Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture and Institute of American and Canadian Studies presents:

Making De-Racialized and Pathologically Racial Bodies and Minds:
U.S. Television and Print News Coverage of Health Issues

Charles L. Briggs,
Professor of Folklore and Anthropology
University of California Berkeley

December 7, 2012
18:30-20:00
Room 301, 3F, Building 10

This paper looks at how notions of race are produced in ever-expanding US news coverage of health issues. Much coverage contributes to post-racial perspectives that render racial inequities invisible by constructing bodies, medical technologies, diagnoses, and forms of treatment as post-racial, creating the sense that no one should need to invoke racial to understand medicine. Nevertheless, a plethora of stories focus on genetics, programs that target particular ethno-racial populations, and seeming failures of racialized minorities to understand biomedical content as requiring discourses of race. Such racialized coverage performatively creates understandings of race, in interaction with gender and class, and then simultaneously naturalizes them and portrays them as notions whose invocation is problematic—often in the same story.

Charles L. Briggs is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley.
His publications include Learning How to Ask, Voices of Modernity (with Richard Bauman), Stories in the Time of Cholera (with Clara Mantini-Briggs), and Poéticas de vida en espacios de muerte. He is currently researching cultural models of mobility, circulation, and communication; narrative representations of violence; global health and indigenous knowledge practices; and, in Cuba, Venezuela, and the United States, how media representations shape the politics of health.

Lecture in English, No prior registration necessary

Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture
(ICC) and Institute
of American and Canadian Studies (IACS)
7-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554, JAPAN ICC Email: diricc[at]sophia.ac.jp IACS Email: instacs[at]sophia.ac.jp ICC Web page: http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/index.html
IACS Web page:
http://www.info.sophia.ac.jp/amecana/jindex.htm

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David H. Slater, Ph.D.
Faculty of Liberal Arts
Sophia University, Tokyo