Robin G. Nelson - Distinguished Lecture Series - February 28, 2022

Summary

In this insightful lecture, Dr. Robin G. Nelson delves into the anthropological perspective on care, community, and crisis management, examining how historical and current events shape societal norms and health outcomes. Highlighting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the structural inequalities it exposes, Dr. Nelson explores themes of vulnerability, equity, and survival in the context of care networks and societal investment. Through a comparative lens, discussions address the disparity in experiences during crises, emphasizing the necessity for increased community support, equitable policies, and global solidarity to foster resilience and equity.

Highlights

• Dr. Nelson sheds light on the intersection of anthropology, care, and societal crises, using COVID-19 as a case study 📊.
• The lecture explores historical examples of societal collapse and draws parallels with current global challenges 🌐.
• Key discussions tackle the discrepancy in experiences across social strata during crises 🌍.
• Dr. Nelson advocates for viewing community investment and care as foundational for surviving societal disruptions and building resilient systems 🔍.
• The event highlights the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, combining insights from anthropology, health, and cultural studies 🔄.

Key Takeaways

• The pandemic has exposed deep-rooted structural inequalities, particularly concerning care workers and underprivileged communities 🌍.
• Anthropology provides critical tools and perspectives to address societal challenges and envision equitable futures 🏛️.
• Community care and mutual support are essential to surviving and thriving during crises, highlighting global disparities ➕.
• Current responses to crises often reveal a deep inadequacy in policy and societal support structures, needing a shift towards mutual aid and care at scale 🤝.
• The anthropological lens shows that historical precedents like pandemics reveal recurring themes of inequity that must be addressed for true societal advancement 📚.

Overview

Dr. Robin G. Nelson, in her lecture at the NYAS Anthropology Section, provides a profound exploration of how the field of anthropology intersects with issues of care and community, particularly in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. She articulates the glaring inequalities that the pandemic has laid bare, stressing the importance of restructuring societal norms to better support care workers and vulnerable communities.

Through historical precedents, including the downfall of ancient civilizations, Dr. Nelson draws parallels with contemporary global issues, urging for a reconsideration of how societies view and respond to crises. Her discourse implores us to revisit our methods of societal organization and care systems, advocating for a collective reimagining of these structures to foster resilience and equity.

This series event, enriched by discussions with fellow scholars, underscores the necessity for an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together insights from anthropology, cultural studies, and public health to address systemic inequalities. Dr. Nelson and her colleagues argue for deep communal investment and highlight the potential for anthropology to guide us towards more equitable and caring societal models.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction and Overview Our theme on emergent care and community encompasses all four fields of anthropology. The global pandemic has exposed the irony that care workers, despite their essential role, are frequently underpaid or unpaid. This exploitation is a result of structural inequalities that have developed over generations. The programming for the academic year will address these critical issues.
• 01:30 - 04:30: Introduction of Speakers The chapter delves into the impact of capitalist modernity, exploring possibilities for fostering radical mutuality. It examines the concept of care in various dimensions—social, environmental, ontological, and material. Rather than positioning anthropologists in a prophetic role, the series emphasizes leveraging their discipline's tools and perspectives. This involves analyzing methods, theory, community engagement, and public commentary to envision and imagine the future.
• 04:30 - 32:30: Lecture by Dr. Robin Nelson The chapter titled 'Lecture by Dr. Robin Nelson' addresses the urgent issue of the crisis in Ukraine, framing it as a form of 'imperial criminality.' The discussion seeks to not only understand the complexities of such geopolitical issues but also to promote care and mutual support as means to counteract imperialism both historically and in contemporary settings. The chapter sets the stage for further discourse from various speakers, emphasizing the need for solidarity against the injustices perpetuated by imperial powers.
• 32:30 - 50:00: Reflections by Dr. Lusadra Character and Dr. Anjali Palmquist The chapter titled 'Reflections by Dr. Lusadra Character and Dr. Anjali Palmquist' introduces a transcript where Christina Baines, co-chair of the New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Section, welcomes three scholars, including Dr. Robin Nelson. Dr. Nelson, an associate professor at Arizona State University, specializes in the school of human evolution and social change. Her work focuses on critical growth periods and the relationship between family dynamics.
• 50:00 - 79:00: Panel Discussion and Q&A This chapter is a panel discussion and Q&A session that focuses on culturally significant forms of social and financial capital and their impact on the health of Black Caribbean families. The conversation delves into topics related to research and cultural anthropology, public health, gender studies, and Black feminist studies. Panelists also discuss equity in science and the influence of racism on theory building and biological anthropology. One speaker, who received her doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2008, shares her background which includes a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University in the Laboratory for Human Biology Research.
• 79:00 - 85:00: Closing Remarks Dr. Nelson was a faculty member at Santa Clara University before joining ASU. The discussion involves Dr. Nelson and Dr. Lucedrama Character, a junior research fellow at Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies and incoming assistant professor in Public Health at Aarhus University, Denmark. Dr. Character leads a community-based initiative.

Robin G. Nelson - Distinguished Lecture Series - February 28, 2022 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 our theme on emergent care and community has covered all four fields of anthropology and i would just like to let you know what our overall programming is covering for the academic year the global pandemic has highlighted the irony that care workers are often underpaid or even unpaid their exploitation a symptom of structural inequalities accrued across generations
• 00:30 - 01:00 against the centrifugal forces of capitalist modernity what possibilities exist for radical mutuality in the future what constitutes care as related to the social environmental ontological or material rather than asking anthropologists to assume some kind of prophetic role this series offers an opportunity to take critical stock of what tools and perspectives our discipline provides in terms of methods theory community engagement and public commentary as we envision and imagine
• 01:00 - 01:30 new possibilities for reshaping society we are mindful of the crisis in ukraine recognizing that this is an urgent iteration of imperial criminality that so many communities have suffered at the hands of subjugating powers we seek to understand and engage in forms of care and mutuality that oppose and redress the injustices of all imperialisms past and present and with that we turn over to our speakers for tonight
• 01:30 - 02:00 um christina baines who is my co-chair in the new york academy of sciences anthropology section will do our introductions tonight christina good evening everyone we are very excited to welcome three um amazing um scholars tonight our featured speaker is doctor i'm robin nelson she's an associate professor in the school of human evolution and social change at arizona state university with a focus on critical periods of growth and development she investigates the relationship between familial dynamics
• 02:00 - 02:30 culturally salient forms of social and financial capital and the health of black caribbean families her work engages with research and cultural anthropology public health gender studies and black feminist studies she also investigates equity in science and the legacy of racism on theory building and biological anthropology she received her doctorate from the university of michigan in 2008 and then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at northwestern university in the laboratory for human biology research
• 02:30 - 03:00 dr nelson was most recently a faculty member at santa clara university before arriving at asu this fall and we have two discussions in conversation with dr nelson um today uh we have dr lucedrama character she is currently a junior research fellow at the ohoos institute for advanced studies and an incoming assistant professor in the department of public health both at oahu's university in denmark in denmark she is leading a community-based
• 03:00 - 03:30 health promotion project called supporting pregnancy food and nutrition security or spoons in denmark's most marginalized neighborhoods spoons focuses on identifying and measuring household food insecurity real or perceived lack of affordable healthy socially appropriate food in social housing blocks with primarily new immigrant populations spoons also aims to work with local organizations to mitigate food insecurity for households with pregnant people
• 03:30 - 04:00 or with parents likely to start a pregnancy in the near future in addition to spoons she's involved in a number of other health equity related studies in canada and denmark all focused on investing through care in preconceptional pregnancy and infant health to support equity and health and well-being in the next generations we also welcome dr anjali ponquist she's assistant professor in the department of maternal and child health at the unc chapel hill gilling school of global
