Episode 54: Anthropology of an American Pandemic with Adia Benton

In this wide-ranging interview, Johanna, Nathan, and Derek talk to Adia Benton about how we can understand the bizarre and disturbing US experience of pandemic from an anthropological perspective and what we can learn from pandemic sport in the United States. Adia Benton is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University and the author of the 2017 Rachel Carson Award-winning book titled, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone (University of Minnesota, 2015).

The first part of the conversation grapples with how to read Covid denialism's many manifestations, the relationship of Americans to their health care system, questions of securitization and militarization, biopolitics, and how a vaccine roll-out is likely to look. This is not a conversation about sport, but it is one worth your time.

In the second half, we touch on a range of issues inspired by Adia's provocative work and thinking, including the ways we might understand Covid-19 as a form of disease exceptionalism in the world of sport, what to make of Vanderbilt kicker Sarah Fuller, and how we might think about injury and harm through the lens of reparations.

You can find Adia Benton's book HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone here. You can find her terrific interview with Daniel Denvir on The Dig podcast here. You can find a published interview with her on pandemic sport in The Nation here. You can find her on the discursive implications of pandemic here.

You can also follow Adia on Twitter! 

 

For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic)

Show Producer: Tristan Loper

After listening to the episode, check out our most recent pieces:

“College Football Feels All Too Normal During the Pandemic” in TIME Magazine

“College Football in a Pandemic Reveals our Capacity for Trumpism” in The Baffler

“Red-Scare Rhetoric Isn’t Gone From Histories of American Sport” in Jacobin Magazine

"Canceling the College-Football Season Isn't Enough" published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“'We are being gaslit': College football and Covid-19 are imperiling athletes” in The Guardian

“Canceling the college football season is about union busting, not health” also in The Guardian

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