COVIDCalls

EP #431 - 2.24.2022 - Racial Justice and the Pandemic w/Rashawn Ray

Today I welcome sociologist Rashawn Ray back to COVIDCalls!

Rashawn Ray is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at The Brookings Institution. He is also an Associate Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Recently, Ray published the book How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work (with Pamela Braboy Jackson) and another edition of Race and Ethnic Relations in the 21^st Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy.

EP #430 - 2.24.2022 - COVID and Epidemiology w/Guest Host Jacob Steere-Williams

Welcome to the 430^th episode of COVID-Calls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a historian of public health at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, and I’m thrilled to be hosting the program this week.

Dr. Freya Jephcott is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. She is a trained both as a medical anthropologist and an epidemiologist. Dr. Jephcott’s research focuses on the effectiveness of outbreak response systems in resource-limited settings, the management of outbreaks of uncertain etiology, and in particular zoonoses. Freya has also participated in applied policy work on health emergencies for Medicine Sans Frontieres and the World Health Organization.

David Steadson is a Consultant Public Health Epidemiologist and Entreprenuer who, after spending a decade in Public Health research and being trained as an epidemiologist, moved into the field of IT and Digital Health startups. His work in epidemiology has focused on mitigation strategies of drunk driving, and recently, he has written extensively about COVID-19, particularly in Scandinavian countries. He is the founder of VanaTech, a digital health company that helps to promote behavioral change in health using the latest research in epidemiology, psychology, and health economics. 

EP #429 - 2.24.2022 - Singapore Update w/Sulfikar Amir

Today I welcome STS researcher and film maker Sulfikar Amir back to COVIDCalls!

Sulfikar Amir is an associate professor of science, technology, and society (STS) and a faculty member in Sociology Program at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has conducted research on technological nationalism, development and globalization, nuclear politics, risk and disaster, design studies, cities and infrastructures, and resilience. He is the author of The Technological State in Indonesia: the Co-constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics (Routledge, 2012), and the editor of The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience: A New Perspective on Governing Risk and Disaster (Palgrave, 2018). Aside from being a scholar, Amir is a documentary filmmaker. His latest film is Healing Fukushima, which chronicles the role and experiences of medical experts in Fukushima in dealing with radiation hazard in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster.

EP #428 - 2.23.2022 - Philsophy and the Pandemic Part 1

Today I welcome philosopher and teacher Keith Maggie Brown.

Keith “Maggie” Brown is a Denton-based poet-philosopher, spiritual counselor, and mind-walker. Besides their academic co-publications and intermittent podcasting, Maggie creates aphorisms to encourage their friends on the way to self-actualization. They have directed a few conferences at the University of North Texas in Denton since 1998: the North Texas Heidegger Symposium; Process Studies in Pedagogy; and the UNT Comics, Graphic Novel, and Serial Arts Studies Workshop. Besides being a lifetime member of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America, they also are a member in good standing with other philosophy groups like the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy as well as the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. 

Along with mentoring youth who want to practice philosophizing as a way of life, Maggie works to make ancient texts more accessible for 21st-century readers. Among his collaborations are a translation of the Dao De Jing with Prof. LU Wenlong of Dalian University and Greek Natural Philosophy: The Presocratics and Their Importance for Environmental Philosophy with Profs. J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren.  

After completing their M.A. in Philosphy (2016), they now are close to completing their dissertation for the Ph.D. at UNT-Denton: “Untying the [K]nots that Bind: Existential Elucidation and the Transgressive Life.” Maggie’s work focuses on queering academic research and weirding professional philosophy. 

EP #427 - 2.23.2022 - Sports, Risk, and COVID-19 w_Guest Host Jacob Steere-Williams

Welcome to the 427^th episode of COVID-Calls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a historian of public health at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, and I’m thrilled to be hosting the program this week.

Dr. Kathleen Bachynski is an assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College. Dr. Bachynski’s work on public health is wide-ranging, but she is a leading expert on brain injuries, sports, injury prevention, youth health, and risk. Her book, No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis has been called by one scholar called “smart, salient, timely, eminently readable, and socially important.” It’s a terrific book and I highly suggest everyone order a copy.

