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Based on two years of ethnographic interviews with patients of chronic illness and participant observation with practitioners of complementary medicine in California, this talk examines what “sensitivity” can provide as a source of information about the relationship between the individual and the environment, and how this impacts health. Centering narratives of illness and healing, Vora explores what care could be, even as mainstream medicine participates in encouraging healthy and abled people to think they can avoid vulnerability through individual effort and ‘fitness.’ In reality, as disability justice advocates argue, and as Covid-19 among other epidemics of chronic illness illustrate, chronic illness is a question of timeline, not fit versus unfit. Taking an approach informed by the history of feminist science theory and practice, Vora’s project elaborates the need for an approach to care that is informed by the unique knowledge held by people with chronic and hard-to-diagnose conditions.
About the SpeakerKalindi Vora is Professor and Chair of Ethnicity Race and Migration, and Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies and of American Studies with an affiliate appointment in History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She is author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (winner of the 2018 4S Bernal Prize), Surrogate Humanity: Race Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures (co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, 2019); Re-Imagining Rerpoduction: Surrogacy, Labor and Technologies of Human Reproduction; and Technoprecarious (with the Precarity Lab).