The Sociology Department invites faculty and graduate students from all disciplines to attend:
Alondra Nelson
“Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination”
Monday, March 12, 12:30p-2:00
Rm. 599, Engineering 2
Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. In this talk, Nelson will discuss a lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism– its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination–was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. Considering the Party as a health social movement, she argues, offers a window on the politics of race and medicine in the 1970s and has implications for how we think about health inequality today. The Black Panther Party’s understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy— and that struggle—continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.
Alondra Nelson is associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she also holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. An interdisciplinary social scientist, she writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality. These themes are taken up in her most recent book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, published in 2011. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (2012), Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001), and “Afrofuturism,” (2002) a special issue of the journal Social Text.
An internationally recognized scholar, Nelson has been a visiting fellow at BIOS: Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics and at the Baravrian-American Academy in Munich. In 2011, she was a senior fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Nelson received her B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of California at San Diego, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her Ph.D. in from New York University in 2003.
Graduate Student Seminar
