Areas of Research

Broadly, I am engaged in ongoing research in three intersecting areas: racism and health, feminist theory and biomedicine, and social studies of pharmaceuticals. Each of these areas has active collaborative projects: a collaboration with Nadine Ehlers, Anthony Ryan Hatch, and Amade Aouatef M'charek on race and the biohumanities; a collaboration with Nina Wakeford on heart feminism, art, and feminist STS at the Science Gallery London; and a collaboration with Lauren Paremoer on the Africa CDC's endeavours to foster pharmaceutical and R&D and manufacture.

Pharmaceutical Science
by and for ​​the Global South

My own research in this area has focused on pharmaceutical science in South Africa.  This feeds into ongoing work, in collaboration with Lauren Paremoer, on Africa CDC's endeavours to catalyse medical manufacturing on the continent.

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My book Synthesizing Hope, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019, opens up the material and social world of pharmaceuticals by focusing on an unexpected place: iThemba Pharmaceuticals. Founded in 2009 with a name taken from the Zulu word for hope, the small South African startup with an elite international scientific board was tasked with drug discovery for tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria. I use this company as an entry point for exploring how the location of scientific knowledge production matters, not only for the raw materials, manufacture, licensing, and distribution of pharmaceuticals but also for the making of basic scientific knowledge.

Consideration of this case exposes the limitations of global health frameworks that implicitly posit rich countries as the only sites of knowledge production. Analysis of iThemba identifies the problems inherent in global north/south divides at the same time as it highlights what is at stake in who makes knowledge and where. It also provides a concrete example for consideration of the contexts and practices of postcolonial science, its constraints, and its promise.

​Synthesizing Hope explores the many legacies that create conditions of possibility for South African drug discovery, especially the specific form of settler colonialism characterized by apartheid and resource extraction. Paying attention to the infrastructures and laboratory processes of drug discovery underscores the materiality of pharmaceuticals from the perspective of their makers, and tracing the intellectual and material infrastructures of South African drug discovery contributes new insights about larger social, political, and economic orders.

The first article from this project was published in Social Studies of Science, an interactive site on the project is available at mappingithemba.com.  Research for this project was funded by the US National Science Foundation.  This work also informs my participation in broader conversations about Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies.

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Racism and Health
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My own research focuses on racism and health in the United States, and I am increasingly interested in building collaborative projects to explore these questions transnationally.  I received a Small Grant from the Wellcome Trust to found an international research network on Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Lab: 21st Century Mobilizations, which led to a Special Issue in BioSocieties: link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41292-021-00261-5

With the support of a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, I completed my third book, Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States.  This book explores a series of distinct, evocative twenty-first-century events to illuminate wide-ranging elements of racial health disparities in the contemporary United States. Each chapter is grounded in close attention to a specific event: the deaths of postal workers in the 2001 anthrax attacks; the increase in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina; the Scott sisters case, in which prison sentences were suspended conditional upon kidney donation; a teenage girl subjected to excessive force by a police officer at a suburban pool party; the differential protection of machines over people in the Flint water crisis; the life-threatening childbirth experience of Serena Williams. These extraordinary crises reveal fundamental racialization of access to citizenship and health in the contemporary United States. A version of one chapter from this project was previously published in Science, Technology & Human Values.
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My first book, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference, published by Duke University Press in 2012, traces the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States over the past century, from the founding of cardiology through the FDA’s approval of BiDil, the first drug sanctioned for use in a specific race.  Medicating Race examines particular sites of the longstanding and dynamic interplay of race and heart disease: the notion, among the founders of American cardiology, that heart disease was a modern, and therefore white, illness; constructions of “normal” populations in epidemiological research, including the influential Framingham Heart Study; medical debates about the “slavery hypothesis” and thiazide diuretics, a class of antihypertensive drugs that has been linked to African American hypertension; and physician advocacy for the urgent needs of black patients on both scientific and social justice grounds. Ultimately, Medicating Race insists that those grappling with the meaning of racialized medical technologies must consider not only the troubled history of race and biomedicine, but also its fraught yet vital present. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation. The aim of scholarly analysis should not be to settle matters of race and genetics, but to hold medicine more broadly accountable to truth and justice.

Heart Feminism

​This project argues for the value of exploration of the heart, circulatory system, and heart disease for feminist theory.  Heart disease is the leading cause of death of women and men in the U.S. and beyond, and women’s heart disease has been a very important site of debates within medical research and public discourse. However, women’s heart disease has not become a locus of a broad social movement.  Moreover, the heart’s physiology not been a prominent site of feminist theorizing about the body.  My first paper from this project was published in Body & Society, and the second one was published in the inaugural issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.  Together with Nassim (JafariNaimi) Parvin and Lewis Wheaton, I have also engaged with design-based inquiry into this sphere, and together with Nina Wakeford, Maithili Pittea, and Aysha Leach, art-based inquiry.