COVIDCalls

EP #265 - 04.23.2021 - COVID and the Asian Diaspora

Today is a discussion of the Asian Diaspora in the COVID Crisis with Woojae Kim and Jinri Kim!

Jinri Kim holds a Masters in Public Policy, specialised in Social Policy and Social Innovation, and is a Foreign research correspondent at Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA), writing articles on France's social policy issues in the journal "Global Social Security Review"

Jinri wrote a masters thesis: Intimate Stranger: A Study of Filipino Domestic Workers in France.  He is also Co-founder of a home food waste app, EmptyMyFridge.

Dr. Woojae Kim is a Geneticist. He is interested in social insects such as honeybees and ants. Bachelor's degree in Biology at Yonsei University in Korea. He received master's and phD degree in molecular virology at POSTECH. While doing post doctoral research in the US he started to research on drosophila behavioral genetics. He was previously at in Otawa university and is currently at Harbin Institute of Technology in China, researching molecular mechanisms of social behaviors and neurocircuits.  He is a author of several books including "Fly-room", and "Selected Nature."

EP #264 - 04.22.2021 - Poetry for the COVID Era

Today I welcome David Hassler to discuss the Global Vaccine Poem Project.

David Hassler directs the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. He is the author or editor of nine books of poetry and nonfiction, including Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community; Speak a Powerful Magic: Ten Years of the Traveling Stanzas Poetry Project; and Red Kimono, Yellow Barn, for which he was awarded Ohio Poet of the Year 2006. His play, May 4^th Voices: Kent State, 1970, was produced in 2020 as a national radio play by the WKSU NPR station.

EP#263 - 04.21.2021 - Disability Justice and COVID-19

Today I welcome . . . DISABILITY JUSTICE AND COVID-19 Lakshmi Fjord, Elaine Gerber, Lenore Manderson.

LAKSHMI FJORD, Ph.D. is an environmental justice anthropologist whose community participatory action research methods and evidence led to two historic legal precedents for environmental justice at the federal and Virginia state level. For the first time, a federal appeals court overturned the air permit to site the largest U.S. fracked gas compressor station in an 83% majority Freedmen descent community on the basis of environmental justice. This contributed to the cancellation of the $8 billion dollar Atlantic Coast Pipeline. With Devva Kasnitz and Pam Block, Lakshmi was a foremother of Disability Studies in Anthropology, and Deaf Studies in Disability Studies. She organized the first AAA panel on Disability and Disasters immediately after Katrina in 2005, recruiting Elaine Gerber and Karen Nakamura. She now works in 4 Freedmen-built communities in Virginia facing imminent threats of new toxic polluting infrastructure.

Elaine Gerber is a medical anthropologist and disability studies scholar at Montclair State University, and a former president of the Society for Disability Studies.  Prior to joining the faculty at MSU, she served for five years as the Senior Research Associate for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) and taught in the graduate program in Disability Studies at the City University of New York. Her work examines the intersection between culture and the body, initially with a focus on women’s reproductive health, and more recently, on disability. Current projects revolve around food insecurity and disablement, audio description, and cultures of ableism. There are both theoretical contributions and practical applications to her work.

 

LENORE MANDERSON is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, and an NRF A-rated scholar. She holds appointments also with Brown University, US, and Monash University, Australia. Known internationally for her work on inequality, social exclusion and the impact of compromised health and embodied difference in Australia, Southeast and East Asia, and Africa, she has published some 750 books, articles, book chapters and reports in these and other areas. She chairs the External Review Group of the Social Innovations in Health Initiative of TDR (2015-) and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). She was awarded the Society of Medical Anthropology Career Achievement Award in 2016, and in January 2020 was admitted as a Member of the Order of Australia.

EP #262 - 04.20.2021 - COVID-19 Stress on Older Adults

Today I am glad to talk with sociologist Deborah Carr about older adults and the stress of COVID-19.

Deborah Carr is professor and chair of the sociology department at Boston University. She has written more than 100 articles and book chapters on topics related to aging, health, and stress. Her recent books including Worried Sick: How Stress Hurts Us & How to Bounce Back, and Golden Years? Social Inequalities in Later Life. She was editor-in-chief of Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences from 2015-2020. Her work has been featured in media outlets including The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, and USA Today.

EP #261 - 04.19.2021 - Anti-Asian Racism in the Pandemic: New Research

Today I am glad to talk with Meera Choi and Hannah Tessler about their new research on the anxiety of being Asian American in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hannah Tessler is a PhD student at Yale University. She graduated from Hamilton College with a BA in sociology. Her research focuses on race/ethnicity, gender, education, and social interactions. 

