Anthropologist of Medicine and Technology
My book based on my food allergy advocacy research, Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care, is now out from the University of Minnesota Press! You can order it via the press, via online retailers, or request it from your local bookshop.
I am co-organizing a conference panel for EASST/4S 2020 with RPI PhD Candidate Hined Rafeh, titled Health Made Digital. The panel has been accepted in the Medicine and Healthcare track of the conference as an open panel. Abstracts accepted until February 29, 2020.
Rather than alleviate risks in a cost-efficient manner, the rush to build new data-driven business models is producing different ones. If health data is capital, the collection of health data is a new form of profit sharing.
You can now watch my talk “The Anthropocene Body,” given at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research First Annual Institute Social in May 2017, on Vimeo.
My upcoming course, Science, Race and Colonialism at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, starts July 10th at The New York Academy of Medicine. Course meets for 4 weeks and is capped at 20.
What does it mean to have a body in the Anthropocene? This talk was delivered as a faculty Lightning Lecture at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research First Annual Institute Social on May 20th, 2017.
The Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology is pleased to welcome submissions for the 2017 STM Graduate Student Paper Prize. This prize is awarded annually for a paper that offers an innovative approach to issues in science, technology, and medicine. Deadline is July 1st, 2017.
How does the financialization of life itself figure as a new means of producing value in modern technoscience? That is the question that motivated Kirk Fiereck to convene the panel “Biofinance: Speculation, Risk, Debt, and Value from Bios” at the 2016 American Anthropological Association meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota last November.
This panel, organized by the Science, Technology and Medicine special interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology, builds on recent efforts in science studies and anthropology to open up the “black box” of valuation processes in technoscientific domains.
I’m pleased to announce that my peer-reviewed scholarly article, titled “The Moral Life of Epinephrine in the United States,” has now been published on the open-access medical anthropology journal, Medicine Anthropology Theory!
Why do emergency medications cost so much? One answer lies in examining how financial industry stakeholders and influencers shape decision making of the people in charge of pharmaceutical sales and development.
I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting on this panel at the American Anthropological Association’s 115th conference in Minneapolis on Friday, November 18th, 2016! My paper considers how financial industry logic shapes the aims and products of biomedical research. Click through for more info.
Why does Mylan’s EpiPen cost so much? Read my early-stage reflections on the matter over at Somatosphere in a recent blog post.
Informed by Marxist theory, feminism, and science studies, this class interrogates how drugs – both engineered pharmaceuticals and pleasurably addictive illegal substances – gain and reproduce their power in our social life. As total health expenditures approach 20% of American GDP, and drugs become dynamic components of everyday life, understanding the personal experience and political economy of these compounds is more crucial than ever.
Are you an graduate student writing about science, technology, and medicine in an anthropologically-informed way? If so, check out the … More
Listening to my early research interviews can be fun. It can also be embarrassing.
For example, one question I asked in early interviews was: “What’s the treatment for food allergies?”
Now, I know that I should have asked, what medications do you use to manage food allergies? That’s what I was interested in: learning about what pills, injections, and other medical products people use to maintain their health while living with food allergies.
What happens when pharmaceuticals overflow the boundaries imposed by regulatory structures, carrier materials, and places and methods of production? What new risks–to bodies and environments–appear in an increasingly pharmaceuticalized world? What new social lives do drugs take on when used outside of their usage scripts, after expiration, or when they are cut, mixed, and remade into new types of drugs?
What happens in the lives of individuals and to their relationship to biomedical expertise when food is the best medicine?
In communities where deadly infectious childhood diseases have largely retreated, food allergies have taken their place as a medico-moral cause célèbre for mothers, medical workers, and medical researchers seeking ensure the safety of innocent children. Their mysterious etiology – a combination of environmental exposure, heredity, and individual biology – unpredictable development, apparently sudden increase, and potentially deadly effects make them a source of fear for parents worldwide.
Danya Glabau 