Intersections of class, race and place

This essay presents an analysis of place references in the spontaneous talk of young Londoners from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. These place references function as ‘cultural concepts’ (Silverstein 2004) which index multilayered meanings well beyond their denotations, constituting important resources for speakers’ local and supralocal positionings. The essay argues that ‘place’ is an important filter for our experience of language, gender and sexuality and provides scholars with a valuable point of departure for explorations of intersectional identities.

Decomposition of Disparities in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia

This study uses Medicare data to non-parametrically evaluate race- and place-of-residence-related disparities in AD/ADRD prevalence and incidence-based mortality, separate them out into the epidemiological causal components including race-related disparities in incidence and survival, and finally explain these in terms of health-care-related factors using causal methods of group variable effects (propensity scores and the rank-and-replace method) and regression-based analyses (extended Fairlie’s model and generalized Oaxaca-Blinder approach for censoring outcomes). Partitioning analysis showed that the incidence rate is the main predictor for temporal changes and racial disparities in AD/ADRD prevalence and mortality, though survival began to play a role after 2010. Arterial hypertension is the leading predictor responsible for racial disparities in AD/ADRD risks. This study demonstrated that Medicare data has sufficient statistical power and potential for studying disparities in AD/ADRD in three interacting directions: multi-ethnic structure of population, place of residence, and time period.

The Logic of Skull Writing

In this essay I discuss the significance of theories and classifications that appear in the material and graphic form of race and place name inscriptions on human skulls. I argue that human skulls themselves provided a site for the inscription of raciological thought, a privileged location for abbreviating broader conceptions of differences and distributions of ‘human races’. I will draw on the history of race science in 19th-century Europe to explore how and why certain race and place names were inscribed onto skulls, and the effect of this form of inscription on the shaping of theories in the racial sciences during this period. The article especially considers the work of the French anthropologists Armand de Quatrefages and Ernest-Théodore Hamy, who systematically wrote inscriptions on the skulls they were studying in the context of Crania Ethnica, arguably the most ambitious project of global racial craniology undertaken in the late 19th century.

Walking as Political Utterance: The Walking Subjects and the Production of Space

In this work, we challenge supposedly neutral imaginaries of what walking methodologies consist of, unveiling social and political dimensions and addressing the production of embodied spaces involved in the act of walking. We adopt the concept of intersectionality to construct an analysis that considers the effects of the colonial, racist, and sexist historical scheme on the production of knowledge. We understand that the current globalization project produces a global subject that is not racialized, and therefore White. And it is marked by gender norms, and therefore, masculine and heterosexual. These characteristics give the person the privilege of moving “naturally,” without the need to justify physical, social, and political corporealities. In the walking research carried out by subjects who deviate from such global parameters, we identified the interruption of walking as an epistemological event that displaces them from the space they are producing. We also analyzed the idea of risk produced to the researchers when they are identified as someone who “does not belong” to that space. We argue that the interaction among gender, race, and place imposes a local condition to the knowledge produced by Afro-Latin American walking researchers. Finally, we defend the walking methodologies as a political statute in the occupation of simultaneously physical and epistemological spaces because the subject’s position and the power relations that are addressed in the act of walking require consideration.