Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a historian of slavery and medicine in the United States and Atlantic World
Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a historian of slavery and medicine in the United States and Atlantic World
This new edited volume provides insights into how the history of capitalism can be analyzed in relation to the production of racial, gendered, and social inequalities in the field of public health and healthcare. While labor and environmental historians and social science researchers have explored how growing industrial productions have contributed to producing toxic residues (Boudia et al, 2021) that affect the health of workers and populations (Bécot & Le Naour, 2023), few books focusing on environmental deterioration and health have united the long-term history of pre-capitalist systems of exploitation and extraction of labor to the industrial society and the post-industrial era. Therefore, this new book will seek to explore these macro-social changes by focusing on diverse case studies addressing the health and social impacts of the plantationocene during the slavery and post-slavery eras (Nading, 2023; Wilson, 2023) as well as the colonial and post-colonial eras (Jobson, 2024), the gradual expansion of industrialization in the 19th century, to deindustrialization processes and disaster capitalism (Pyles et al, 2017) in the 20th century. Organized labor practices through unionism will be explored in relation to workers’ health and workers’ rights (Dewey, 1998; Bécot, 2012; Marichalar, 2018; Marichalar, Markowitz and Rosner, 2021). Furthermore, the financialization of medicine and healthcare has shaped how care is delivered, the conditions healthcare workers labor under, and how human subjects are compensated for medical experimentation (Winant, 2021; Shah, 2006; McQueeney, 2023).
Case studies will also engage with reflections on the production of scientific and medical expertise, to understand how industrial firms and corporations have negotiated with norms set by local, national and international authorities, how populations have perceived medical and scientific expertise focusing on health and toxicity (Brown, 1992) and how expertise have also been produced in relation to industrialists’ expectations regarding industrial and labor productivity. Public health initiatives and medical expertise seeking to target and experiment on specific populations groups in relation to their work environment will also be studied. Works will also examine how State-sponsored policies regarding the dissemination of funding have organized programs in public health and medical research or even impeded modern environmental protection (Fredrickson et al, 2018).
The financialization of healthcare and medicine has also had profound effects on the labor market internal to medicine. As historian Gabriel Winant has shown recently (2023), deindustrialization has shifted workers from factories to the care economy. As the ownership of hospitals has been consolidated by corporations, they have sought to maximize profits through cutting labor costs, affecting patients and healthcare workers. Similarly, closures of unprofitable hospitals have led to the emergence of hospital deserts, often in communities most affected by toxic exposure. On the other hand, international pharmacological study has allowed for a dynamic market to emerge for the procurement of medical test subjects. Thus, case studies could examine the market economy for test subject and human remains, labor organizing among test subject communities, the creation of healthcare deserts, and the labor movement and working conditions for healthcare professionals.
Case studies will also reflect on how State and local policies have conditioned spatial formations (with the implementation of zoning laws or urban renewal programs), urbanization patterns and in industrial sprawl (Fricklel & Elliott, 2018) that have produced increased social and sanitary impacts and health risks for low-income racialized populations, who are overrepresented in areas where petrochemical industries, dumping grounds and other heavy-polluting infrastructures have been sited. Attention will be given to reflections on race, labor and migratory patterns, to study the overrepresentation of newly arrived immigrants in heavily polluted work environments such as mining where they are exposed to health risks such as sarcoidosis. Psychological well-being and mental health care will also be analyzed, beyond the topics of exposure to toxic and industrial residues. Key processes such as slow violence (Davies, 2018; Nixon, 2013), the fabrics of contrived silences and ignorance (Frickel & Vincent, 2007) will also be studied in relation to these empirical cases.
The book will also focus on knowledge production and datactivism. Physicians have long engaged with data production and analysis in order to challenge racial and social assumptions about bodies and ideals of productivity (Eddy, 2021). Data collection and management in environmental health have given rise to counterresistance practices to fight against the exploitation of workers and the subjugation of their health and basic needs to labor incentives. The book will therefore explore how medical professionals have risen to these new tasks, sometimes beyond their primary area of expertise, to become community advocates and build community science or citizen science projects.
Looking at case studies from the 18th century to the early 21st century focusing on rural and urban contexts, the essays will stem from a wide range of fields such as history of science, technology and medicine, economic, social and industrial history, environmental history, sociology of health, medicine and expertise, historical sociology and social anthropology. The book editors encourage authors to submit works that address case studies from all continents.
Sub themes for essays are given below but not limited to:
Carceral logics, incarceration, prisoners’ labor and health risks
Trade unions and workers’ health
Political and moral economy
Occupational health
Empires and medicine
Slavery and health
Disaster capitalism
Slow violence
Migration and labor
Urban/environmental history and sociology
Regulatory history of toxicity and health
Medical knowledge production and scientific expertise on toxicity
The financialization of healthcare and medicine
Experimental subjects as workers
Workplace environmental and health
Urban segregation, zoning and racial inequalities
Applying
We seek 250–500-word abstracts outlining the author’s argument and how it connects to one or several of the larger themes outlined above. Please send your abstract and bio at … by December 20, 2024. In Summer 2025, selected authors will participate in a zoom workshop, as a first round of peer review. At this point, editors and commentators will supply detailed feedback in preparation for submitting the manuscript. Expected book chapters will be about 5000-7000 words and will feature theoretical discussions and/or empirical case studies.
About the editors
Elodie Edwards-Grossi is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL and a Junior Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France. Her first book, Bad Brains: la psychiatrie et la lutte des Noirs américains pour la justice raciale, XXe-XXIe siècles was published with Presses Universitaires de Rennes in 2021. A new, revised English edition is currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. Her second book, Mad with Freedom: The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity and Civil Rights in the US South, 1840–1940, was published with LSU Press in Fall 2022, and received the 2023 Jules and Frances Landry Award. She is currently working on a new book project which is tentatively titled Hidden in Plain Sight: Race, Petrotoxicity and Disaster Capitalism in California. The book examines the production of polluted spaces due to the presence of petrochemical industries in socially disadvantaged, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and historical sociology, the project focuses on the residents' past and current perceptions of social, racial and environmental inequalities and territorial stigma in their community.
Christopher D. E. Willoughby is an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) and coeditor of Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery (Louisiana State University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a history of capitalism and U.S. medicine from 1500 to the present. Entitled Capitalism & Medicine: a History, this project examines how significant shifts in social life and political economy from the conquest of the Americas to the rise of neoliberalism created the United States’ most peculiar medical profession and healthcare system. Previously, Edwards-Grossi and Willoughby have organized the 2021 symposium “Legacies of Slavery, Racism, and Empire in the History of Medicine” at the University of Chicago Center in Paris, and most recently, they wrote the article “Slavery and its Afterlives in US Psychiatry”, published in the American Journal of Public Health.
References
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Bécot, Renaud, and Gwenola Le Naour. Vivre et lutter dans un monde toxique. Violence environnementale et santé à l’âge du pétrole. Paris : Le Seuil, 2023.
Boudia, Soraya, Angela N. H. Creager, Scott Frickel, Emmanuel Henry, Nathalie Jas, Carsten Reinhardt, and Jody A. Roberts. Residues: Thinking Through Chemical Environments. Rutgers University Press, 2021.
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Wilson, Brenda K. “‘When There Is No Money, That Is When I Vomit Blood’: The Domino Effect and the Unfettered Lethal Exploitation of Black Labor on Dominican Sugar Plantations.” Globalization and Health 19, no. 1 (August 29, 2023): 63. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-023-00963-4.
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