Dr Anne Pollock, Georgia Institute of Technology

Title: Places of Pharmaceutical Knowledge-Making: Global health, Postcolonial Science, and South African drug discovery

Anne Pollock is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology & Culture at Georgia Tech.  Her research focuses on biomedicine and culture, theories of race and gender, and how science and medicine are mobilized in social justice projects. Her first book, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference, was published by Duke in 2012, and her articles have appeared in journals including BioSocieties and Body & Society.  She is engaged in ongoing research projects in three areas: feminism and heart disease; American health disparities and citizenship claims; and drug discovery efforts by and for the Global South (specifically South Africa).

Professor David Napier, University College London

The scope and development of Professor Napier’s research and teaching interests are readily evidenced through the publication of four books. Masks, Transformation, and Paradox (1986) examines the concepts of personhood both historically and cross-culturally. It focuses on embodiment, impersonation, and performance, on the one hand, and medical botany and human ecology, on the other. Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology(1992) examines various ways in which the cultural construction of Otherness is employed in definitions of Selfhood. The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World (2003) is a critique of the rise of a now-dominant scientific trope that relies deeply on not only “the recognition of Self,” but also on the “elimination of Otherness.” And The Righting of Passage: Perceptions of Change After Modernity (2004) argues that the variable nature of transformation and psychological growth in the contemporary world disposes us towards understanding the potentially constructive nature of stressful encounters, and especially those stressful encounters that involve how we assess well-being across cultures.