Meera Choi is a PhD student at Yale University. She received her BA and MA in sociology from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. Her research focuses on gender, family, and urban sociology. 

EP #260 - 04.15.2021 - Vaccination Research in the U.K.

Today I am glad to vaccination expert Samantha Vanderslott from the Oxford Vaccine Group.

Samantha Vanderslott is a University Research Lecturer at Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford. Her research is about people’s attitudes and behaviours towards vaccination. She draws on perspectives from sociology, history, anthropology, global health, and science and technology studies (STS). She is particularly interested in public policy and media representation, as well as making comparisons across countries and time.

EP #259 - 04.14.2021 - Coping with Disaster w/Jon Mooallem

Today I am glad to bring writer Jon to #COVIDcalls for a discussion of his new book

This Is Chance!: The Shaking of An American City, A Voice that Held it Together

Jon Mooallem is a longtime writer at large with The New York Times Magazine and a contributor to numerous other radio shows and magazines, including This American Life, The Daily, 99% Invisible, California Sunday and Wired. He's frequently talked about his reporting on radio and television shows (like Fresh Air, Radiolab, and The Colbert Report) and at the TED conference in Vancouver. Occasionally, he collaborates on live storytelling and music projects with members of the Decemberists.

Jon's most recent book, THIS IS CHANCE!, tells the story of the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake and radio reporter Genie Chance. The Wall Street Journal called it "A powerful, heart-wrenching book, as much art as it is journalism." Amazon, Buzzfeed and Brainpickings selected THIS IS CHANCE! as one of the best books of 2020 and it’s in the process of being adapted into a film. His last book, Wild Ones was chosen as a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, NPR’s Science Friday, and Canada’s National Post, among others. He lives on Bainbridge Island, next to Seattle. During the pandemic, he's primarily been a father. Also, he built a fence.

This Is Chance!: The Shaking of An American City, A Voice that Held it Together

EP #258 - 04.13.2021 - Deep Histories of Disease in COVID-19 Era

Today is a discussion of DEEP HISTORIES OF DISEASE IN THE COVID-19 ERA w/historian Rebecca Winer & physical therapy student Zoe Mendel.  This is a partnership call with the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University.

Zoe Mendel is a senior at Villanova, participating in the health affiliations six-year Doctor of Physical Therapy program through Thomas Jefferson University. In addition to completing her Bachelor of Science in Biology in May of 2021, she is currently a first year Doctor of Physical Therapy Student and will graduate from Jefferson in 2023.  She is an active member of the Physical Therapy Society, an organization that raises money for physical therapy-based charities, and is an officer at Hands of Hope; a Pro Bono clinic located in South Philadelphia.

Rebecca Winer is an Associate Professor of History at Villanova University specializing in the Middle Ages. Her research focuses on women, gender, and Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations in medieval Roussillon (in southern France) and Catalonia (in Eastern Spain), and Slavery Studies. She is the author of Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town (Ashgate, 2006) as well as numerous essays on medieval mothers, childcare, Jewish women, domestic service, slavery, and notarial culture in the Middle Ages. She is coeditor with Federica Francesconi of Jewish Women's History from Antiquity to the Present (Wayne State University Press, forthcoming fall 2021).

EP #257 - 04.09.2021 - COVID-19 & The History of Facemasks in East Asia

Today is a discussion of face masks and public health in East Asia with my guests Hyungsub Choi and Jaehwan Hyun.

Hyungsub Choi is associate professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Seoul National University of Science and Technology. He is interested in technological artifacts in modern Korean history. Together with Heewon Kim, Hyungsub worked on the masking behavior in Korea during the current pandemic.

Jaehwan Hyun is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Pusan National University, South Korea. He is working on the post-WWII history of human biology and environmental sciences with a focus on transnational connections between South Korea, Japan, and the United States. He is also making an effort to create a research collective in studying the history of mask-wearing in East Asia. As part of this effort, he organized a virtual workshop titled "The Socio-Material History of Masked Societies in East Asia" last October. The workshop outcome is now under review at the East Asian Science, Technology, and Society Journal.

EP #255 - 04.07.2021 - Mathematics and the Pandemic

Today my guest is historian of science and mathematics Michael Barany.

Michael Barany is a historian of science and mathematics in the Science Technology and Innovation Studies subject group at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He completed his 2016 PhD in the history of science at Princeton University and was a member of the Dartmouth College Society of Fellows. His current research focuses on the globalization of modern mathematics and on the social and material infrastructures (most notably the blackboard) of abstract knowledge.