• 04:00 - 04:30 public health she's a medical anthropologist who examines the biocultural dimensions of perinatal health inequalities their recent work focuses on the ethics of postpartum newborn care in times of crisis including humanitarian settings the coven 19 pandemic and incarceration we're very fortunate enough to welcome these three scholars and look forward to our discussion so first i want to begin by um really thanking the new york academy
• 04:30 - 05:00 of sciences for inviting us to speak today and i would like to thank sajah and anjali palmquist for being with me today as calamity upon calamity seemed to pile up there have been musings that this is the end of the world there is even a tick top meme asking why everyone is working so hard when the world is clearly ending as anthropologists we tend to think in deep time millennia rather than decades
• 05:00 - 05:30 millions of years rather than centuries and as such i began to tangle with my own experience of this moment as a scientist as a black woman as a mother and even as a gen xer who has lived through my fair share of personal and public tragedies as someone who is keenly interested in the human condition and experience to the level of obsession really as i've dedicated my professional life to this i began to wonder how the
• 05:30 - 06:00 general public non-scientists and non-anthropologists were experiencing this moment and what reference we have for relatively non-biblical conversations about the end of the world and i say non-biblical because we have lots of references in the bible surely to this end i asked myself what has pop culture told us about the end of the world in most cases there are several causal elements that appear in these pop culture pieces and i'm particularly
• 06:00 - 06:30 thinking of film right now there are changes in weather like the day after tomorrow the film from i think 2004 there are despotic rulers like the hunger games and there are also viruses as in all the above noted zombie films zombie films in fact i couldn't help but continually return to the genre of zombie films just hang with me for a second here their zombie films provide this fascinating
• 06:30 - 07:00 window into our own fears and vulnerability in almost all zombie films there is some contagious element a virus most often that renders individuals susceptible to losing their lives there is also a recognition that you have to run and hide and dodge and protect oneself from this impending danger and finally zombies themselves are terrifying even
• 07:00 - 07:30 when zombies move slowly because they lay bare what happens when society can no longer function as it once did and dangers around every corner whatever the causal catastrophic elements whether the despotic rulers or a virus these films remain relevant and scary and prescient because they challenge our ideas about normalcy our beliefs about our ability to remain safe and they ask us what we would do at the end of the world
• 07:30 - 08:00 in february 2020 i was teaching a class called the biology of poverty when i started hearing word of a virus that emerged in mulan china and was spreading rapidly and causing high levels of illness in the communities in china because this class was in part a lesson on risk and vulnerability and health outcomes i began mentioning it in passing to our students during the first week weekend in march i went to target and began stocking up on advil and ibuprofen hand sanitizers and
• 08:00 - 08:30 masks and non-perishable foods and when i was checking out the cashier said you heard huh i did some early morning shopping at costco earlier last week then on tuesday march 10 2020 i remember saying to the class we are not getting out of this unscathed please begin to mentally prepare yourselves for this to disrupt your life i never met with them again in person after that meeting the next day our campus went virtual and
• 08:30 - 09:00 for those students many of whom were seniors in college their worlds changed irreparably no graduation no parties no senior celebrations all things that may seem minor or trivial but do serve as those place markers for the passage of time the completion of a daunting task like college and places your life or their lives in this case in relation with others who have experienced the same thing
• 09:00 - 09:30 we know that beginning and this moment and i use these pictures here of the chandelier london and dumbo in brooklyn because they actually draw us back to those pictures from the zombie films where the streets were absolutely deserted in only a few weeks cities around the world began to quote unquote shut down there were scenes of deserted streets that in our lifetimes were once only the manifestation of a create creative art director on a film
• 09:30 - 10:00 set and these became eerily normal new york a place that we call the city that never sleeps because it literally comes with energy and noise at all hours of the day suddenly became a space where folks reported hearing birds during the day outside of green spaces is this the end of the world if so whose life was made less typical during this time who was no longer traveling out to work and who still had to
• 10:00 - 10:30 how did we make sense of this new space which we knew was liminal but whose limit but whose liminality was unknown would this be our new normal for two weeks for two months or two years and is there any precedent for this kind of shift in social organization when i wasn't wrestling with two children who were suddenly attending school from home these questions dominated my thinking if we turn to the archaeological record
• 10:30 - 11:00 we can learn a bit about what the end of the world quote unquote looked like in our human past and what precedent what proceeded excuse me devastation and what emerged afterwards in one case of the sovereignty call which is in guatemala it was uh at its height from 250 to 600 ce and by 900 ce was completely abandoned after hundreds of years of prosperity the maya left the city of dakota and some of the reasons for desertion were
• 11:00 - 11:30 overpopulation persistent droughts and over-exploitation deforestation of the surrounding lands and in fact the recent study by david lenson colleagues found the presence of toxic algae an algae which may have flourished because it was nourished by phosphate phosphate which accumulated in the reservoirs due to centuries of smoky cooking fires and ceramic plates washed in the reservoir that these this dominance or or rise of algae and mercury metals probably made the water
• 11:30 - 12:00 in the reservoirs unhealthy so between the waters and the reservoirs becoming unhealthy and the land becoming deforested the entire area became uninhabitable these areas which were you know empty relative to the previous population by about 900 ce were not resettled there was a reorganization of the community that once lived in this space around lakes and rivers and migration from the southern lowlands to the
• 12:00 - 12:30 northern lowlands into the highlands and i bring up this these particular cases and i'll give you one more archaeological case in a second because i want us to think about what we mean when we say it's the end of the world what is ending and what happens afterwards cahokia also gives us a really interesting example which will both of these cases draw really interesting parallels to what we're experiencing now cahokia for a long time was a classic example of what folks called collapse
• 12:30 - 13:00 and it took a lot it took up a lot of space in a kind of apocalyptic imagination within anthropology and archaeological anthropology cahokia was an enormously large settlement at its height it was the size of london or rome with regards to population and had explosive population at the confluence of the mississippi and st louis rivers around a thousand years ago and over a hundred years spanned it grew to one of the biggest settlements in the world over time though the countryside is
• 13:00 - 13:30 reorganized to provision the city with deer and corn and inequity builds as the people in the city center are healthy but people in the countryside show signs of increasing malnutrition as their diet shifts towards more squirrels and turtles and away from deer during the next 200 years the city had to build a stockade around it and the elite quarter for one of the outlier settlements in what is now east st louis because it is brutally one of the elite
• 13:30 - 14:00 quarters sorry is brutally attacked and burned to the ground then within the archaeological record i'm sure it was not southern for the people who lived there but if you're looking from kind of archaeological time depth there's a kind of sudden depopulation with the cahokia elites seeming to flee down to alabama where they tried to rebuild the city at moundville but it never reaches more than about one-tenth the size of what cahokia was with most people dispersing into smaller more egalitarian groups revealing evidence of better health and
• 14:00 - 14:30 lower violence and this is a kind of interesting site because the whole center central ceremonial palace is very much like a mesoamerican city with a ground plaza with pyramids at either end a henge for celestial ceremonies and the layout planned around the movement of the sun across the annual cycle but this was all built on the backs of individuals who were exploited and eventually rebelled
• 14:30 - 15:00 so from the archaeological record what do we know about the end of the world quote unquote well we can think a little bit about resource accumulation and resource accumulation in particular parts of the community whereas others don't have access to these resources so that manifests itself in inequity and we can kind of think about this through a kind of structural violence lens we also see shifting norms and expectations which are sometimes codified as in the case of cahokia when
• 15:00 - 15:30 people who are in the farming outlands were expected to provision people in the city and then eventually we see a dissolution of society as it was once established the case of takao in guatemala is particularly prescient as we are now navigating our own challenges regarding climate and sustainability it seems that when one looks in nearly any direction there is evidence that the climate is changing and it will change
