EP#263 - 04.21.2021 - Disability Justice and COVID-19

Today I welcome . . . DISABILITY JUSTICE AND COVID-19 Lakshmi Fjord, Elaine Gerber, Lenore Manderson.

LAKSHMI FJORD, Ph.D. is an environmental justice anthropologist whose community participatory action research methods and evidence led to two historic legal precedents for environmental justice at the federal and Virginia state level. For the first time, a federal appeals court overturned the air permit to site the largest U.S. fracked gas compressor station in an 83% majority Freedmen descent community on the basis of environmental justice. This contributed to the cancellation of the $8 billion dollar Atlantic Coast Pipeline. With Devva Kasnitz and Pam Block, Lakshmi was a foremother of Disability Studies in Anthropology, and Deaf Studies in Disability Studies. She organized the first AAA panel on Disability and Disasters immediately after Katrina in 2005, recruiting Elaine Gerber and Karen Nakamura. She now works in 4 Freedmen-built communities in Virginia facing imminent threats of new toxic polluting infrastructure.

Elaine Gerber is a medical anthropologist and disability studies scholar at Montclair State University, and a former president of the Society for Disability Studies.  Prior to joining the faculty at MSU, she served for five years as the Senior Research Associate for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) and taught in the graduate program in Disability Studies at the City University of New York. Her work examines the intersection between culture and the body, initially with a focus on women’s reproductive health, and more recently, on disability. Current projects revolve around food insecurity and disablement, audio description, and cultures of ableism. There are both theoretical contributions and practical applications to her work.

 

LENORE MANDERSON is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, and an NRF A-rated scholar. She holds appointments also with Brown University, US, and Monash University, Australia. Known internationally for her work on inequality, social exclusion and the impact of compromised health and embodied difference in Australia, Southeast and East Asia, and Africa, she has published some 750 books, articles, book chapters and reports in these and other areas. She chairs the External Review Group of the Social Innovations in Health Initiative of TDR (2015-) and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). She was awarded the Society of Medical Anthropology Career Achievement Award in 2016, and in January 2020 was admitted as a Member of the Order of Australia.