COVIDCalls

EP #363 - 10.22.2021 - More-Than-Human Perspectives on COVID-19

Today I welcome Adam Searle and Jonathon Turnbull to COVIDCalls to talk about their work on “More than human perspectives” on the pandemic.

Jonathon Turnbull is a cultural and environmental geographer from the University of Cambridge. His PhD research, funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council, concerns the return of nature to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, where he has been working for the last two years with scientists studying different aspects of the Zone's ecology, especially dogs and wolves.

Adam Searle is a cultural and environmental geographer from the University of Liège in Belgium. His PhD research at Cambridge examined de/extinction—or bringing extinct animals back to life—building upon ethnographic work in the Spanish and French Pyrenees, and his postdoctoral research, funded by the European Research Council, concerns the use of biotechnologies in agriculture.

EP #362 - 10.21.2021 - Medical Students in the Pandemic

Today I welcome medical students Mayank Jayaram & Minna Wybrecht to the program.

Minna Wybrecht is a 3rd year medical student at the University of Michigan, pursuing a specialty in family medicine. She grew up in Taiwan and Michigan. Her passions include translating between English and Mandarin, providing trauma-informed care, as well as addressing health care disparities. Outside of medicine, Minna is a dancer and a published poet. You can find her work in places such as the Journal of Medical Humanities.

Mayank Jayaram is a 3rd year medical student at the University of Michigan with a B.S. in physiology from Michigan State University. Mayank is interested in general surgery and plans to pursue a career in academic medicine where he can mentor the next generation of learners while also striving to improve healthcare inequities. In his free time, Mayank enjoys archery, chess, and research. He has published articles in JAMA and Nature affiliated journals.

EP #361 - 10.19.2021 - Public Health and COVID-19 w/Greg Gonsales

Today I welcome pioneering HIV/AIDS & global health researcher/activist Gregg Gonsalves.

My guest today! Gregg Gonsalves is an expert in policy modeling on infectious disease and substance use, as well as the intersection of public policy and health equity. His research focuses on the use of quantitative models for improving the response to epidemic diseases. For more than 30 years, he worked on HIV/AIDS and other global health issues with several organizations, including the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the Treatment Action Group, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa. He was also a fellow at the Open Society Foundations and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2011-2012. He is a 2011 graduate of Yale College and received his PhD from Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences/School of Public Health in 2017. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

EP #360 - 10.18.2021 - Photography in the Pandemic w/Virginia Hanusik

Virginia Hanusik is an artist whose projects explore the relationship between landscape, culture, and the built environment. Her work has been exhibited internationally, featured in The New Yorker, National Geographic, British Journal of Photography, Domus, Places Journal, The Atlantic, MAS Context, and Oxford American among others, and supported by the Pulitzer Center, Graham Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. She is on the board of directors of The Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans where she coordinates multi-disciplinary projects on the climate crisis and is a 2020-2021 Photography Fellow with Exhibit Columbus. She lives in New Orleans.

EP #359 - 10.18.2021 - The Origins of COVID-19 w/Frederic Keck

Today I discuss the origins of COVID-19 w/Frederic Keck, author of Avian Reservoirs. Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts.

Frédéric Keck is a Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS). After working on the history of social anthropology and contemporary biopolitical questions raised by avian influenza, he was the head of the research department of the musée du quai KAY Branly between 2014 and 2018. He published Avian Reservoirs. Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts  (Duke University Press, 2020) and (with A. Kelly and C. Lynteris) Anthropology of Epidemics (Routledge, 2019).

EP #358 - 10.14.2021 - Medical Scarcity and COVID-19

Dr.  George Aumoithe  is an Assistant Professor of Global Health. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2018 and completed postdoctoral training in legal history at Princeton University in 2020. Dr. Aumoithe's research  focuses on the effect of anti-inflationary economic policy and colorblind legal ideology on public hospitals. His research interests engage problems in political economy, social welfare policy, public health, curative medicine, and epidemic preparedness. In 2019, Dr. Aumoithe  organized a national conference called   Law, Difference, and Healthcare: Making Sense of Structural Racism in Medico-Legal History . He directs the inaugural Global Health and Health Inequality Mapping Lab in Africana Studies.  Dr. Aumoithe is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled  Medical Scarcity: The Political Economy of Healthcare Rights in America. "Dismantling the Safety Net Hospital: The Construction of 'Underutilization' and Scarce Public Healthcare" has been accepted for publication and is forthcoming at the Journal of Urban History.

EP #357 - 10.13.2021 - Researchers‘ Roundtable

Today is a researchers’ roundtable, with: Renu Singh, Jon Shaffer, and Lucia Vitale.

Jon Shaffer is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Boston University. He is studying how global health NGOs resist dominant field pressures and develop alternative strategies in advancing state-protected universal health care access, social change, and human rights. Before starting graduate school, Jon was involved in the founding and served as the executive director of GlobeMed. He then served as the senior strategist for community organizing at Partners In Health, where he launched PIH Engage, a program that links trains activists around the country to fight for the right to health here and around the world. Most recently, Jon and colleagues launched R2H Action, a campaign to leverage the COVID-19 disaster to ensure that the human right to health and a safe environment is realized by everyone, everywhere. 

Renu Singh, PhD is a Research Assistant Professor within the Division of Public Policy, a Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study Junior Fellow, and a Faculty Affiliate with the Institute for Emerging Market Studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She is also a Scholar at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law and a DAAD Research Ambassador for the German Academic Exchange Service. As a political scientist and microbiologist by training, Renu aims to bridge the worlds of science and policy through her research on comparative social policy, global health security and governance, and the political economy of health.

Lucia Vitale is an interdisciplinary global health scholar who uses comparative political science methods, theories in sociology, and also geography to explore multi-scale effects of global health governance and primary healthcare access. While her research is geographically located along the border of the Dominican Republic with Haiti, non-state transnational decision making spaces are central to her work.

After graduating with her B.A. in 2015, Vitale taught English in Comayagua, Honduras, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic (DR), and then worked as a contractor for USAID’s Local Works program where she investigated access to documentation, and assessed the needs of cooperatives at the community level.

EP #356 - 10.13.2021 - Vaccination in South Korea

Today I talk about virology and COVID-19 vaccines in South Korea with Professor Soon-Young Paik.  I’m joined by translator Hyunah Keum, graduate student in STP KAIST.

He currently serves as an Emeritus professor at Dept. of Microbiology in Catholic University, South Korea. In his academic training he conducted research in the Dept. of fermentation technology in Hiroshima University, Japan; He completed his post doctorate program at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke under the National Institute of Health(NIH) in the USA.

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.   

EP #354 - 10.07.2021 - Tracking COVID w/Technology in South Korea and China

Today I talk about technologies of COVID surveillance and control in South Korea and China with Youngrim Kim and Yuchen Chen.

Youngrim Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, and a Rackham predoctoral fellow. She is interested in the social, cultural, and political implications of disaster information technologies in East Asia. She is currently writing a dissertation that examines South Korea’s technologically-driven infectious disease governance throughout the 2015 MERS Epidemic to the current COVID-19 pandemic, and how it relates to the issues of national identity, marginalization, and civic participation in crisis situations. 

Yuchen Chen is a third-year PhD student at Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Her research looks at the transnational flow of technology, knowledge, labor, and capital and how it relates to social experiments in China.