“Rethinking Diabetes: Considerations of Hunger, Trauma, Precarity and Insulin”

The Department of Anthropology will host a discussion by Emily Mendenhall Thursday, Jan. 23, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the Senior Classroom of the Tinkham Veale University Center. The theme of the discussion is: “Rethinking Diabetes: Considerations of Hunger, Trauma, Precarity and Insulin.”

Mendenhall, a medical anthropologist, is Provost’s Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Mendenhall received the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2017 for her ethnographic work on the intersection of social trauma, poverty, and chronic disease globally. Her first book, Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes Among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012, Routledge) explored the experiences of immigration and social isolation in Mexican women in Chicago. Her recent book, Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements of Poverty, Trauma, and HIV(2019, Cornell University Press), expanded this work to examine the experiences of low-income people in Chicago, Delhi, Johannesburg, and Nairobi.

The event is free and open to the public.

Light refreshments will be served.