Chronic Conditions: Knowing, Seeing & Healing the Body in Global Africa

Recently nominated for funding by the Mellon Foundation, the goal of the 2019-2020 Sawyer Seminar is to offer novel ways of thinking about the historical, cultural, and structural processes that have given rise to chronic health conditions among Africans, African immigrants, and African Americans. Seminar participants will address critical questions about how anti-black racism and symbolic violence have combined with structural inequalities to predispose minoritized populations to particular illnesses sometimes referred to as “chronic.” Through a focus on communities that share African roots, Seminar participants will trace how legacies of slavery, colonialism, and segregation have rendered black bodies particularly vulnerable to misapprehension, oppression, and exploitation in medicine. The Seminar will show how the enduring effects of this shared history are manifested in people’s exposure to and experiences of chronic health conditions. While these effects are evident in epidemiological health data, humanistic inquiry is uniquely suited to interrogate relations of power, systems of meanings, and narratives that structure and reproduce them.