When animals (humans among them) mourn, they honor the emotional bonds that make social living both desirable and possible.  Ebola, one of the most virulent primate diseases, wreaks havoc within this sociality, bringing death and triggering isolation.  Here I examine spaces of mourning - instances when mourning does or might occur - in the context of Ebola to explore how we can protect social connection in the face of disease.  Previous Ebola narratives have often portrayed mourning as an obstacle to public health.  Journalists and academics have largely ignored how isolating people from dying loved ones and depriving families of traditional mourning rituals affects the grieving process or how forcing people to quell grief as they exterminate Ebola-infected lab monkeys affects humans.  Only recently have scholars begun to explore difficulties Ebola survivors face grappling with grief amid stigma-induced isolation.  Here, I explore what it means to reread outbreak narratives in light of theories of mourning.  Drawing upon Judith Butler's concepts of grievability and precarious life, I challenge narratives touting extermination as the sole means of stopping Ebola from crossing species.  Together, these accounts highlight the shared vulnerability and capacity for social suffering uniting humans with other primates.  Through this work I explore how recognizing the significance of relationships within and between species vulnerable to Ebola might change human responses to this disease.  If we embrace this approach for Ebola, it opens new possibilities for handling other infectious diseases and for deciding which lives (among individuals of all species) count as grievable.

This paper analyzes the juxtaposing narratives between various documents and media portrayals from mining corporations, the Peruvian government, and the affected indigenous populations, focusing on how many of the more dominant narratives can often be misleading in reflecting the serious health effects from mining. Peru’s mining industry significantly influences the health of surrounding indigenous communities due to high levels of air and water pollution. Unfortunately, there is not a great deal of sincere concern for the wellbeing of these communities from either the corporations exploiting their land or the Peruvian government. Despite their efforts to express their suffering through protests, indigenous communities have seen few results. The mining industry and its detrimental health effects are often overlooked, and therefore many of these dominant corporate narratives and our own capitalist desires are all that we have to shape our understanding of how mining industries operate in other countries, such as Peru. However, the subaltern counter-narratives from indigenous populations concerning their health and rights can more accurately shape our understanding of the severity of these health effects caused by the mining industry.

 In 2009, the World Health Organization declared swine flu to be the first global flu pandemic in 40 years as a result of the outbreak of cases in Mexico. Although the mortality rate of the disease was lower than predicted, the narrative constructed around the disease offers important takeaways regarding how an outbreak is perceived and what groups become associated as disease carriers. Incorporating knowledge of Mexican-American relations, past and present, in the analysis of the media coverage broadens the understanding regarding the roles that racism and xenophobia play in responses to swine flu. However, the U.S media’s blaming of Mexico, especially when connecting to issues of immigration and borders, draw attention away from American culpability in the H1N1 experience. Using my digital medium as a holding space and synthesis for different thought provoking articles, imagery, and videos about this subject will allow the audience to understand the systematic conditions that influence the spread of diseases like H1N1. For example, by unpacking the capitalist economic imperatives of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), a policy signed off by Canada, the US, and Mexico to create the world's largest free trade area, I examine how its neoliberal policies encouraged transnational corporations to open up industrial pig factories and its impacts on the environment, human health, labor practices, animal welfare, and immigration. I argue that these factors are symptoms of a “NAFTA Flu”, which shaped unequal disease development conditions and unequal access to treatment in Mexico, a perspective that anti-Mexican media ignore. Therefore, critiquing the U.S media framings of the outbreak undermines the stigmatization and blaming of the specific populations in traditional outbreak narratives.