Dr. Johanna Mellis is an assistant professor of World History at Ursinus (Er-sigh-nus) College outside of Philadelphia and was a former D-I swimmer at the College of Charleston and a former swim coach. She is a historian of Cold War sport who analyzes sporting interactions between Hungary, the International Olympic Committee, and the US. She is a co-host of the End of Sport podcast that explores capitalist sport, labor, and justice for the end of times and has written pieces for the Guardian, Time, Washington Post, and LA Times, and also for the Journal of Sport History and Contemporary European History. I am so excited to read the book she is working on, Changing the Global Game: Hungarian Athletes and International Sport during the Cold War.

EP #426 - 2.22.2022 - 2020 Studies w/Amy Slaton

Today I welcome historian of science, technology, and inequality Amy Slaton.

Amy E. Slaton is a professor of history at Drexel University in Philadelphia.  She holds a PhD  in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the history of technical expertise and labor, seen through the lens of historical ideas of human difference—asking, that is, how ideas of race, gender, disability and queer identifications have operated in places of scientific and technical work. Her most recent book, Race, Rigor and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Harvard University Press, 2010), follows racial ideologies in engineering higher education since the 1940s.  Her current book project, All Good People: Diversity, Difference and the Invention of Opportunity describes the limits of American commitments to equity around race, gender, LGBTQ and disabilities since the Civil Rights era.  She is co-editor with Tiago Saraiva of the journal History & Technology.

EP #425 - 2.22.2022 - Plague and Global Health w/guest host Jacob Steere-Williams

Welcome to the 423nd episode of COVID-Calls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a historian of public health at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, and I’m thrilled to be hosting the program this week.

Dr. Susan Jones is the Distinguished McKnight University Pressor in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, and in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Trained first as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Jones also received a PhD in the history of science and medicine at Penn. Her expertise is the historical ecology of disease, comparative and environmental health, and human-animal relationships. Dr. Jones is the recipient of both Guggenheim and Fullbright Fellowships, and is the author of the 2003 book Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and their Patients in Modern America, the 2010 book Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax, and dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters. She currently is working on a global environmental history of plague.

Dr. Pratik Chakrabarti is the Cullen NEH Chair in History at the University of Houston. He has written extensively on the history of science, medicine, and imperialism in South Asia, the Atlantic World, and the Caribbean from the 18^th to the 20^th centuries. Dr. Chakrabarti is the author of several stunning books, including Western Science in Modern India (2004), Materials and Medicine (2010), Bacteriology in British India (2012), and the 2020 book, Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity. For several years he was both the Director of the Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester in the UK, and editor of the journal Social History of Medicine. Pratik is currently working on the history of postcolonial public health in India and on a project about global vaccine research.

EP #424 - 2.22.2022 - Governing the Disaster w/Don Kettl

Today I welcome political scientist Don Kettl back to COVIDCalls.

My guest is Donald F. Kettl.  He is the Sid Richardson Professor at the LBJ School at UT Austin.  He previously served as dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Volcker Alliance, the Brookings Institution and the Partnership for Public Service.

Kettl has authored or edited numerous books, including Can Governments Earn Our Trust? (2017); Little Bites of Big Data for Public Policy (2017); his most recent: The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn’t Work (2020).

EP #423 - 2.21.2022 - Mourning a Health Care Hero w/Pamela Addison

Today I welcome Pamela Addison back to COVIDCalls to talk about her life AND advocacy since her husband died of COVID in 2020.

Pamela Addison is the widow of a brave healthcare worker who lost his life to Covid at the start of this pandemic when her children were just 5 months and 2 years old.  Since her late husband’s death she has become a covid loss advocate focusing on the young children who have lost a parent/caregiver to Covid, the forgotten grievers. She also founded the group Young Widows and Widowers of Covid-19 several months after losing her late husband so no other young widow would feel alone on this unexpected and difficult journey of love, loss and grief. She hopes her story can make a difference and create change especially for the youngest victims of this pandemic, the children.

EP #422 - 2.21.2022 - Cancer, Children, and the Pandemic w/guest host Jacob Steere-Williams

Welcome to the 422nd episode of COVID-Calls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a historian of public health at the College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina. This week I will be the guest host of COVID-Calls while the program’s founder, Scott Knowles, takes a much-needed recharge. I’m thrilled to be back for a week of guest hosting the program.