• 15:30 - 16:00 our lives in irreparable ways if we don't act immediately to meet this challenge recent findings from the international glacier collaboration funded by nsf to the tune of 25 million dollars identified cracks and fissures in the eastern shelf if it collapses the rest of the west atlantic arctic sheep could collapse raising tides around the world and is stated in the rolling stone article about changes to this ice sheet entitled quote the fuse has been blown
• 16:00 - 16:30 and the doomsday glacier is coming for us all we would need to say quote goodbye to every low-level coastal city around the world additionally the news i should say this news regarding the shifts in kuwait's glacier is not surprising in light of news from the epa regarding their climate indicators as you can see from this graph of annual average temperatures in the lower 48 since 1901
• 16:30 - 17:00 we can see that beginning around 1970 1980 we start seeing increasing temperatures and then you can also see measurements from the trophies the lower troposphere which is the lowest levels of the earth's atmosphere and those temperatures are rising as well in actuality few of us need meteorological data to identify changes in local temperatures if you look at this map which provides similar evidence and surface temperatures taken in third year increments beginning in 1901 to
• 17:00 - 17:30 1930 and ending in current day i'll show you the second one in a minute you can see that what was areas that were once cool are increasingly hot and i think we've all experienced that okay so what of those moments and how does this speak to our conversation about the end of the world well just as we've seen in the past and with many other incidents many other cases the end of the world is not experienced equally
• 17:30 - 18:00 and everyone does not um does not experience the trauma of this event to the same order of magnitude the rising temperatures are experienced by working class and poor people differently than their wealthier counterparts who may have jobs that allow them to work inside air-conditioned buildings act allow them access to fresh and cool drinking water provide them with appliances that allow them to cook and clean clothes in cool areas and without physical labor and provide resources to escape the heat if needed
• 18:00 - 18:30 in the u.s the effect of urban heat deserts is intensified in poor communities where there are fewer green spaces and thus reduced ability to mediate increasingly rising temperatures this graphic highlights this graphic highlights cities with the strongest correlation between heat and income so the darker the green color is the higher the income and the light green are lower incomes and then dark red correlates to hot to heat increased heat and lighter red to cooler areas and you can see how
• 18:30 - 19:00 closely it maps on where if you are living in a wealthier area you are more likely to be protected from these rising temperatures to some extent this brings us back to our current conversation about our our uh daily challenge of cova in these headlines from the beginning of the covid crisis we are presented with reflection of the world trying to make sense of the end of whatever versions of normalcy with which we were once
• 19:00 - 19:30 familiar in may 2020 the new york led with the following headline u.s deaths near 100 000 and incalculable loss this article shared a thousand obituaries of people who had died now less than two years later we in the u.s have lost a conservative 94 947 000 lives and we have experienced 78 million cases of covid 5.95 million people have died around the world beyond death
• 19:30 - 20:00 cove had peeled back the layers of inequity that are so comfortably baked into our society in the united states and highlighted which aspects of our culture facilitated the creation and maintenance of structures that supported our malaise at addressing these inequities at all one aspect of this pandemic that we must acknowledge is that people across the country actually experience the rise of covet cases at different moments this graphic
• 20:00 - 20:30 is taken from cnn.com and is based on data out of johns hopkins from june 2020 and what you can see is that areas that first struggled with rise in the virus like new york city were suddenly doing better for just a small pocket of time and places that had been shielded from the trauma of that early emergence of this virus were suddenly held firmly in its grip basic governance in the united states allowed for states to develop and enact their own policies and protections or lack thereof against kovid
• 20:30 - 21:00 this diversity in policy and practice under the guise of freedom rendered us actually more susceptible to this infectious disease which can mutate and shift and change as it moves through space and time data from the national conference of state legislation legislators excuse me reveals that the high variability in the application reveals the high variability in the application of federal guidance regarding phobia and that variability in
• 21:00 - 21:30 the application of federal guidance also mirrors variability in the experience of this pandemic so what did we learn about the end of the world from the early days of coven and these are pictures from the new york times reuters the university of chicago and abc7.com out of california one striking takeaway from my perspective as a biological anthropologist who studied social and
• 21:30 - 22:00 kin networks risk and vulnerability and individual health outcomes was that our commitment to bootstrap ideologies about individual perseverance and freedom were not going to serve us well in the face of a highly contagious infectious disease and in fact the lack of formalized of a formalized safety net and protective procedures for most for the most vulnerable individuals in our communities ensured that we would experience this end of the world quite differently depending on
• 22:00 - 22:30 occupancy occupation and position in the social strata and so in this if you aren't remembering these are pictures actually award tracks uh that were lined up in new york city as cases surged at the very beginning of the pandemic and i wanted to highlight in this slide what we were calling essential workers or frontline workers individuals who could not stay home who had to work through those early days and if you remember in the very early parts of the of the pandemic there were lots of celebrations
• 22:30 - 23:00 for frontline workers we were applauding outside hospitals at seven o'clock every night when shift changes happened but slowly that support which was um kind of in feeling only not in policy started to ebb and in fact one quarter of frontline workers have had trouble affording basic expenses during the covet 19 crisis so while we have all been impacted by
• 23:00 - 23:30 covin some have been impacted more than others while there are frontline workers who were thinking quite a bit about how to survive every day and protect themselves there were many discussions about sourdough starters and i do not take myself out of this conversation and we can talk a little bit maybe in the q a about positionality um but you know certainly i was able to work from home so there were conversations about things like sourdough starters on all these websites and little uh articles about how to do
• 23:30 - 24:00 these things at home that we never had time to do there are also ongoing jokes about you know wearing an outfit that looks really nice from the top up so you could be presentable on zoom whereas you're very casual from the bottom down and finally conversation started to emerge that working from home is in fact a privilege and so when they looked at the share of u.s respondents in this one study who worked uh from home more because of the coronavirus by annual household
• 24:00 - 24:30 income you found that 45.3 percent were making over two hundred thousand dollars a year in a new york times opinion piece by charles blow entitled social distancing and a privilege he cites data out of chicago that showed that 70 percent of coven 19 deaths were bla were deaths of black people and pointed out about surrounding cook county but quote while black residents make up only 23 percent of the population in the county they account
• 24:30 - 25:00 for 58 of the coven 19 deaths and in fact we know that while cova deaths are not experienced evenly across communities neither are the tolls of the way that this pandemic was handled according to a report by the national women's law center and mentioned in the piece by rebecca clay for the american psychological association women in the u.s have lost 5.4 million net jobs since february 2020 and globally women's
• 25:00 - 25:30 employment dropped by 4.2 as compared to 3 percent for men additionally the report above all of the jobs lost in december were women's jobs the leisure and house noted that the leisure and hospitality sector lost 498 000 jobs in december 2020 and women accounted for 56.6 of those jobs that were lost
• 25:30 - 26:00 so you know even if you were able to work at home and you didn't experience job loss during the pandemic we still had all these other ripple effects that kind of emerged and one of them were the kind of um immediate and long-term impacts of co of the covenant 19 pandemic on the delivery of surgical services so in this article out of the british journal surgery there's a discussion about how to
• 26:00 - 26:30 kind of strategize around reducing elective surgeries in any given hospital based on what the case count looked like for covid and this article was first published in april 2020 and at that time clinicians were already concerned about how to figure out which surgeries could be delayed which ones needed to go forward and how to think about that in light of copin this pandemic revealed what i call a
• 26:30 - 27:00 care crisis unlike other countries most notably taiwan and new zealand the united states as a whole had few mechanisms in place to protect individuals reduce risk and support those who were faced with proven infection for biological anthropologists like myself this inability who studied kid and social relationships this inability or unwillingness to truly confront this challenge via a deepening of support via a deepening of support rather than a
