This academic year CRE2 is inaugurating a partnership with Northwestern University’s Program in Science in Human Culture (SHC) to co-sponsor a series of research exchanges, public panels, and scholarly presentations that focus on the intersections of race, science, and medicine. Through this partnership, members of both institutions will have opportunities to participate in events in the series that explore questions surrounding the production of scientific knowledge across the Americas, including institutional barriers, “gatekeeping,” and the construction of expertise; genomics, genetics, and understandings of race; and the roles of science in society in the present and past.
What does it mean to be in “the room where it happens”? In this virtual panel on Gatekeeping & the Publishing Landscape for Scholarship on Race, Medicine & Science, participants explored how publication trends and directions for race-focused work in areas of science and medical research have been shaped by public conversations, the makeup of editorial boards, and field-specific debates themselves, among other sources of influence and power structures. Join us as we delve into this conversation to learn more about gatekeeping and publishing. Made possible with support from the Klopsteg Lecture Series Fund.
Gatekeeping & the Publishing Landscape for Scholarship on Race, Medicine & Science November 5, from 1:00pm-2:45pm central time
Holden Thorp, moderator (Editor in Chief, Science Family of Journals)
Gil Eyal (Columbia University, Sociology)
Gil Eyal is Professor of Sociology and co-Director of the Precision Medicine and Society Program at Columbia University. He is currently leading a two-year Mellon-Sawyer Seminar on “Trust and Mistrust of Science and Experts.” During this second year of the seminar, the seminar is collaborating with the Bronx Community Health Network (BCHN) and NYC Department of Health to focus on the relations of trust and mistrust between NYC communities of color and the medical system. Professor Eya’s main research interest is the sociology of experts and expertise, with a focus most recently on the question of trust in experts. He is the author, most recently, of The Crisis of Expertise (Polity 2019). Previous books include The Autism Matrix (Polity 2010) and The Disenchantment of the Orient (SUP 2006). Some current research interests include a comparative sociology of trust in experts during the Covid-19 pandemic, the dynamics of lay expertise among long-covid patients, and the politics of precision medicine.
Tess Lanzarotta (Science in Human Culture Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University)
Tess Lanzarotta is a historian of science and medicine whose research and teaching focuses on the history of American Indian and Alaska Native health. Her current book project, Unsettling Biomedicine: Research, Care, and Indigenous Rights in Cold War Alaska, explores biomedicine as a feature of American colonial power and explains how Alaska Native peoples have transformed it into a tool for expressing their sovereignty. She has also written about the history of biomedical research involving Indigenous communities, with a particular focus on the role of institutionalized bioethics in reckoning with harmful past research. Her work has appeared in Social Studies of Science, the American Journal of Public Health, Boston Review, and the Washington Post and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Yale Center for Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration.
She holds a position as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science in Human Culture Program at Northwestern University and serves as an instructor in Northwestern’s Department of History. Previously, she was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, where she worked collaboratively with colleagues at the interdisciplinary Waakebiness-Bryce Institute for Indigenous Health. She received her PhD from Yale University’s Program in the History of Science and Medicine in 2018.
Damon Scott Tweedy (Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Duke University)
Damon Tweedy, MD is an associate professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and a staff psychiatrist within the Durham Veteran Affairs Health Care System. He completed both medical school and his specialty training at Duke. He divides his time between clinical and administrative duties within the VA system and medical student teaching and mentorship at Duke.
Dr. Tweedy has written extensively about the intersection of race and medicine, both in academic journals and popular print publications. His 2015 book, Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine, made the New York Times bestseller list and was selected by TIME Magazine as a top non-fiction book that year.
Yolonda Wilson (Saint Louis University, Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics; Philosophy)
Yolonda Y. Wilson is an associate professor in the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University, with additional affiliations in the departments of Philosophy and African American Studies. She earned the PhD in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars. Professor Wilson’s broad areas of interest include bioethics, social and political philosophy, race theory, and feminist theory.
Professor Wilson’s work centers on race and gender justice, particularly as it relates to health care. Her recent article, “Intersectionality in Clinical Medicine: The Need for a Conceptual Framework,” is a consideration on applying intersectionality’s intellectual approach—how race, gender, and other social identities converge in order to create unique forms of oppression—in the clinical environment.
A 2019-2020 National Humanities Center fellow and a 2019-2020 Encore Public Voices fellow, Professor Wilson is currently working on a monograph entitled Black Death: Racial Justice, Priority-Setting, and Care at the End of Life, in which she uses end of life care to argue that, given historic and continuing racial injustice leading to African Americans being unfairly burdened with ill health, African Americans have a special justice claim on health care.
Professor Wilson is the winner of the American Philosophical Association’s (APA) Committee on Public Philosophy Op-Ed Award for her USA Today article, “For Black Shooting Victims, Sometimes Anger (Not Forgiveness) Is the Best Response.” Her public scholarship on issues of bioethics, race, and gender has appeared in The Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum and The Conversation (among others) and has been republished in outlets such as The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Salon.com, and The Philly Voice. Her article for The Conversation, “Why Black Women’s Experiences of #MeToo Are Different,” was re-published internationally and forms the basis for an edited volume on feminist philosophy and #MeToo. Her media appearances include outlets such as National Public Radio (NPR), Al Jazeera English, and The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio.