Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic | Anthropology Talk with Prof. Amy Moran-Thomas

Dr. Moran-Thomas’s research reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a 500-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar” – or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” Her ethnography profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it,” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, their arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.

About the speaker: Professor Amy Moran-Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She is a cultural anthropologist, interested in the human and material entanglements that shape global health and medicine in practice. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2012, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Brown University. She is the author of “Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic” published by University of California Press in 2019.

About the event: This talk is organized as part of the Second Year Speaker Series by the second year cohort at the Department of Anthropology, UIC. Do join us for what promises to be an exciting talk accompanied by light refreshments. For queries, suggestions and access needs, please contact us at anthropology.uic@gmail.com