different trans/national contexts. This dialogue has been posted to The Foundry as Race, Contagion, and the Nation: A Dialogue with Pedro Valdez, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, and Jenny Reardon

Below you will find information about relevant contexts that shape the topics discussed during the full dialogue.

As a UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) report from 2020 summarizes, xenophobia and racism toward migrant workers around the world has grown since the start of the pandemic, attributed to fears of contagion and charging migrants with spreading the virus. For example, just as the U.S. ‘weaponized COVID against migrants’, the Dominican Republic’s long history of structural racism against Haitians as well  its and the U.S. governments’ deportations of Haitians during the past year threatened not only the general health of these migrants, but also caused a surge in COVID-19 cases in Haiti, already suffering from an unstable public health infrastructure.

Further intertwined with the COVID-19 pandemic has been mass protests (both in the U.S. and internationally) against racism, white supremacy, and police brutality sparked, in part, by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in Spring 2020. Much discussion ensued about the need to understand white supremacy and racism as factors creating structural threats to health. As one open letter signed by over 1,200 U.S.-based public health professionals and community advocates put it, “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”

In an effort to think through these developments, the dialogue ranged widely with panelists offering their uniquely situated takes. First, panelists were asked about the possibilities and impediments to the collection of COVID data based on ‘race’ in their countries (the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the United States). Next, they discussed strategies to move away from the biologizing and racializing discourse on pre-existing conditions and COVID-19 vulnerability that become tied to certain racial/ethnic groups. As one strategy, Dr. Saldaña made the case for treating social-structural forces, such as racism and poverty, as pre-existing conditions themselves. The discussion covered the utility of seeing whiteness as a race and the ways the power and privilege of whiteness becomes invisibilized even as it leads to harmful effects on others – for example, white U.S. citizens vacationing in Mexico without getting tested for COVID-19.

The dialogue further covered the function and role of borders, and understandings of the border as a racialized and carceral space of containment and expulsion. Panelists discussed how legacies of colonialism have gutted many national and transnational public health responses to the pandemic, thus failing to ensure adequate health and safety for those most vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. Panelists concluded the dialogue by discussing ways the meaning of racial justice has shifted trans/nationally since early 2020, and how they are grappling with these developments as they move forward with their work and projects.

Contributors

Dennis Browe is a Sociology PhD student who works across medical sociology, science and technology studies, and feminist theory. He studies the rise of precision medicine in the U.S., as well as the field of biogerontology, which links questions of population aging to the biomolecular study of aging in cells and organisms.

Sophia Parizadeh is a second-year undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, majoring in Politics. She is interested in understanding systemic racial inequality and how it has been magnified during the COVID-19 pandemic. She hopes to shed light on other social justice issues and work towards forming solutions to today’s problems.

Dr. Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology at UCSC and Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Dr. Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is an anthropologist at the Universidad de Guanajuato in central Mexico whose work includes scholarship on mestizaje and health patterns of non-communicable diseases and healthcare access. 

Dr. Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is a Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC who works on science and technology studies, border identities, indigeneity, and citizenship regimes, especially related to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Pedro Valdez is affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, who currently holds a position at a national migration research institute.

Lucia Vitale is a PhD student in the UC Santa Cruz Politics department and interdisciplinary global health scholar whose work explores the right to healthcare (see “COVID’s Co-Pathogenisis”). She uses citizenship to frame inclusion/exclusion practices occurring at both the transnational scale in global health policy, and at the national scale in social policy. You can find her on twitter.

Theorizing Race After Race: Metrics, Enumeration, and the Politics of Knowledge in Estimating Racial Health Disparities in the COVID-19 Pandemic

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.

COVID-19: Online Events

Image credit: CDC/Alissa Eckert; Dan Higgins

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters and calls for action, and organizing and participating in online events.