• 27:00 - 27:30 go it alone ideology was an obvious failure in governance and a clear effect of american myth-making about rugged individualism from an evolutionary anthropological perspective caretaking requires an exchange of energy and resources an investment in social relationships expectations of reciprocity and these context-specific yet reliable relationships have been the difference between life and death and more subtly survival and thriving for millions of years
• 27:30 - 28:00 in classic studies of investment we tend to think about things like this what i call like the maternal triad right which is uh the production and release and eventual fertilization of eggs pregnancy and lactation these were the the spaces with which we would focus lots of energy when we were thinking about building social networks we would begin here as this being the most kind of primary relationship between individuals in any society
• 28:00 - 28:30 indeed when we examine the most influential work on parenting and parental investment and kin investment or even do a rather a google perusal of the portrayal of investment of parental investment in anthropologically related sources parental investment is often revealed as something that is best understood via the lens of foraging and small-scale agricultural communities in my own work i've asked why we are not asking these same questions in urban and semi-urban industrialized communities
• 28:30 - 29:00 i've been studying what we can learn about these most critical care relationships and their embeddedness within larger communities beyond that of what of a traditional anthropological subject covid and our response to it has underscored the urgency of revisiting our practices as both a discipline and a broader community and our understandings of community and investment as a faculty member at arizona state i
• 29:00 - 29:30 have learned how the navajo nation has both suffered from the spread of covet in their community and also battled back in ways that the surrounding areas in arizona were simply unwilling or unable to do it men in mid 2020 the navajo nation had the highest per capita infection rate of cover 19 in the united states although the infection rate remains high tribal leaders continue to practice mitigation efforts while many parts of the u.s have simply relaxed restrictions so what does
• 29:30 - 30:00 care look like in this context it looks like close attention to the needs of the community including the most vulnerable so essential sites for the distribution of resources like groceries and medicine vaccination efforts mobile clinics to serve far reaching communities and those who are unable to travel to central distribution sites curfews required masking persistent lockdowns and as of december 2021 59 of the people living on the navajo reservation were vaccinated
• 30:00 - 30:30 as compared to 54 percent of arizonans not living on the reservation similarly new zealand dealt with the coronavirus in ways that other countries were simply unable to do and this also included lockdowns border controls and persistent policies that require vaccination and masking and to that effect we know that rates in new zealand have been much lower than they have been in neighboring countries and in countries
• 30:30 - 31:00 around the world so when i think a bit about an anthropology of investment and how it relates to ideas around covet i think about why our poli the kind of limitations of our imagination with regards to policy in the united states and what our stumbling blocks are there and how we need to think about policies that can deliver care at scale and i'm not sure and i would love to talk about this in the discussion uh
• 31:00 - 31:30 what it would take to shift us as a community to a space where we would start to invest in each other beyond simply our neighbors or our families and we don't even do neighbors very well truth be told so the one thing i want to say in closing here um is that in those kind of archaeological examples of collapse the thing that i want folks to remember is that collapse doesn't mean everyone dies and goes away it
• 31:30 - 32:00 means there is a death of what was once there and a rebirth and it also doesn't mean that everyone survives this transition but as i mentioned at the beginning of the talk zombie films are so alluring because they have the ability to both highlight a universal level of vulnerability while also employing a metaphor that uses zombies to highlight the themes of invasion and difference in this moment of climate change new and old wars and coveted the end of the
• 32:00 - 32:30 world will not be experienced similarly for everyone across social strata so what are the lessons that we can learn from the anthropological record and from our peers around the world one which should be blatantly obvious is that inequity is unsustainable it cannot persist and community will not survive a persistent inequity and that one inequity is violent it's it's structurally violent and it is directly violence um and it's also costly and it costs everyone including
• 32:30 - 33:00 the haves and not just the have-nots we're probably gonna have to do some serious work reimagining our relationship to others and understanding our own vulnerability and risk i think one of the biggest challenges facing us with regards to kovid is a lack of identification with others who are experiencing different levels of vulnerability than ourselves and in the recognition that we ourselves may experience different levels of vulnerability at different points in time
• 33:00 - 33:30 we also need to invest in shared community and i don't mean i mean i think that some of this is going to have to come in the form of things like mutual aid projects because we're not in a space as a country where this happens at a policy level and in a very easy way and then finally i'm i'm hoping that out of covid and out of all this information that we have about the way that the toll that kova took on our community that we can advocate and agitate for care at scale and what i mean by care at scale is uh rethinking
• 33:30 - 34:00 the way that we kind of um our kind of fetishization with uh individualism and thinking a bit about enacting and agitating for policies that allow for better protection of people at all levels of social strata and particularly the most vulnerable i want to thank the new york academy of sciences dr stephanie rob christina baines and bear campbell uh and lucia and anjali for joining me so i just want
• 34:00 - 34:30 to start by saying the most heartfelt thank you to the absolutely amazing dr robin nelson for inviting me to be a part of this discussion this conversation and especially to be able to do so in the company of the equally amazing doctor i'm surely ponquist um i've been admiring robin's work as well as her general approach to the world mostly from afar since i think 2012 2013 um or thereabouts when i first saw her give a talk on aloe
• 34:30 - 35:00 parental care and kinship um but aside from maybe two very fleeting wave at each other in the hall encounters at conferences i haven't actually had a chance to really talk to her so this is really just such an amazing opportunity and i'm trying not to be too starstruck and but i don't know i don't i suspect i'm not being that's not terribly successful thus far um also thank you really to to the niaz folks for putting to get this together and making it happen so that the three of us could be together with all of you
• 35:00 - 35:30 um there's more than 80 of us here in the room in the in this virtual room so that's really that's really wonderful i don't know exactly how much to say about my background i know christina already introduced anjali and i at the beginning of the session um and how much to say about my research focus so to give like some context for the couple of comments i want to make about um what some of my own ex reflections on care and crisis um but i maybe i'll just say
• 35:30 - 36:00 a couple of a paragraph a few lines um because i know some people came in a little bit late um so i think i will say um that i am an evolutionary anthropologist by training um and to a large extent really by my intellectual passion too i um i started out um it feels like a million years ago really really nearly interested in neanderthals and what weaning might have looked like in neanderthals
• 36:00 - 36:30 um but somewhere along the line maybe about halfway through my phd which i finished back in 2016. i started looking around both in my own life um i guess probably yeah probably actually when i was pregnant with my first daughter um particularly um and at the the bigger picture and and thinking i have been lucky enough to get some resources to examine and to think deeply about things about um about
• 36:30 - 37:00 human variation and shouldn't i channel those resources and and that luck into thinking deeply about things that might help people address some of the real world problems that that shape their their their lives right now including some of the people in my in my own network and where i landed um eventually was using some of my perspectives knowledge um maybe even methodological tools that i gained from from training as an
• 37:00 - 37:30 evolutionary or a biocultural anthropologist to try to shed some light on emerging um an emergent and emerging non-communicable disease epidemics um and on the structural inequities that likely drive them and i got particularly interested in metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes um i think that explaining how i went from wanting to disrupt cycles of inequity in non-communicable diseases to some of the
• 37:30 - 38:00 main organizing principles and hypotheses that now drive my active research program which you just heard a tiny bit of a bit about um is probably something that we don't have time for so um i'll skip that and just say that i frame basically all of my research now and in terms of what's called the developmental origins of health and disease hypothesis which basically holds that environmental inputs things like a lot of the things you just heard about in
