Ali Kenner: "To Breathe: The Place of Asthma in US Healthcare"
Friday, January 15, 2016
10:30 AM-12:30 PM
Join us for a discussion of the book manuscript "To Breathe: The Place of Asthma in US Healthcare" with author Ali Kenner, PhD, assistant professor of politics and science, technology and society, and discussants Laura Mamo, PhD, professor of health education at San Fransisco State University, and Ian Whitmarsh, PhD, associate professor of anthropology, history and social medicine at University of California, San Francisco.
Millions of people around the world suffer from breathing difficulty. Asthma, one of the most common respiratory disorders, keeps people up at night, prevents them from going to work and school, limits their movement and opportunities, and in some cases, leads to tragic, often preventable death. Although asthma has been documented and cared for since antiquity, contemporary patients still struggle to manage disordered breathing; doctors must tinker with treatments to find an effective prescription; scientists disagree on the nature of the disease and its cause; and healthcare professionals strive to strike a balance between individual and collective approaches that can best address one of the most common environmental health problems of the day.
"To Breathe: The Place of Asthma in US Healthcare" is an ethnography of breathing that takes readers through multiple cultural and material scales, providing a window into biomedical, community, and embodied approaches to what is a common, chronic, yet often invisible respiratory disease. The book lays bare many of the overarching questions that asthmatics and their caregivers have about the risks posed by their surroundings, as well as some enduring questions that drive the work of scientists and public health professionals. A social geography of care, "To Breathe: The Place of Asthma in US Healthcare" illustrates how different scales and forms of place shape our understanding of environmental health conditions, and how responsibility for health gets assigned or assumed in ways that are politically infused.
Contact Information
RSVP to Irene Cho
215.571.3852
irene.cho@drexel.edu