 

Help Spread the Word of These Online Events

C-Span | State and Federal Covid-19 Briefings and Legislative Deliberation | (schedule)

Archived Events

February 8, 2021 | Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics | Medical Apartheid Goes Viral: How Infection Catalyzes Bioethical Erosion with Harriet Washington (recording)

Jan 15, 2021 | Schmidt Futures + SSRC | COVID-19 — Case Studies from 23 Nations (recordings)

Dec 7, 2020 | Harvard Data Science Initiative| Trust in Science, Trust in Democracy (recording)

Sept 24, 2020 | Boston Medical Library | History in an Epidemic: The Puzzles of Covid-19 (recording)

July 23, 2020 | UCSC Molecular Diagnostic Lab | Tales from a pandemic pop-up lab with Isabel Bjork, Jeremy Sanford, Olena Vaske, and Michael Stone (recording)

July 17, 2020 | UCSC University Forum: The Lessons of COVID for Global and Community Health with Nancy Chen and Matt Sparke (recording)

July 1, 2020 | COVID-19: The scientific basis for what we know (and don’t!) and the exit strategy it provides with Marm Kilpatrick (recording)

June 22, 2020 | University Forum: Solidarity Economics for the Coronavirus Crisis & Beyond with Chris Benner (recording)

June 17, 2020 | The Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce | Health Care Inequality: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19 and the Health Care System (recording)

May 28, 2020 | American Medical Association (AMA) | Prioritizing Equity: The Root Cause (recording)

May 27, 2020 |UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation | The Coronavirus Crisis and Social Change: Flash Talks on Social and Economic Dimensions of the COVID-19 Pandemic | Moderated by Dean Katharyne Mitchell (registration)

May 26, 2020 | UC San Diego Health | Lessons Learned: Ramping Up Telehealth Services During COVID-19 | Presented by Lawrence Friedman, Kristian Kidholm, Micaela Monteiro, and Lisa Moore (recording)

May 22, 2020 | UC Santa Cruz Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | COVID-19: The Scientific Basis for What We Know and the Exit Strategy it Provides | Hosted by Infectious Disease Expert Marm Kilpatrick (recording)

May 14, 2020 | UC Santa Cruz  Institute for Social Transformation and UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative| Webinar: Health Care Access, Service Delivery, and Youth Civic Engagement in the Central Valley during the COVID-19 Pandemic (recording)

May 8 – 9, 2020 | Princeton University| Pandemic, Creating a Usable Past: Epidemic History, COVID-19, and the Future of Health. | Sponsored by the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) with support from Princeton University, Department of History (recording)

May 6, 2020 | UC Santa Cruz COVID-19 Team | Guy Kawaski’s Fireside Chat With UCSC Coronavirus Team | Presented by Guy Kawasaki, David Haussler, Rebecca DuBois, John MacMillan, Jeremy Sanford | Supported by UCSC’s Genomics Institute (podcast recording)

May 6, 2020 | UCSC Right Livelihood College | Water Justice in the Age of Coronavirus and Beyond | Presented by Maude Barlow (Canada), Robert Bilott (USA), and Andy Szasz (USA, moderator) (recording)

April 29, 2020 | UCSC Right Livelihood College | Women in Global Health – COVID spotlight on major challenges with Laureates Monika Hauser (Germany), Sima Samar (Afghanistan), Evan Zillén (Sweden). Moderated by Professor Nancy Chen (UCSC, Anthropology) (recording)

April 28, 2020 | UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture Series | Viruses & Vaccines with Rebecca DuBois (recording)

April 28, 2020 | Duke University | COVID-19 Seminar #1 with Professor Priscilla Wald on the Outbreak Narrative and Why We Need to Change the Story | Co-hosted by the Alfred Deakin Institue for Citizenship & Globalisation (ADI) and the Science and Society Network (SSN)

April 24, 2020 | Virginia Tech STS Program | STS Approaches to COVID-19: A Roundtable Discussion | (recording)

April 24, 2020 | UC Berkeley | Straight Talk: A Conversation about Racism, Health Inequities, and COVID-19 (recording)

April 20, 2020 | UNESCO | Inclusion in the time of COVID-19: International webinar addressing racism, discrimination and exclusion [we will look for a link to the recording]

April 16, 2020 | UC Davis DHI | The Geopolitics of COVID-19: Mike Davis in Conversation with Joshua Clover (recording)