• 38:00 - 38:30 robin's talk things like air quality climate stress nutrition infectious disease but then also on those the positive side of things other sources of resilience next is the nexus of support care beauty during all those kinds of environmental inputs during the early stages of life and like pregnancy um cue and embryos or fetuses or babies develop in ways that influence and their chances of survival in the immediate term but they may have negative consequences a little farther
• 38:30 - 39:00 downstream particularly in middle adulthood and beyond so that was that's the the frame in which i approach um my work and that's brought me sort of the long evolution about thinking about uh thinking through that lens and thinking about structural inequities in in health and non-community diseases led me to launch the the spoons project that i'm running now which uh spoon stands for supporting
• 39:00 - 39:30 pregnancy food and nutrition security in denmark's most marginalized neighborhoods and it's basically a community based research program aimed at understanding how care and cooperation shape nutrition during pregnancy and also with some of the structural facts factors like um like fairly racist it's it's if i hope this we gotta get a chance to flush out some of this a little bit in the subsequent discussion and q a um uh housing policy plans here in denmark um how those things might making getting
• 39:30 - 40:00 safe adequate at appropriate foods inaccessible or challenging for many pregnant people regardless of what their their care networks and support networks um might look like so that's kind of who i am as as a researcher in a nutshell um i kind of lost track of time um lost track of how long i've been talking i should give it over to angeline i prepared slides just um to help keep myself organized
• 40:00 - 40:30 but i i will admit that they're a little bit all over the place so um hopefully we will have some common threads and we can pick up on the discussion which i'm i'm really excited to learn more about your work lucedra so i'm going to kind of start here with thinking about the evolutionary origins of care and investments in the perinatal period because that's the period that i sort of focus on in my work um sarah laffer hardy and her book mothers
• 40:30 - 41:00 and others has written that shared child care may be the secret of human evolutionary success and she notes quote from a tender age and without special training modern humans identify with the plights of others and without being asked volunteer to help and share even with strangers in these respects our line of apes is in a class by itself it is hard to overstate the human need for communal care during and after pregnancy
• 41:00 - 41:30 and throughout infancy and these are significant and deeply connected to our evolutionary history these needs cannot be neglected without consequence and when they are it is often catastrophic both for people across the life course um and generations so as anthropologists when we conduct sort of these cross-cultural and comparative studies of practices around the perinatal postpartum period we can see that there are some common things that both nurture health and survival of
• 41:30 - 42:00 mothers and infants such as immediate skin to skin contact initiation of breastfeeding shared sleep between the mother and the infant rest of the postpartum parent having someone to feed her and and watch over them and also having rituals for postpartum care that support psychological social and emotional transitions that all come along with this you know event of bringing new life into families and communities
• 42:00 - 42:30 lactation is also particularly significant so making milk is one of the key defining characteristics of humans it is also one of the most ancient ecological and evolutionary perspectives are critical to understanding both individual community and population variability including the diverse and complex ways that human milk has helped humans adapt to life on this planet across time and space including in the face of emergent infectious diseases and disease outbreaks so this is part of why early in the
• 42:30 - 43:00 pandemic many of us were deeply concerned about national policies related to the mandatory separation of newborns from their mothers if cova 19 was suspected or confirmed mandatory separation policies were in fact contrary to the who guidance um and was enacted in the united states by the cdc and the aap and then quickly adopted around the world without regard to the consequences of isolation and disruption of care violations of human rights during
• 43:00 - 43:30 childbirth at this time there were no vaccines and no medications and was not certain what the transmissibility of the virus would be through milk but it was suggested that there was really no good evidence that separation was actually needed and despite that mothers across the world were and continue to be denied the opportunity to have a support person with them during labor and delivery in hospitals denied the opportunity to have skin-to-skin contact to bond with their
• 43:30 - 44:00 infants or to breastfeed um as zanita thayer anthropo biological anthropologist um sort of outlines this and her saphen's article here and infants are deprived of skin to skin contact and breastfeeding despite the lack of evidence so this mandatory separation of mothers and newborns has indeed led to excess preventable illnesses and deaths among infants and women around the world so this is one example of how policies can be enacted in ways that disrupt the
• 44:00 - 44:30 basic things that we need most which is care and support during a really vulnerable and sensitive time of life this the toll of the collapse on the different dimensions of collapse that dr nelson mentioned earlier whether through climate emergencies disasters or emergent infections are not experienced equitably both in terms of labor employment social status
• 44:30 - 45:00 racialization and structural inequities there are also biocultural considerations as i mentioned for this population so humanitarian crises in particular account for over 95 percent of the global burden of maternal mortality and over 50 of the global burden of under five mortality um as well so an estimated 90 of infant deaths that occur in humanitarian settings occur in the first 28 days of life so there are other impacts as well um
• 45:00 - 45:30 recently there was a headline um that over five million children around the world have lost a parent or a caregiver due to coca-19 and in the united states we know that there is an increased burden of mental health issues among children and adolescents exposures to neglect and violence and education loss among other things also not experienced equitably in the same across different populations i've often
• 45:30 - 46:00 reflected on how my own experiencing witnessing humanitarian crisis seems to bring together the best and the worst of humanity sort of all altogether and too often in these situations the beginnings and the endings of life collapse upon one another in ways that i have found disorienting and challenge my perceptions of time and space and so just by virtue of some other things that i've been working on in reading and bringing in some other um insights from
• 46:00 - 46:30 some essays from this volume of feminist africa on afrofuturism and in this essay mina salami talks about the liquid space of african feminism and afrofuturism which resonates with my reflecting on the coloniality and the temporality of this crisis she writes that rather than being linear the passage of time is like a course of a river that swells and curves forwards downwards yonder and sideways in response to
• 46:30 - 47:00 circumstances within and beyond its streams this confluence she calls a liquid space to reflect a place of uncertainty so my question is this is also a place of hope as dr nelson mentioned is there a space for imagining new systems built upon care and for radical kinship dr nelson has illustrated the coloniality of coca-19 and responses to it not only in the us but in other places around the world
• 47:00 - 47:30 which commonly minimizes care over capital or profits the structural violence that is unleashed as a result of racial capitalism during crisis like this pandemic targets our human dignity by disrupting pathways to care and making care only available to some usually the privileged el morlada describes this as a poly crisis or convergence of ecological political spiritual and social breakdown where the quote-unquote traditionally held certainties of humanity's place in the world are crumbling
• 47:30 - 48:00 lada and others across the global south affirm that the only way forward from this kind of crisis is deep solidarity grounded in care and fighting against the oppression and exploitation of those who are most marginalized in reflecting on the possibilities of imagined futures where care and human dignity are centered i thought i would share sylvia tamale's invocation of ubuntu as a reconceptualization of justice rooted in shared african worldviews and philosophies of being in her new book
• 48:00 - 48:30 decolonization and afrofeminism she notes that ubuntu emphasizes good human relations within meaningful human life as a pathway to justice ubuntu is more than equality it is about leveling the ground by addressing systemic injustices and trump the dignity of human worth of the marginalized so as dr nelson wrote in her scientific american peace rugged individualism will not save us and it is not an understatement to say
• 48:30 - 49:00 that the future of humanity will hinge on our collective ability to honor our evolutionary mandate to care for one or another in our planet thank you so much to all three of you um doctors nelson and mccarricker and conquest for those provocative ideas i'd like to invite you to to enter into a conversation um we can be relaxed and i there's many um threads to weave
• 49:00 - 49:30 while you're you're you're speaking we're not invite the audience to um enter questions into the chat um i'm sure there's there's many ideas that they may have but perhaps this is a good time to to bring it back to you robin to respond to some of the comments sure i think you know one of the reasons i was really interested in having this conversation with these two scholars is because their work is on that most
• 49:30 - 50:00 pivotal period of vulnerability for parents and young offspring and i really thought that it would be you know covid presents us with um unfortunately like a crisis point like this you know i think what lucedra and anjali already know is that this period in like kind of perinatal or or pregnancy is a crisis point almost all the time like i mean it requires a tremendous amount of resources for it not to be a crisis period and so when
• 50:00 - 50:30 you're in different you know care settings you kind of realize different levels of vulnerability for people in this particular space um i wanted to know i'm wondering in in both of your work like what uh your experience with anthropology the work that you've done can tell us about risk and survival and who is getting help and both of you have looked at kind of like national level policies and and kind of risk and humanitarian
• 50:30 - 51:00 crises so what what has become apparent to you in these spaces um i can start i think um this is such an important question and i think i'm gonna maybe pick up on something that that you raised earlier um robin about the i well i guess also you touched on essentially uh about um the us being
• 51:00 - 51:30 such a pull yourself up by your bootstrap sort of place of a place with bootstrap ideologies i think was the phrase used um and my i haven't lived or worked really in a context like that exactly um i most of my life i've spent in canada which is in many ways culturally very similar to the us demographically it's not as diverse but it's um but it's
• 51:30 - 52:00 a multi-racial um settler colonial state um with um some of the same ways of organizing things but they're also but it is also a social democracy with um health care resources and at least an idea of prioritizing care and supporting the vulnerable um doesn't the the
• 52:00 - 52:30 the federal government doesn't always put its money where its mouth is although i think generally it did a pretty good job of responding to the covet crisis and spending really a lot of money to to support care workers not enough um not enough there i don't think there was quite enough investment in in nursing and particularly in early childhood education um the federal dollars were there but it wasn't really implemented um as well as it could be and then i've spent the last i'm married
• 52:30 - 53:00 to a dane i've spent the last couple of years in denmark which is sort of like the next level of of what i grew up with in canada and there's a real i mean it's a really really comprehensive attitude towards making sure that there are resources for people generally speaking that being said in denmark that is not the case when it comes to um immigrants from
• 53:00 - 53:30 quote-unquote non-western backgrounds um they're they are are second-class residents very very very much um they're um so there are a lot of people that in general fall through the cracks and and kovid absolutely sort of laid those uh those fault lines bare and um the neighborhood where i live in for example um is a as a predominantly non-western immigrant neighborhood and it's on um what the
• 53:30 - 54:00 the danish government until it got a lot of international criticism formally called um the ghetto list which is a list of uh of roughly 30 neighborhoods with um relatively high rates of poverty and unemployment and at least 50 of the population has to be of non-western uh background to be on this list um so i live in one of these neighborhoods and uh the
• 54:00 - 54:30 the population is about i don't know um i think around three three percent of the the city's population in the neighborhood makes up about three percent of the city but it counted about uh for more than forty percent of the of covered cases that's it some of the some of the peak waves which i think illustrates that even though there are financial resources here even though this is a society that says that it cares and invests in care it doesn't do so equally which is it was
• 54:30 - 55:00 um which was sort of the point that you were making um so yeah those are i don't think i actually answered your question about what i think being an anthropologist meant that moving to denmark and observing that means that instead of just being [Music] in the daily rhythm of listening to um listening to
• 55:00 - 55:30 people's ex the daily rhythm of life i think i probably have some sort of sense of a need to look at what policies are in place and i think um yeah i think i wouldn't have i don't think i wouldn't live in the neighborhood that i live in and i wouldn't have the interactions that i have had or the perceptions that i had if i didn't have the training in the background that that we all do
• 55:30 - 56:00 yeah i mean i think um there it's it's clear that policies do have some kind of influence on what happens but usually i may feel like in the case of the the cdc guidance directly contradicting the who guidance for example um does so in sort of predictable ways that perpetuate inequities and
• 56:00 - 56:30 disparities i mean it's the united states is already a really really hostile place to experience pregnancy and birth and to raise children um and i think the fact that the cdc and aap came out with these early recommendations led to a really swift adoption elsewhere in places where maybe they you know there would have been more um more willingness to keep
• 56:30 - 57:00 infants together with their mothers and to support breastfeeding particularly when there weren't you know vaccines and um there wasn't really a lot of evidence to suggest that that those things might um might be super dangerous so i think i'm of the mind that there is like there in terms of scaling up there's a potential for policies and um more you know governance to help move the needle towards more equitable care and providing struck you know
• 57:00 - 57:30 social structures that give people what they need when they need it um but i'm i'm also skeptical because i know that there are for example in like the humanitarian response for infant feeding and emergencies which is the sector that i'm more familiar with humanitarian response perpetuates the same kind of racialized neocolonialism and harm and violence that in some ways replicate or just exacerbate the other kinds of shocks whether it be a a war or
• 57:30 - 58:00 um you know a natural disaster or some other kind of displacement i mean the kinds of things that i've seen in terms of country international level humanitarian response are appalling you know they're they're there to in the spirit of protecting human rights and protecting the well-being of um you know women and children during this perinatal period and they just they're just causing so much more harm um so i think that there's
• 58:00 - 58:30 there has i mean i think there are people who are more um you know expert in understanding what possible political solutions there might be i think ultimately we probably would agree there needs to be like massive divestment from um you know this um humanitarian industrial complex racial capitalism in general and i think that those kind like that to have that sort of social shift in a way that begins to move policies and to move
• 58:30 - 59:00 institutions in that direction probably takes maybe it takes a revolution um it takes a long time um and i think you know just sort of where we're at now i i i want to invest in hope and to sort of like move you know mutual aid works um it is it it is what allows people to get the help that they need not equitably um usually but it is sometimes like the only thing that that we've see we've seen it we saw it in co during covenant team where you've had doulas and community midwives and
• 59:00 - 59:30 community health workers trying to like get ppe so they could go visit folks in their community and do like whatever they could to tell the houses like whatsapp visits and trying to do anything to overcome the barriers that our healthcare system was putting up in in the early parts of the pandemic so i think um i don't have the solutions but i it's definitely not
• 59:30 - 60:00 it's not what we have been doing you know it's it's not definitely not the divestment of public health um and you know public science education and all those things um in terms of anthropologically speaking i mean anthropology just has helped give me the tools and sort of the words and the ideas to kind of understand these inequities and understand like they have a history and just as there are histories in terms of um the the racism that is perpetuated through these kind of
• 60:00 - 60:30 crisis crises of colonialism um that there have always been people coming together and finding ways to to provide each other with the care that they need because that's what we have to do so they're they're they're i guess that it's sort of like that that critical perspective those tools to sort of think through both under an understanding of why we get here and then what do we do what do we do now
• 60:30 - 61:00 yeah i've been experiencing the pandemic and concurrent crises as kind of this ultimate experience of of living through something while being on this level of being a social scientist where you're also thinking about it in critical ways while living through it which is exhausting mentally right because you know you're i mean on a certain level we're all just kind of hanging in and and particularly if you have you know family you're caring for
• 61:00 - 61:30 or your own job is particularly vulnerable you know there's a survival piece to every single day that that is you know heightened in a crisis and one of the things that i couldn't seem to and maybe this is naive like admittedly so that i couldn't seem to make sense of and i saw someone tweet about this as well is that you know when we watch and the reason why i reference zombie films no one runs towards the zombies no one runs towards the virus everyone runs away you're running away
• 61:30 - 62:00 you're hiding the thing that has kind of broken my heart and brain about this particular crisis is the lack of acknowledgement of one's own real vulnerability so the way that we talk about comorbidities right now you know we'll deal with k with non-masking if if you don't have any comorbidities i don't even think all of us we have a
• 62:00 - 62:30 terrible health care system who actually knows what all their co-morbidities are people are not even you know out and about and kind of maybe when's the last time your blood pressure protector anything like that right so there's this kind of lack of acknowledgement of one's own risk but then also um kind of flippant disregard for anyone else's risk as well and those two things combined and now i'm living you know i moved from california and i'm living in arizona
• 62:30 - 63:00 those are very different spaces with regards to policy and kind of public attention towards risk and i think that i as an anthropologist and kind of and i you know and anthropology is it might be the most important metric here but it has shaped my thinking on this that i wasn't necessarily prepared for people to put themselves at risk and be so um i think i was okay i think i understood
• 63:00 - 63:30 some of the kind of disregard for frontline workers disregard for so that fits right into our kind of racialized capitalism within the united states but a kind of overestimation of one's own health is such a revealing factor um [Music] of revealing kind of uh insight into the stories that we tell ourselves about how inter interdependent we are
• 63:30 - 64:00 we have experienced pandemics in the united states before it's been a while but we have experienced them and i think you know watching people kind of feel like they're fine and they're not going to be concerned about anyone else how many stories did we hear about people who on their death beds were regretful that they hadn't taken different precautions around covet there are things that we can say about care and community that are very relevant to all of our work but i think
• 64:00 - 64:30 there's another layer of course which has to do with kind of class and and kind of ableism and racism that doesn't allow us to kind of get to those core kind of human behaviors that emphasize class i'm wondering in each of your work um what have you seen to be kind of the most if we recognize if we acknowledge
• 64:30 - 65:00 that policy has holes and that it doesn't really policy isn't going to fix everything because like you were saying in the denmark uh situation that it's you know quite racialized right who who is able to kind of get care and we know what happens and humanitarian crises what what care counts like what policies are actually effective or what kinds of mutual aid projects have been effective in the different um kind of uh settings where people have
• 65:00 - 65:30 been most vulnerable in your own research um well here in in denmark in particular in this in the neighborhood gila up where i live and have been doing um been doing my active research project um the the only thing that that really works um is this it's not a mutual aid organization but it's this it's this network
• 65:30 - 66:00 that uh called buddhism um or neighborhood mothers and they're not necessarily mothers but um but they are predominantly maybe exclusively women um mostly um middle age and they it's not entirely clear to me exactly what what this organization started out uh being about but um
• 66:00 - 66:30 it's a national thing with local chapters and the local chapter where i live um is all people from the neighborhood that speak the languages of the the native languages of the people who live here the mother languages of the people who live here and they they're what they've what they seem to do and particularly what they've like been doing at a sort of like a next level um
• 66:30 - 67:00 in the context of covid is just to meet people where they're at and they literally knock on doors of all of the people who live in the social housing blocks in the neighborhood and they say um did you did you know we exist uh we're here uh what do you need uh have you heard have you read anything about this did anybody make this accessible to you in a language that you understand what what's been your experience are you are you afraid about
• 67:00 - 67:30 this do you misunderstand that um can i go with you to get a vaccination for example can i um can i walk with you to your appointment with your primary care physician can i do what do you need do you do you need food do you need do you need these resources and people actually buy into that there are there are also a lot of state resources and that are also invested in these so-called vulnerable neighborhoods or ghetto neighborhoods um but there's no
• 67:30 - 68:00 uptake they just said empty but the buddhas they get the people connect with them they use they use them they like build relationships with them and then they actually like get their healthcare needs met and they get their social needs met they meet other people through through these women um so that really gives me a lot of hope yeah i i was thinking a lot about um
• 68:00 - 68:30 since um dr paul farmer has passed away a lot of people have been talking about you know this accompaniment model that was so intrinsic to the um approach to care that he kind of brought to partners in health and i think what i and what i've just heard this the sages say what i have seen is like it's precisely that kind of model of care that is seems to be the most um important particularly for pro for pregnant people and um those who are
• 68:30 - 69:00 caring for a new infant is just having someone to go with you like you said like someone to check up on you someone to bring new food someone um you know even even in the the i was involved in like this um telehealth access project during or the first um year of the pandemic in the us and there was like all this investment in like these new innovations and technologies you know how do we get people connected to telehealth services and remote care and sort of like bridging that gap
• 69:00 - 69:30 between the hospital and community and what all of that we interviewed black birth workers and indigenous birth workers and other community health support persons working in communities of color and rural communities across the us what they said was like telehealth is great but we don't need more we don't need a technological innovation here what we need is ppe we need transportation support we need to be with people because um for lots of different reasons but there's there's there's so much to the
• 69:30 - 70:00 sensory dimensions of care during pregnancy and postpartum that even sort of the idea that you couldn't put hands on someone to sort of check the pregnancy or to un you know sort of see what was happening during breastfeeding to sort of look at the color of the baby and um you know just sort of that that assumption that technology was going to take us sort of lift us out of a crisis when actually it was really that human connection so it um
• 70:00 - 70:30 i don't know if i'm speaking in ways that are very really clear but i think just that that the things in terms of what i have seen both um during kobe 19 and in other settings is actually it's that very very deep human connection and compassion and sort of being with people not just um you know and finding ways for policies to make that possible i mean we really we don't we don't have the community health worker system that we really need in our this country um
• 70:30 - 71:00 and i'm not exactly sure i don't know the history i'm not sure why that is but i like we if we had invested in that kind those kinds of care we would have been able to mobilize birth workers and the wives and nurses and and other folks um vaccination clinics like much more readily across the nation um to do education to do community engagement to do all those things and have a competent models um to ensure that people weren't falling through the cracks um so i guess in a nutshell that's sort of what i think
• 71:00 - 71:30 yeah i mean i was thinking about this because um you know part of the reason i mean i'm in arizona and so the the example of the navajo nation is right here and um asu has worked in in relationship with the navajo nation and there's been and one of the kind of very interesting things is that like if you are on the reservation like you or you have to abide by their rules this isn't this about sovereignty right and so um some of the the kinds of of of thoughts that have kind of come to my
• 71:30 - 72:00 mind um is thinking about the way that we respond to crisis and how we see vulnerability in our relationship to other people and so if you're in a space where fundamentally the relationship to community is different i mean arizona is a very you know live free or die i know that's new hampshire but it's a very live free and diet or diet kind of space and if you're in a space within arizona um that's that where people fundamentally organize themselves differently in relationships to one another what does that look like as
• 72:00 - 72:30 kovac kind of peaks and dies down again and peaks and dies down again and how do you respond to these crises and i think you know in watching all of this kind of social media conversation about the end of the world i just got to thinking about how many people are experiencing something like the end of their world very frequently you know be it kind of forced migration through the crises you know uh be a dissolution of kind of
• 72:30 - 73:00 family support systems um whatever it is you know this has been part of the human experience and the only way that we've seen ourselves out of it is through increased investment in one another not through dissolution of these relationships and i i really appreciate your point about the fact that tech is not gonna save us because i think there is this kind of um at every level right there's i mean not to kind of go off on a bit of attention here but even this concept of like bio hacks i don't know if you've heard of this is like things
• 73:00 - 73:30 that tech uh mostly tech guys i was trying to think about if i could say that but it is mostly tech guys like you know think about doing to their body to kind of maximize efficiency and maximize performance there's always this idea that there is a hack that's gonna get us out of the most basic everyday needs in our relationships with one another and our daily needs in terms of life if i do this i only need six hours of sleep no you probably need eight not all of us get it but your body actually probably
• 73:30 - 74:00 needs closer to eight you know there are just parts of our lives that i think we can speak to as people who are interested in health and interested in inequity and interested in sometimes in deep time um that we know are pretty stable and so when we kind of violate that certain people are put at risk more than others i think even to some degree with the the site the idea that the vaccines are now you know that was that's all we needed
• 74:00 - 74:30 was an effective vaccine and then we would be we'd be good you know i think i think there is some um definitely over over reliant but i think that that grows out of this more like sort of capitalist kind of model this you know um the idea that we need to profit off of crisis in order to sustain our society in like particular ways
• 74:30 - 75:00 um and i think it also feeds into those ideas that you were talking about about i mean i even had family member tell me i have an immune system god gave me an immune system why do i need why do i need this vaccine when i you know i don't know what i'm putting in my body um so this idea just really different kinds of ideas about it only matters i'm only thinking about me and how it's going to affect me not well maybe i'll transmit it to someone else or maybe like i'll die and my child
• 75:00 - 75:30 won't have a parent anymore or like those those things weren't even sort of in this particular conversation um but yeah we just we have so there's just so much of that happening um in terms of policies like this the masking policy i mean just the rhetoric that kind of i don't i don't i understand it and yet i don't understand it it's sort of like um i think that's part of this like being in it where you're trying to like
• 75:30 - 76:00 understand it but like you're living through it it's like how i don't understand the logic sometimes and yet we have tools to really kind of understand the origins of that kind of rhetoric and those kinds of ideas i wonder if there's some possibility to for some people reframe i'm just kind of been kind of percolating i don't know i don't know how to frame this point exactly but um
• 76:00 - 76:30 the the point that robin made about um about people's some people's inability to sort of as us probably most of our inability to really obsess or assess our own health risks um accurately and to maybe take risks that we uh wouldn't wouldn't if we even from a like purely self-interested um perspective because we we don't know necessarily what's going on under our
• 76:30 - 77:00 own skin or to or haven't fully thought through all of the consequences um and i wonder if there's some way of reframing um protecting like minimizing one's own risk um and ma in a way that sort of like that is fairly individualistic um is a way of motivating something that would actually have ramifications for
• 77:00 - 77:30 benefits for for a larger network of people i know i don't think the point clearly at all no no i don't think you're wrong and and stephanie was saying that you know um that uh that we have very contested layers of experiences and identities in places like the united states and denmark and so there's not a shared solution because there's not a shared experience right like the way that society is structured and i have thought about this that like
• 77:30 - 78:00 unfortunately we have not cultivated a uh ethos of care across space and in fact we've encouraged just the opposite our countries have thrived off just the opposite right that that some people are going to be winners and some people are going to be losers and and they're those kinds of positionalities have been kind of locked in for for hundreds of years um and i think that uh i've thought about this kind of self-interested approach and i think that it probably does work in some ways
• 78:00 - 78:30 and and then that's that's kind of painful to me you know that that's the way that it works and so um uh so someone says here um oh do you want to do it oh do you want me to i mean yeah you can regret please yeah um has a a a question in the chat um thank you all for your thoughtful and engaging in compelling talks and remarks they are very aligned to the insights and commitments of critical medical anthropologists and i was just thinking
• 78:30 - 79:00 the same thing and others concerned with documenting denouncing and trying to correct and eliminate um social injustices and prefer provide a more equitable life ways um for all instead of just the privileged few so the question is um she's curious what unique insights biological anthropologists um bring to this conversation so i guess i would say that i think that you know one of the things that biological anthropologists do that is a little bit different than our peers who are interested in the same questions in
• 79:00 - 79:30 critical medical anthropology and sometimes it's not different i mean sometimes our work overlaps quite a bit in fact and i think what where you see difference is kind of methodological it might be in some of the theories that we apply but i think that a recognition of kind of deep the deep evolutionary necessity of these relationships is also important um because i think in some ways it speaks to the idea that there is no easy way around this or outside of this
• 79:30 - 80:00 um that part the being kind of deeply enmeshed with each with one another is part of the human condition and always has been for millions of years and um so there's kind of that viewpoint which is a deep time viewpoint but i think there's also um there's kind of great literature out of biological anthropology that is actually kind of assessing on a kind of community-based level or a population study population based level
• 80:00 - 80:30 just how impactful these relationships can be on the kind of survive survival and thriving of people within the community i'm thinking just kind of popped in my head of a piece by uh barbara pipperada which is looking at kind of mental health in the postpartum period and she did kind of mental health assessments of women and it was really kind of like if the cultural norms around support with um mental health were met in a postpartum period women were thriving and their babies were thriving and i think that um
• 80:30 - 81:00 what these two perspectives of like critical medical anthropologists and biological anthropologists um depending on the topic they can kind of fit like lock and key where we're talking about it from two different methodological standpoints and for me as someone who is interested in questions around advocacy that's important because different perspectives um agitate and meet people at different places and so sometimes people want to
• 81:00 - 81:30 see numbers and they want to know this is really going to make a difference tell me how this makes a difference so you come talk to folks who have been doing these these assessments sometimes people want to think kind of big picture um pull back and talk about theory and other researchers can do that work so i think that that is kind of the way that these these types of work fit together and if i go so far to suggest i had the same question that i think that biological anthropologists are maybe um positioned to
• 81:30 - 82:00 have the ear of policy makers whether it's because of their use of of statistics and numbers more so than medical anthropologists because i've asked this question a lot during covid like why are we defining health as being virus free and not as having a robust network of of care we know that these this is this leads to health in in ways that you've demonstrated in this talk and i i do think that we sort of privilege biology in some way you know if there's
• 82:00 - 82:30 if there's a social component we we think of it as less valid and and yet um this is something that i think we all fight against as anthropologists i mean i don't want to speak for everyone but i think that that biological anthropologists are maybe uniquely positioned to have that ear in a strong way and i think like really quickly just to add like i think we do have to kind of be careful because we don't want to slip into a kind of scientism where we like privilege certain kinds of data but i think that we also have to be realistic
• 82:30 - 83:00 about which data speak to particular people's motivations and when it comes to most the most vulnerable communities around us i'm kind of willing to pull in whatever resources are needed um and whoever kind of understands the landscape uh best regardless of your theoretical positioning or training to kind of answer these critical questions there are also some issues that are really um
• 83:00 - 83:30 they're biocultural right they they sort of they require both an understanding of those the social the social and cultural processes and exactly how those affect health and how do we measure those and how do we talk about those so i think lactation at least is one of those things that's like you can't really get around the biocultural future of of this process and and in that sense i think absolutely having being able to sort of
• 83:30 - 84:00 um craft data especially if you're talking about advocacy and policy that that meets those needs of those the cases for greater kinds of advocacy um certainly more useful i want to say thank you so much to our speakers this evening um robin and lusadra and anjali it was wonderful to host you and have you be part of our series um on emergent karen community um thanks to everybody for attending and we hope
• 84:00 - 84:30 that you all come back again for our next lecture which will be on monday the 28th of march again at 6 30 again by zoom thank you uh coveted crisis for bringing us together at least all across the world um lucedra is joining us from denmark where it's super late so we're so grateful to you for participating even though the time zones are difficult um our next talk will be presented by dr vanessa agar jones um she'll speak up she'll deliver a paper entitled racial capitalism chemical kin and she will be
• 84:30 - 85:00 joined in conversation by dr jafari allen so we look forward to welcoming each of you back with us um to continue this important conversation about emergent care and community so until then be well stay safe and be happy