EP #355 - 10.11.2021 - Sugar, Diet, and COVID-19 w/Guest Host Adia Benton

 

Welcome to episode 355 of the COVIDCalls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. My name is Adia Benton and I'll be your guest host today. I am a cultural anthropologist of public health and medicine in post-conflict and “development” settings at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.  I’m coming to you live from Oakland, California. Today I talk with anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas, author of Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic . 

Amy Moran-Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT, interested in the human and material entanglements that shape health in practice. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2012, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Brown, which is where we met, before going to MIT. Her writing often focuses on the social lives of medical objects. She also works on the cultural anthropology of intergenerational health, planetary change, and chronic conditions; as well as questions of equitable device design, technology and kinship, and the afterlives of "carbohydrates and hydrocarbons" across scales. ​Professor Moran-Thomas has conducted ethnographic and historical research in Belize, Guatemala, Ghana, Brazil and the U.S, supported by the Mellon-American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the West African Research Association, and the American Philosophical Society. Her first book, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (2019), examines the global rise of diabetes as part of the ongoing legacies of sweetness and power -- including how unequal access to insulin varieties, oxygen chambers, glucose meters, dialysis devices, farming machines, coral reef care, and prosthetic limb technologies can become part of how plantation histories live on in the present, impacting lives and landscapes across generations. She is the winner of the James A. and Ruth Levitan Research Prize in the Humanities at MIT, a Diabetes Foot Center Group Appreciation Award; the Curl Essay Prize, awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the David Schneider Award, American Anthropological Association, among others.