The UCLA FSPH Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health presents their spring 2022 distinguished speaker series lecture, featuring Dr. Ugo Edu, assistant professor, african american studies department at UCLA.
In this talk, Dr. Edu will share some meditations on the ways that practices and logics used to measure, define, restrict or control health and/or disease always produce an aesthetic and the contours of racial categories. She draws largely on field experiences in Brazil to build upon previous work that is beginning to trace the way that concerns with appropriateness of form proceed from historical moments which emerged alongside interests and practices for cataloguing and categorizing different types of lifeforms, life-making, and being.
Dr. Ugo F. Edu is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, black feminism, and science, technology, and society studies (STS). Using interdisciplinary approaches, her scholarship focuses on reproductive and sexual health, gender, race, aesthetics, body knowledge, and body modifications. Her book project: The "Family Planned": Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity in Brazil, traces the influence of an economy of race, aesthetics, and sexuality on reproductive and sterilization practices of women in Brazil. She is working on a play, Securing Ties, which draws heavily on her book project as a means for critical public engagement and an incorporation of the arts in her scholarship. She is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department at UCLA.