To address the growing international attention on the high rates of obesity in the Pacific Islands, this project examines the discursive patterns that play a role in both fueling and quelling the outbreak of obesity among the Samoan population. I will provide a historical account of the diet and lifestyle during the pre- and post-colonialism periods in American Samoa. I am especially interested in tracing the racialization of food and the differences in perceiving food. I draw on theorist Michel Foucault’s interpretation of biopower in  to further illuminate the narratives that perpetuate the issues of power inequality, colonialism and the racialization of obesity towards the Samoan people, and what exactly defines “health” and “wellness”. The sources of these narratives are extracted from everday popular media, news articles, and even film or artwork. The project also uncovers the various counter narratives from Samoan Americans in the local Seattle community as well as Pacific Island authors and educators to shed light on work counteracting obesity in the community, the significance of cultural preservation and indigenizing health and incorporating de-colonial movements. This leads into the movement towards individualized risk management awhile not losing sight of community and relationship. The implications of this analysis lead us to consider the correlation between discourse and body governance in the context of a growing global health and food industry.

How was U.S. immigration policy shaped by the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak? My project will explore the relationship between immigration policy, xenophobia, and Swine Flu. The uproar in the US stemming from the 2009 Swine Flu (H1N1) outbreak revealed a racialized narrative that targeted and stigmatized Mexican immigrants. Rising xenophobic sentiments were exploited to further the cause of anti-immigrant groups and to justify immigration limits. For example, xenophobia was so prominent that some citizens blindly advocated for the closing of the U.S. - Mexican border without considering the economic effect of such an action. As part of this project I will explore xenophobia itself as an outbreak linked to the Swine Flu outbreak. How did this xenophobia outbreak infiltrate the U.S.? Were U.S. immigration policy makers susceptible to xenophobia? Were they “infected” by the xenophobic outbreak? Is xenophobic sentiment evident in immigration policy? I will draw on empirical data (like immigration statistics and public opinion polls), analyze rhetoric used in immigration debates, and explore media representations, to reveal the connections between Swine Flu and U.S. Immigration policy. I argue that Swine Flu, and the xenophobic discourses surrounding it, had a profound effect on contemporary immigration narratives.

 The HIV epidemic in Southern Africa is one of the most persistent threats to global well-being, representing over twenty-five percent of global AIDS infections. As such, an increasing emphasis has been placed on developing cures or vaccines and deploying treatments for HIV. This global effort has been stymied at every turn by resource shortages, opportunistic infections and cultural and political barriers. But as South African poet Roshila Nair remarks: "we are beginning to learn / how to make everything / out of nothing again." My research reads an anthology of poems and short stories titled "Nobody Ever Said AIDS" and attempts to uncover a space of possibility for representing HIV, which is a prerequisite to fighting it, or at the very least living with it. I use the work of Homi Bhabha, Julia Kristeva, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others to show how culture represents itself through place (inhabited space) and imagined futures. I also read comparative surveys of historical and contemporary migrant mine laborers to suggest that neocolonial ideology has foreclosed a space for imagining a future in such precarity. I hope to suggest that questions of representing, fighting, and living with HIV are also always questions of culture, and that therefore developing a cultural imaginary of and response to HIV is essential to the longer-term human objective of “becoming with” HIV as a species. This cultural imaginary includes not only semiotic resources (that is, language with multiple possible meanings), but also the capacity to understand futures, and to transform spatial locales into inhabitable place.

The purpose of this research is to investigate hidden health narratives on campus regarding the use of tobacco products to contextualize the legitimacy of smoke-free and tobacco-free university initiatives. This academic endeavor will also reveal the structural and institutionalized violence of the tobacco industry which targets marginalized communities to entice the uptake of regular smoking habits. An analysis of biopolitical power, structural violence, and social theory will help to reveal the hidden narratives of these populations, twice-targeted by the social stigmatization of tobacco use and the manipulative advertising of the tobacco industry. By exposing, analyzing, and deconstructing patterns of profit-driven tobacco marketing directed at student demographics, it is possible to examine geographies of blame regarding tobacco use, impact of tobacco use on non-smoking populations, and the misleading agendas behind the dominant narratives of tobacco industry advertising. By identifying and bringing to light these messages, it is possible to legitimize the anti-smoking and anti-tobacco movements happening at the University of Washington, and U.S. universities at large, with a critical analysis of the health risks involved.