April 15, 2020 | Hutchins Center for African & African American Research Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine, Harvard | Epidemics and African American Communities Series: from 1792 to the Present | recordings: April 15 part 1, April 21 part 2, April 23 part 3, May 6 part 4

April 7, 2020 | Global Views on COVID 19: Lessons from the 1918 Flu Pandemic in India and Indonesia | (registration)

April 1, 2020 | Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlé Crenshaw |  Age Against the Machine: The Fatal Intersection of Racism & Ageism In the Time of Coronavirus (recording)

April 1, 2020 | The National Academy of Medicine and the American Public Health Association| The Science of Social Distancing, Part 2 (recording)

March 25, 2020 | Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlé Crenshaw | Under The Blacklight: The Intersectional Failures that COVID Lays Bare, Part 1 (recording)

March 25, 2020 | The National Academy of Medicine and the American Public Health Association | The Science of Social Distancing: Part 1 (recording)

C-Span | State and Federal Covid-19 Briefings and Legislative Deliberation | (recordings)

Pandemicene Podcast, Episode 9: Isa Ansari with Ruth Müller

The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, December 13th, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below after the episode airs.

 

 

Welcome to the Pandemicene podcast! Today we welcome you to a conversation with Ruth Müller.

Guest Bio:

Ruth Müller is a researcher in the interdisciplinary research field of Science & Technology studies. She has studied molecular biology (M.Sc.; 2000-2007) and sociology (PhD; 2007-2012) at the University of Vienna, Austria. During her studies, she conducted research on breast cancer at the Medical University of Vienna  (2001-2005) before she started to work on issues of life sciences, society & policy at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna (2005-2011). She held postdoctoral positions at the Austrian Institute of International Affairs  (2012-2013) and at the Research Policy Institute, Lund University, Sweden (2013-2015), and she has been a recurring visiting research the Science & Justice Research Center, University of California Santa Cruz, U.S.. In February 2015, she was appointed Assistant Professor of Science & Technology Policy at the Munich Center for Technology in Society, a co-appointment with the TUM School of Management and the TUM School of Life Sciences.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

Pandemicene Podcast, Episode 8: Paloma Medina with Martha Kenney

The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

Aired on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, December 6th, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the Pandemicene Podcast. Today we welcome you to a conversation with Martha Kenney, recorded on September 22nd, 2020. Dr. Kenney is an Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Department at San Francisco State University, and an interdisciplinary scholar in the science, technology, and society hub there. In this conversation, we touch on many topics, from the fables of individualism that have dominated popular discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic, to the importance of media literacy, to the role that speculative fiction can play in processing our current reality and opening space up to imagine new worlds. Our conversation begins with Dr. Kenney telling us about how she has guided her attention throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and how she has responded thus far.

Guest Bios:

Martha Kenney (Ph.D. History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz) is an Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies department at San Francisco State University. She is a feminist science studies scholar whose research explores the poetics and politics of biological storytelling. Her current project examines and intervenes in the narratives emerging from the new field of environmental epigenetics, which studies how signals from the environment affect gene expression. Specifically, she looks at how assumptions about gender, race, class and sexuality influence the design of epigenetic experiments on model organisms and how we understand the relationship between bodies and environments. She has recent and forthcoming articles in Social Studies of Science, Science as Culture, Biosocieties and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Dr. Kenney teaches courses on the politics of science, technology, medicine and the environment. Dr. Kenney was a founding graduate student researcher with the UC Santa Cruz Science & Justice Working Group and a fellow of the Science & Justice Training Program.

Works Cited in Interview:

Penkler, Michael; Ruth Müller; Martha Kenney; and Mark Hanson. “Back to normal? Building community resilience after COVID-19.” The Lancet: Diabetes & Endocrinology. August 2020.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

Pandemicene Podcast, Episode 7: Tee Wicks with Owain Williams

The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, November 29th, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below after the episode airs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the Pandemicene podcast where we attempt to create knowledge that orients us towards justice at this critical historical juncture. On May 13th, 2020, we spoke with Dr. Owain Williams, Lecturer in International Relations and Global Security at the University of Leeds, and a former Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. Dr. Williams is a political economist of global health, who focuses on health policy and intellectual property rights and access to medicines. We talked about his COVID Diaries project, privatization of the aged care sector, the pandemic as a crisis of capitalism, and the necessity for universal health coverage policies. Though much time has passed and the pandemic has evolved, we hope to think together with our listeners about which of Dr. Williams’s thoughts and predictions have been accurate and useful, and which parts we all need to think anew.

