The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality & Disease Collide

Steven Thrasher and Samuel Roberts

Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University

Monday, September 19, 2022 6:00 pm EDT

Online Event Via Zoom

Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University (IRAAS)
presents
CONVERSATIONS - " THE VIRAL UNDERCLASS:THE HUMAN TOLL WHEN INEQUALITY & DISEASE COLLIDE"
with author, Steven W. Thrasher, Northwestern University in discussion w/Samuel K. Roberts, Columbia University
 
presented virtually via Zoom , Registration required
Registration: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oISClq9XT1qBmX6iUNbVxg
 
STEVEN W. THRASHER, PhDholds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair at Northwestern University's Medill School, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ research. He is also a faculty member of Northwestern’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. He holds a PhD in American Studies and divides his time between Chicago and New York. The Viral Underclassis his first book. Twitter: @thrasherxy.
 
SAMUEL K. ROBERTS,  PhD, is Associate Professor of History (Columbia University School of the Arts and Sciences) and Sociomedical Sciences (Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health), and is also a former Director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS). Dr. Roberts writes, teaches, and lectures widely on African-American urban history, especially medicine, public health, and science and technology. His widely acclaimed book, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), is an exploration of the political economy of race and the modern American public health state between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, a period which encompasses the overlapping and mutually-informed eras of Jim Crow segregation and modern American public health practice.
Roberts currently is researching and writing a book-length project on the United States’s troubled history of race and recovery, examining the social and political history of heroin addiction treatment from the 1950s to the early 1990s. This project traces urban policy at the beginning of the postwar heroin epidemic, the emergence of therapeutic communities, the politics of state-run addiction rehabilitation facilities, the adoption of methadone maintenance treatment in the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of “radical recovery” movements and harm reduction and syringe exchange in the 1980s and 1990s.  Twitter: @SamuelKRoberts