Spring 2023 Colloquium Series featuring: Dr. Emily Vasquez
Spring 2023 Colloquium Series
February 22, 2023
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Location
Behavioral Sciences Building 4105
Address
1007 W. Harrison St, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
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Join us for our spring 2023 colloquium series featuring our own Dr. Emily Vasquez. Dr. Vasquez will give a talk titled, " Treating Risk, Deepening Inequality: Narratives of Biomedical Prevention in Mexico." A light lunch will be served during the talk. Masks required when not eating or drinking.
Description:
Set against Mexico’s chronic disease crisis, where type 2 diabetes was declared a national sanitary emergency in 2016, this talk examines the unlikely rise of prediabetes diagnosis as a leading public health prevention strategy and its uptake in clinical care across Mexico City. Extending the modalities of diabetes treatment to those who are not yet sick but rather “at risk” for the disease, prediabetes diagnosis deepens the reach of biomedical surveillance and clinical management of glucose in the bloodstream. And yet, it does so unevenly. Drawing on long-term ethnographic encounters in diverse clinical settings, I show that the contours of the diagnosis and the care of those living with this predisease are deeply entangled with legacies of race and class that divide and disparately valorize Mexican bodies, local institutional political economies, and the vested interests of those promoting the diagnosis across this field. Interested not just in the ontological multiplicity of the “scientific fact” of prediabetes, these narratives also center the real and unequal consequences for the lived experience of “pre-patients” and the health futures they imagine. In doing so, this talk expands on histories of medicine that have examined the rise of pre-disease diagnosis in the United States and Western Europe, foregrounding the violence of extreme inequalities reproduced through clinic-based, biomedical prevention strategies.
Date posted
Feb 14, 2023
Date updated
Feb 16, 2023