Join Us Virtually:
https://ubc.zoom.us/j/68613353119?pwd=Q09sWXF3a0Jib29oNG5ubFQzMkNrUT09
Meeting ID: 686 1335 3119 Passcode: 091440
“Spy, Patrol, Police: Black Life and the Production of Epidemiological Knowledge from Atlanta, Georgia to Freetown, Sierra Leone”
Speaker: Dr. Adia Benton
Abstract:
This talk weaves together the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) collaboration with the Atlanta police department in the early 1980s; oral histories of CDC workers who investigated an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone; and fieldwork in Sierra Leone after the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak. The CDC plays a pivotal role in global health and US cultural imagination, and as a partner with other US government agencies, African ministries, and non-governmental organizations. It is also a critical node for examining the broad, global circulations of US racial formations, racialized organizations and their relations to blackness and black life across space and time. Thinking these events, stories and objects from Freetown and Atlanta together helps us to understand what US public health imagines itself to be, crystallizing the visual, racial, spatial and affective forms of inequalities embedded in global health’s securitized and policed landscape.
Speaker’s Biographical Note:
Adia Benton is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. The author of HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), she writes for academic and popular audiences on global health, biomedicine, development, humanitarianism, political economy, race, gender, sports, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, and the US, and is known for her blog ethnography911.org
