Event overview
You are invited to a seminar with Anne Pollock, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture
Too often, academic engagement with topics of race and medicine uses a grammar of lamentation, adopting an aggrieved subject position and mourning the racialization perpetuated by powerful discourses such as genomic research and pharmaceuticalized medicine. For example, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved BiDil for “heart failure in self-identified black patients,” there was quick consensus in the critical studies of race and medicine that this was an egregious example of the geneticization of race and pharmaceutical profiteering. Paradoxically, part of the problem with this approach is that it is too comfortable: biomedicine appears far more stable than it is, and the analyst far less implicated. Pointing out that any given present or future racialized medical technology emerges from a historical context of racial oppression or serves vested interests is only one component of critique. Paying attention to the partial and contingent sites of resistance it opens up is also vital to avoiding decontextualization. So is leaving space open for surprise. This talk uses BiDil as an example to argue that in the face of racialized biomedical technologies, we should resist traditional bioethics’ call to embrace or to debunk, and instead strive for ethical noninnocence. Our deep engagement with the context of racialized technologies should take into account not only the residue of a horrific history and the specter of an unacceptable future, but also the unbearable present. We should feel suspicious of any position that promises to settle something as fraught as a new intersection of race and medicine, and strive not to provide a yes or no answer, but to engage in an ongoing process of making medicine answerable to truth and justice.
Anne Pollock is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture at Georgia Tech. Her research focuses on biomedicine and culture. She is particularly interested in how medical categories and technologies are enrolled in telling stories about identity and difference, especially with regard to race, gender, and citizenship. Her forthcoming book, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference, tracks the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States from the founding of cardiology to the commercial failure of BiDil. She is also engaged in ongoing projects in three areas: feminism and heart disease; American health disparities and citizenship claims; and global pharmaceuticals amid economic crisis and the pharmaceuticalization of philanthropy.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Sep 2011 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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