This holiday weekend marked two significant days – Juneteenth and Father’s Day. On the surface, these days are unrelated, but they help us reflect on health inequity in the United States. Juneteenth has created a space to discuss the ongoing battle for social justice, including racialized health disparities. The rates of disease and death that…
Category: Race and Ethnicity
Life Made Possible: Migrant Care, Settler Health, and Colonial Futurities
Rachel Brown’s Unsettled Labors: Migrant Care Work in Palestine/Israel (2024) theorizes migrant, home-based eldercare as a critical yet underexamined component of the economic, cultural, biological, and discursive reproduction of settler colonialism in Israel and Palestine, where almost 70,000 migrant caregivers are currently working (3). After the first Intifada in 1987, the Israeli government began granting visas to migrant workers…
Air Pollution and Black Bodies: A Cause of Death
Why do Black people die prematurely? Racial health disparities have always existed in the United States. Despite notable progress, Black people continue to experience a disproportionate burden of disease and death. While lifestyle choices and environmental conditions contribute to poor health outcomes, focusing mainly on diet and exercise minimizes the importance of environmental health. In…
Infrastructural Freedom Dreaming: On Jina B. Kim’s “Care at The End of The World”
Image Credit: © Jina B. Kim, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025), reproduced under fair use provision (review). Jina B. Kim begins her new book – as the title, Care at The End of The World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (2025),…
Fungal Epistemes and Crip Worldmaking
Image Credit: Photograph of fungal mycelium by Rob Hille, used under Creative Commons licence. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope––or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin. The Art of Noticing, Anna Tsing Crip theory has often sought out conceptual frameworks that…
“Innocent” and “Guilty” AIDS Victims: A Review of The Life and Times of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro
Flyer, “Bring Your Grief and Rage About AIDS to a Political Funeral in Washington, D.C.” October 11, 1992. Several years ago, I was asked to give a presentation for World AIDS Day while working as a sexual health educator at a youth center. Popular histories of AIDS activism were in vogue, such as David…
Book Review: Inspired and Outraged by Alice Rothchild
“[T]he analyst who points us out from our classmates and announced (disapprovingly)/ You women are taking the place of a productive male…You are here because of your Unresolved Penis Envy” (pp 166-7). These are the attitudes which Dr. Alice Rothchild, obstetrician and gynecologist at Beth Israel Hospital, Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology…
Birdshot: Psychic Numbing over Body in Number
In July 2024, tertiary-level students in Bangladesh protested a quota system that favored descendants of freedom fighters, demanding equal access to government jobs. The police, along with a government-backed student wing, responded with violence, killing six protesters early in the movement, according to the CBC . This incident sparked further protests and fatalities, eventually leading…
Part II: Invisible Women
Part 2 of the Invisible Women series aims to highlight the dangers of using White people as the default reference group in research (Part I). I will use body ideal/image research to illustrate how a default White reference group can erase the experiences of racially marginalized folks. It is also important to acknowledge that much…
Towards an Asian American Disability Politics: On Mimi Khúc’s “Dear Elia”
Sami Schalk, in Black Disability Politics (2022), notes “the limited scholarly work on the specific approaches to disability politics within particular racialized communities thus far” (162). Schalk explains that the lack of such scholarly work prevents her from exploring to what extent a Black disability politics overlaps with the disability politics of Indigenous and Native,…