Guest Bio:

Dr. Owain Williams is a Lecturer in International Relations and Global Security at the University of Leeds, and a former Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. He is an expert on the politics and political economy of health policy, and on intellectual property rights and access to medicines. He worked for the UNDP as a consultant on this area in 2014. He has published on access to medicines and global health governance, and new actors in health. His work includes, with Adrian Kay (eds.) Global Health Governance: Crisis, Institutions and Political Economy (Palgrave 2009); Partnerships and Foundations in Global Health Governance with Simon Rushton (eds.) ((Palgrave 2011), New Political Economy of Pharmaceuticals in the Global South (Palgrave 2013); and The Transformation of Global Health Governance (Palgrave 2014).​ He manages a range of projects on testing with the Queensland Chair in HIV and STIs and works in the broad area of global health governance from a platform of community engagement. He is convener of the Pacific Health Governance workshop and Research Network.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

Pandemicene Podcast, Episode 6: Gina Barba with Erin McElroy

The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, November  22nd, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below after the episode airs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On August 24th, 2020, we spoke with Erin McElroy about housing justice, landlord tech and surveillance, and the role of AI in this new world shaped by the pandemic. McElroy earned their doctorate of Feminist Studies from UC Santa Cruz, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s AI Now Institute. Due to the urban soundscape of New York City, we decided to edit out some of the segments from this Zoom interview that were important but too challenging to hear clearly, including McElroy’s introduction to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. In early 2021, SJRC will help McElroy celebrate the launch of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s newly released book: Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance, published by PM Press.

Guest Bio:

Erin McElroy is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s AI Now Institute, and cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Erin earned a doctoral degree in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on the politics of space, race, and technology in Romania and Silicon Valley, and is an editor of Radical Housing Journal.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

Pandemicene Podcast, Episode 5: Maryam Nazir with Rebecca DuBois

The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, November 15th, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below after the episode airs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the Pandemicene podcast! Today we speak with Dr. Rebecca DuBois, associate professor of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. We ask her thoughts on the many issues involved in developing a COVID-19 vaccine, including the biological details of what a vaccine might look like and be capable of,  the necessary phases of clinical trials, and bioethical issues of equity and fairness that will arise during eventual vaccine distribution. Note that this interview was conducted on September 3rd, 2020, and much has changed over the past two months, including the U.S. political landscape and breakthroughs in vaccine development.

Guest Bio:

Rebecca DuBois is an associate professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She runs the DuBois Lab on campus, which seeks to understand the molecular mechanisms of virus infections, and to use this information to develop new vaccines and antiviral therapeutics.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

Pandemicene Podcast, Episode 4: Gina Barba with Sharon Daniel

The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, November 8th, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below after the episode airs.

Welcome to the Pandemicene Podcast. Today we share a conversation with Professor Sharon Daniel, whose work has dramatically shifted in response to the pandemic.  Sharon Daniel is a professor of Film and Digital Media at UCSC. In addition to teaching at the university, Daniel also does research on various social justice issues in order to create interactive websites and other media projects for the general public. Her current work focuses on the criminal justice system and Indigenous communities in Alaska. She strives to give a platform to those historically marginalized. Daniel talks to us about what incarceration during the pandemic looks like and shares details on her newest project – Exposed – documenting COVID-19 in prisons and jails around the country. Visit the newly launched project site at unjustlyexposed.com!

Guest Bio:

Sharon Daniel is a Professor of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, and a media artist who produces interactive and participatory documentaries focused on issues of social, economic, environmental and criminal justice. She builds online archives and interfaces that make the stories of marginalized and disenfranchised communities available across social, cultural and economic boundaries. Daniel’s most recent project – Exposed – documents the ravaging spread of COVID-19 through jails and prisons in the U.S. Detailed descriptions of Daniel’s works can be found at http://sharondaniel.net.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.