April 7, 2021 | Book launch! Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (U. Minn Press)

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

On Wednesday, April 7, 2021 at 5:30pm–7:00pm, there was a University Forum to celebrate the launch of Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (U. Minn Press) by Assistant Professor of Sociology and Interim SJRC Director (fall 2020) James Doucet-Battle’s new book that challenges assumptions about race within diabetes research and delves into the issue through the lens of African American experience.

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

With opening remarks and general welcome by Science & Justice Research Center Founding Director and Professor of Sociology Jenny Reardon and introductions and moderation by Nancy Chen (Professor of Anthropology, Associate Dean for Health, Wellbeing and Society), we aim to gather in the spirit of celebrating Sweetness in the Blood’s launch, broadening the discussion of race and risk, and supporting the work of the UC Santa Cruz Science & Justice Research Center.

Nancy Chen is Professor of Anthropology, Associate Dean for Health, Wellbeing and Society at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

James Doucet-Battle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology 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.

Edward T. Hawthorne founder and managing partner of CE3 Solutions, LLC, serves as Chief Administrative Officer.  Prior to CE3 Solutions, Hawthorne had a 33 year career with Bank of America holding various senior executive positions covering technology, operational risk, and customer servicing worldwide. He is currently Vice Chairman of the board for the Diabetes Leadership Council, and serves on the Emeritus Council for the American Diabetes Association, and the board of directors for Children with Diabetes. He is also past Chairman of the National Board of Directors for the American Diabetes Association.

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science studies, feminist and critical race studies, and the sociology of science, technology and medicine. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.

Co-Sponsored by University Relations, the Science & Justice Research Center, the Institute for Social Transformation, and the Sociology Department.
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Forthcoming Book release! Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

About the Book

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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.