Graduate Student Seminar

“Approaches to the Field Statement”

Monday, February 27, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8

Field statements mark a key development in the academic life of graduate students.  Though the prospects of writing field statements may be daunting, this panel is designed to assuage your fears and provide you with strategies and tips for optimizing your work.

Panelists will include Professor Dana Takagi, graduate student Shannon Williams and others.  Megan Abed McNamara will moderate.

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.

Laura Grindstaff (PDF)

“From Jerry Springer to Jersey Shore: the Cultural Politics of Class in/on US Reality Programming”

Monday, November 28, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8

Grindstaff’s talk explores what might be considered the ‘performance logic’ of reality programming as it relates to the cultural politics of class. Having conducted ethnographic research on two different genres of reality television in the US, Grindstaff is interested in the tensions between class as an embodied phenomenon and as a discursive phenomenon as parlayed by social institutions such as the media.

Laura Grindstaff is an Associate Professor at UC Davis who teaches in the areas of popular culture, cultural sociology, gender and society, and field methods. Her research focuses broadly on American popular culture and its role in constructing gender, race, and class relations. Her first book, The Money Shot, is an ethnographic account of daytime television talkshows. Based on interviews and participant observation behind-the-scenes, it explores how the production process works to transform the private experiences of “ordinary”people into extraordinary public performances, and what these performances tell us about class inequality in the US.