Date:
Location:
“The Global Politics of Emergency Vaccines: A Primer on Decolonizing the Pandemic”
Attend this event via Zoom (advance registration required)
Speaker:
Dwaipayan Banerjee, Assistant Professor, Science, Technology, and Society (STS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Contact:
Paul Sherman
paul_sherman@hks.harvard.edu
Co-sponsored by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
This event is online only. Please click the "Read More" link for full instructions on how to attend this seminar.
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Remote Access Information:
To join by computer:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcuceChqDkiEtWjAlRFEI0f8tVnYoroVSfs
Please note: This event requires registration by noon on Friday, November 27 to receive the meeting link and password.
Abstract:
The hopeful promise and roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines comes attached with a series of difficult questions. Are vaccines a 'human right'? Should patents be enforced in a way that puts people in the global south behind the queue of those that live in the United States and Europe? And how much do we know anyway about the new technologies that went into making it? As the world struggles to manufacture the vaccine at volume, India and China have the capacity to scale up production to meet global needs. They did so during the HIV-AIDS pandemic, when global south governments led by Nelson Mandela fought big pharma for the right to manufacture and sell essential life-saving drugs. Can the same strategies be mobilized to deal with inequalities in the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine? This talk answers these questions of vaccine access through the lens of decolonization and offers key takeaways about what history teaches us about the possibilities and limits of vaccine equity.
Speaker bio:
Dwaipayan Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at MIT. He earned his doctorate in cultural anthropology at NYU and has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. He also holds an M.Phil and an MA in sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Banerjee's first monograph Enduring Cancer: Life, Death and Diagnosis in Delhi is an ethnography of cancer in India. Enduring Cancer presents the efforts of the urban poor in Delhi to carve out a livable life with cancer, as they negotiate an over-extended health system struggling to respond to the disease. He has also co-authored Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India with Jacob Copeman. Banerjee's current research—Decolonizing Science: Towards a Cosmopolitics of Art, Physics and Computing in 1950s India—tracks scientific and aesthetic internationalisms in early postcolonial Bombay and Calcutta. His research has been funded by the Levitan Prize for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.
