Emergent Illnesses, Public Scholarship
1997-1998 Fellows

Fall 1997

Deborah Barrett explored a category of emergent illnesses which she refers to as "invisible" illness--that is, illnesses that are not directly visible, tend to be poorly understood by the medical community, and lack specific lab tests for diagnosis. People with invisible illnesses not only suffer from chronic symptoms, but also from lack of legitimacy for their complaints and disabilities. While at Emory, Barrett also taught a course, Sociology of the Body, which overlapped and complemented her CSPS work.
Lisa Lynch was completing a dissertation on the literary and cultural representation of epidemic disease in the United States at Rutgers University. She also organized a public lecture by Linda King, the head of the Environmental Health Network, a national environmental justice foundation to speak on the topic of emergent illness.

Spring 1998

Eileen Crist spent the semester working on a conceptual history of immunology with a particular focus on academic and popular constructions of the immune system. She was primary organizer of a workshop on "The Politics of AIDS/HIV" that examined topics pertaining to the socio-cultural dimensions of the AIDS/HIV pandemic, in local and global contexts.
Kate Winskell (Global Dialogues Trust) continued her work on Scenarios from the Sahel, an innovative, multisectoral HIV/AIDS prevention project currently being carried out by Global Dialogues and its partners in three West African countries. This project featured a 1997 competition that drew participation from 12,000 young people up to age 24 in Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso. They were invited to contribute ideas for short films on a range of themes related to HIV/AIDS. Sahelian teams of public health specialists and film makers came together to select thirty winning "scenarios", to be transformed into short films by some of West Africa's most acclaimed film makers.