Global Health

November 15, 2023 | Works-in-Progress with Anila Daulatzai

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Wednesday, November 15, 2023

4:00-5:30 PM

Oakes 231 + Zoom Registration

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! 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 postdoctoral fellow Anila Daulatzai on her ethnographic fieldwork with UNICEF, WHO and the GAVI vaccine alliance in Switzerland towards her research on global health architectures and polio.

Anila Daulatzai is a political and medical anthropologist. She has taught in prisons, and in universities across three continents. Her past and current research projects look at widowhood, heroin use, and polio through the lens of serial war and the US Empire in Afghanistan, and Pakistan. She has published articles in Jadaliyya, Al-Jazeera, several academic journals, and edited volumes and is a contributing member to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, since 2014. She is currently completing her book manuscript provisionally titled War and What Remains. Everyday Life in Contemporary Kabul, Afghanistan. At UCSC, Anila is a postdoctoral fellow in the history department working on the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine,” a project co-led by SJRC faculty affiliate Jennifer Derr (History) and SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon (Sociology). More information can be found at: https://raceempirebiomedicine.sites.ucsc.edu/.

February 23, 2022 | Global divisions of health: bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing in Latin America

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Wednesday, February 23, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! 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 one of our visiting scholars, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda in a talk titled, “Global divisions of health; bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing in Latin America.”

This project asks how scientific and non-scientific communities of knowledge production in Latin America have historically perceived ethical concerns regarding human genome editing and other reproductive technologies (MSRTs). The project explores how current frameworks, concerns and discourses in the United States and Europe engage with (or contradict) those in Latin America. Through a series of seminars, workshops and regional meetings /in-depth interviews with some key stakeholders (geneticists, legislators, academics), the project explores the implications of a geographical and discursive distance between those places where bioethical frameworks are produced (global north) and those where the actual practice of human genome editing (research and trials) could be potentially happening.

Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico, and focuses on the social determinants of health, genomics and postgenomics. She is currently exploring bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing and stem cell research in Latin America.

Clear blood vile with red cap against yellow background

Forthcoming Book release! Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

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About the Book

Clear blood vile with red cap against yellow background

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes. U Minn Press, March 2021.

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

The book will be available in March 2021 at: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/sweetness-in-the-blood

Learn more in this campus news article, Uncovering the social factors lurking within diabetes risk.

About the Author

James Doucet-Battle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Fall 2020 Interim Director of the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley/University San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of science, technology and society studies, development studies and anthropological approaches to health and medicine. He applies these interests to study the political economy of genomic discourses about race, risk, and health disparities.

structure of COVID-19

Royal Geographical Society publishes special COVID-19 issue

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A virtual special issue of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers features Politics Professor and S&J Advisor Matt Sparke’s article, “Contextualizing Coronavirus Geographically,” and provides free access to additional articles that provide perspective on the pandemic.

More in this campus news article, “Royal Geographical Society publishes special COVID-19 issue.”

JOB Announcement | UC Santa Cruz is hiring for Global and Community Health

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Two Social Science assistant professor tenure track positions in Global and Community Health are now open at the University of California, Santa Cruz! One search will focus on Health Data and the other on Social Justice.

In addition, the recruitment period for four biomedical sciences positions is still open, even though the initial review is underway.

Please share these recruitment advertisements with all your networks and as widely as possible. Descriptions and links are below.

Assistant Professor of Global Health – Health Data

  • Initial Review Date: 01/14/20
  • Apply at: https://recruit.ucsc.edu/JPF00787
  • UC Santa Cruz invites applications for a Global and Community Health scholar with expertise in health and health data, including data-analysis and/or geo-visualization as they relate to societal injustices embodied in ill-health. The position is open to any field in the Social Sciences at the Assistant Professor level. The selected candidate will hold a professorial appointment in one of the departments in UCSC’s Division of Social Sciences (see below), and also contribute towards the Global Community Health (GCH) program. More.

Assistant Professor of Global Health – Social Justice

  • Initial Review Date: 01/14/20
  • Apply at https://recruit.ucsc.edu/JPF00788
  • UC Santa Cruz invites applications for a Global and Community Health scholar with expertise in the social justice questions raised by societal and environmental influences on health. The position is open to any field in the Social Sciences at the tenure-track Assistant Professor level. The selected candidate will be invited to join one of the following departments: Anthropology, Community Studies, Economics, Education, Environmental Studies, Latin American & Latino Studies, Politics, Psychology, Sociology, and also contribute to new program development and teaching in Global Community Health (GCH). More.

Assistant Professors of Physical and Biological Sciences: Biomedical Sciences

  • Initial Review Date: 11/08/19; Final Review Date: 06/30/21
  • Apply at https://recruit.ucsc.edu/JPF00756
  • UC Santa Cruz invites applications for tenure-track Assistant Professors in global and community health who conduct basic and/or translational research that addresses human health and disease, and have interests in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Four positions will be filled. Successful candidates will be invited to join one of the following departments: Molecular Cell & Developmental Biology; Chemistry & Biochemistry; and Microbiology & Environmental Toxicology. More.