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G4. Roundtable Act Two: Black Life Through Biopolitics, Necropolitics, and Afrophobia
Saturday May 3, 2025 3:45pm - 5:15pm EDT
Back Bay D
G4. Roundtable Act Two: Black Life Through Biopolitics, Necropolitics, and Afrophobia 
Chair: Alexandre White, Johns Hopkins University 
 
Vincenza Mazzeo, Johns Hopkins University 
OmiSoore Dryden, Dalhousie University 
Elizabeth Adetiba, Columbia University 
Pyar Seth, University of Notre Dame 

How might we reimagine and retheorize Western biomedicine in a world presently defined by what’s left in “the wake” of imperialism, colonization, and racial capitalism?

This roundtable explores the role of biomedicine — specifically through public/global health — in spaces shaped by imperialism, colonialism, and racial capitalism, and how it functions to sustain and transform Black, African, and Diasporic life across time and space. We use theories belonging to Black Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, and African Studies to foreground the centrality of medical histories in anti-colonial and de-colonial movements and histories on a global scale. By doing so, we explore how inter-disciplinary theories informed by race allow us to understand medicine as a paradoxical tool for the production of well-being and good health, on the one hand, and the creation of debility and death worlds, as Achille Mbembe suggests, on the other. This round table will detail how interdisciplinary approaches to histories of Black health have generated new ways of thinking about how systems of domination shape Black life on a global scale., This panel will achieve multiple goals, including: developing the capacity for critical thinking about the nature, ends and limits of medicine; deepening understanding of illness and suffering; understanding the dynamic history of medical ideas and practices, their implications for patients and health care providers; the need for lifelong learning; and enable one to recognize the dynamic interrelationship between medicine and society throughout history and at present (the present is not divorced from the past).

Moderators
AW

Alexandre White

Assistant professor, Johns Hopkins University
Speakers
DO

Dr. OmiSoore Dryden

James R. Johnston Chair, Black Canadian Studies, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University
Dr. OmiSoore H. Dryden, a Black queer femme and senior scholar is the James R Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies, Faculty of Medicine, and the co-lead of the new national organization – The Black Health Education Collaborative (https://www.bhec.ca/). Dr. Dryden engages in... Read More →
avatar for Vincenza Mazzeo

Vincenza Mazzeo

PhD Candidate, Johns Hopkins University
EA

Elizabeth Adetiba

Columbia University
PS

Pyar Seth

University of Notre Dame
Saturday May 3, 2025 3:45pm - 5:15pm EDT
Back Bay D Sheraton, Level 2
  Concurrent Session, Roundtable

Attendees (31)


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