Note: I am currently planning a two-event series on race, health, and innovation set to take place at Arizona State University and King’s College London during the 2023-2024 academic year. Check back in the coming months for details!

Imagining Innovative Digital Health Futures

The just pursuit of innovation in digital health care requires imagination, an equitable distribution of resources, and a policy environment in which flexibility and adaptability ensure that we can be responsive to patients’ and health care providers’ needs. But what happens when, as is often or even always the case, the conditions under which we pursue digital health innovation are not entirely just? How can we create innovative health futures that work for all of us when structural barriers to health and health care persist? What theoretical frameworks for action can help us to be imaginative about not only the material technologies we design but also the means by which we pursue health equity or racial justice? In other words, how should we think and be reflexive about what innovation in the world of digital health means?

Moderated by Beza Merid and co-organized by Merid and Latha Poonamallee, this April 2022 event featured Jeremy Greene, Melissa Creary, and Al O. Pacino as panelists, with Kathleen Vogel delivering opening remarks.

Illness Narratives, Networked Subjects, and Intimate Publics

This event explored the material effects/affects of illness, disability, dying, and death, across the humanities and social sciences, through the lenses of communication studies, STS, medical anthropology, and feminist and queer science studies.

Co-moderated and co-organized with Tamara Kneese, this MCC Lecture Series event at NYU featured Tom Boellstorff, Whitney Erin Boesel, Marisa Brandt, Jed Brubaker, Danya Glabau, Melissa Gregg, Tamara Kneese, Jonathan Metzl, Beza Merid, Erica Robles-Anderson, and David Serlin as as panelists, and Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsberg as keynote speakers.

Merid and Kneese also developed this program idea into a special issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience in 2018.