The engagements that comprise the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” interrogate the intersections among race, empire, and the environment, and their significance in the theory, practice, and structure of American biomedicine. These engagements consist of a series of public lectures, scholarly talks, and a regular interdisciplinary reading and discussion group. The seminar’s geographic frame is that of the American biomedical empire, a formation that includes the United States as well as those places formed by and encircled in the networks of American (biomedical) imperial influence. Within these geographies, race has functioned as a determinant of environmental exposures with deleterious impacts on human health. It also has been a central component of the environmental imaginaries that undergird the theory and practice of medicine and the provision of care. This seminar will approach the history and study of biomedicine from the vantage point of its racialized environments with an eye towards how these critical engagements might be marshaled to produce a more equitable practice of medicine. It is rooted in the proposition that to fully grasp the significance of race in medicine, we must probe how race is made material through environmental imaginaries, practices, and material entanglements, and how these in turn undergird and shape American biomedicine.

“Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” is supported by the Mellon Foundation and presented in partnership with the Science and Justice Research Center.

This project is administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz.