Workshop | Chronic Living and Covid Inequalities

A workshop by Joe Dumit, Professor of Anthropology, Science & Technology Studies, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Davis
Co-sponsored by Public Humanities at Yale

Workshop description
This is a workshop on fieldwork on/in structural issues and going into/returning from the field, framed around the topic of “Chronic Living and Covid Inequalities”.

Ahead of workshop:
1) Participants should come to the workshop having watched the first 30 minutes of this video, a keynote talk Prof. Dumit presented “in” Copenhagen for the Chronic Living conference. Participants may add comments and questions directly onto the Vimeo interface, and can also reply to each other. Professor Dumit will look these over ahead of time.

2) In addition to responding to Prof. Dumit’s talk, participants should prepare to discuss their own thoughts and questions as they emerge in the context of going into the field and/or returning from it. They can be about ways of writing, ways of researching, and ways of being.

Workshop on May 17th (6-7:30 pm):
Prof. Dumit will present opening thoughts about fieldwork on/in structural issues including increasing vaccine extortion and diagramming as a strategy of engagement. This will be followed by 1 hour of workshopping and discussion of ideas on questions on both Prof. Dumit’s talk and participants’ own projects and ideas.

More about Prof. Dumit
Joseph Dumit is an anthropologist of passions, performance, brains, games, bodies, drugs and facts. Chair of Performance Studies, and Professor of Science & Technology Studies, and Anthropology at University of California Davis, he is author of Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans & Biomedical America (Princeton 2004), Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Duke 2012), and co-editor of Cyborgs & Citadels; Cyborg Babies; and Biomedicine as Culture. He has written articles about neuroscience and play, irrational computers, patient experiences, difficult to define illnesses, and the history of medicine, and was the managing editor of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry for 10 years. He holds a B.A. from Rice University and a Ph.D. in the history of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

After 20 years of writing about the life-draining effects of the pharmaceutical industry he’s taken up improvisation and dance as a potential practice of longevity or at least pleasure, as well as practice as research. He is also collaborating with the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University and CNRS Paris on virtual reality and embodiment; working with neuroscientists, artists, and improvisers in Denmark, Germany, and France on multimedia installations for social learning and togetherness, and writing speculative science fiction about cannabis and ayahuasca. http://dumit.net.

May 17, 2021
6-7:30 pm EST, join via Zoom
Admission: Free, with registration
Registration: register here

View the full spring schedule here.

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