Alondra Nelson

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12111/8109
Widely known for her research at the intersection of science, technology, and politics, Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science. An acclaimed sociologist, Alondra Nelson examines questions in science, technology, and social inequality. Nelson's work offers a critical and innovative approach to the social sciences in fruitful dialogue with other fields. Her major research contributions are situated at the intersection of racial formation and social citizenship, on the one hand, and emerging scientific and technological phenomena, on the other.

ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0383-1806.

Image credit: Dan Komoda

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  • Communities on the Verge: Intersections and Disjunctures in the New Information Order
    (Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1997)
    Wexler, Debra
    ;
    Tu, Thuy Lin
    ;
    Nelson, Alondra
    ;
    Headlam, Alicia
    This article examines the relationship of information technology to communities of color. In recent decades, American microelectronics firms have shifted production facilities to offshore sites while prototypic and short-term projects, research, and development have remained in places such as Silicon Valley. Assembly work that fuels the industry there, done mostly by immigrant women, closely resembles the “low tech” labor of their overseas counterparts. Despite these attachments by people of color at the level of labor and high-tech production, the same people are largely isolated from the technology on the levels of use, consumption, and content development. Some attempts have been made by marginalized communities, however, to “stake a claim in cyberspace.” Examining what anthropologist David Hess termed the social and cultural “reconstruction of technology,” we argue that attempts to claim information technologies happen on two levels: the “virtual” and the “real.” We explore questions of how community is conjured or imagined by people of color using icons and language and how images and language mark insiders and outsiders, we examine the inconsistencies in “global village” metaphors and whether communities of color betray similar inconsistencies, and we conclude that we are both critical of and optimistic about the communicative possibilities of information technology.
      11  21
  • Aliens Who Are Of Course Ourselves
    (College Art Association, 2001)
    Nelson, Alondra
    The cultural theorist and novelist Albert Murray once remarked that the mandate of the black intellectual was to provide “technology” to the black community. By technology, Murray didn't mean mechanics, new media, or the Internet. Rather, he defined it as those novel analytic approaches he believed necessary to understanding black life “on a higher level of abstraction.” For Murray, this process was one of distillation and complication. He advocated theories of African American existence that, like a blueprint, would be sufficiently robust to reveal the larger patterns of society and do justice to its intricacies and complexities. By Murray's definition, the artist Laylah Ali is a technologist of the highest order. In spite of their striking clarity, her gouache images reflect the contradictions of the human condition. Ali's work explores the tragic lives of the Greenheads, her hypercephalic, thin-limbed, brown-skinned creations. Using a limited palette, she composes provocative visual fields noticeably lacking in scenery, save the humanoid figures that inhabit them. A master at sleight of hand, she uses bright comic-strip colors in a way that recalls the Sunday funnies; but these images have more in common with sardonic political cartoons, for the figures she depicts inflict all manner of insult and injury on one other. Although Ali provides no script for her images, their despair and anger is unmistakable. But there is no violent haste in her brush stroke; the images are controlled—eerily exact. As befits the work of a technician, these tortured lives are rendered with the sharpest precision.
      34  116
  • Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life
    (New York University Press, 2001)
    Nelson, Alondra
    ;
    Tu, Thuy Linh N.
    ;
    Hines, Alicia Headlam
    This text explores the relationship between race and technology. From Indian H-1B workers and Detroit techno music to karaoke and the Chicano interneta, this book uses case studies to document the use of technology - rupturing stereotypes such as Asian whizz kids and black technophobes. The cultural impact of new information and communication technologies has been a constant topic of debate, but questions of race and ethnicity remain a critical absence. TechniColor fills this gap by exploring the relationship between race and technology.From Indian H-1B Workers and Detroit techno music to karaoke and the Chicano interneta, TechniColor's specific case studies document the ways in which people of color actually use technology. The results rupture such racial stereotypes as Asian whiz-kids and Black and Latino techno-phobes, while fundamentally challenging many widely-held theoretical and political assumptions. Incorporating a broader definition of technology and technological practices--to include not only those technologies thought to create "revolutions" (computer hardware and software) but also cars, cellular phones, and other everyday technologies--TechniColor reflects the larger history of technology use by people of color. Contributors: Vivek Bald, Ben Chappell, Beth Coleman, McLean Greaves, Logan Hill, Alicia Headlam Hines, Karen Hossfeld, Amitava Kumar, Casey Man Kong Lum, Alondra Nelson, Mimi Nguyen, Guillermo Goméz-Peña, Tricia Rose, Andrew Ross, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, and Ben Williams.
      20  45
  • Afrofuturism
    (Duke University Press, 2002)
    Nelson, Alondra
    Challenging mainstream technocultural assumptions of a raceless future, Afrofuturism explores culturally distinct approaches to technology. This special issue addresses the intersection between African diasporic culture and technology through literature, poetry, science fiction and speculative fiction, music, visual art, and the Internet and maintains that racial identity fundamentally influences technocultural practices. The collection includes a reflection on the ideologies of race created by cultural critics in their analyses of change wrought by the information age; an interview with Nalo Hopkinson, the award-winning novelist and author of speculative fiction novels Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring, who fuses futuristic thinking with Caribbean traditions; an essay on how contemporary R&B music presents African American reflections on the technologies of everyday life; and an article examining early interventions by the black community to carve out a distinct niche in cyberspace.
      14  80
  • Broadband Politics
    (Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, 2003)
    Nelson, Alondra
      10  21
  • ‘A Black Mass’ as Black Gothic: Myth and Biomedicine in African American Cultural Nationalism
    (Rutgers University Press, 2006)
    Nelson, Alondra
    During the 1960s and 1970s, a cadre of poets, playwrights, visual artists, musicians, and other visionaries came together to create a renaissance in African American literature and art. This charged chapter in the history of African American culture-which came to be known as the Black Arts Movement-has remained largely neglected by subsequent generations of critics. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement includes essays that reexamine well-known figures such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Betye Saar, Jeff Donaldson, and Haki Madhubuti. In addition, the anthology expands the scope of the movement by offering essays that explore the racial and sexual politics of the era, links with other period cultural movements, the arts in prison, the role of Black colleges and universities, gender politics and the rise of feminism, color fetishism, photography, music, and more. An invigorating look at a movement that has long begged for reexamination, this collection lucidly interprets the complex debates that surround this tumultuous era and demonstrates that the celebration of this movement need not be separated from its critique.
      42  49
  • The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing
    (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2007)
    Bolnick, Deborah
    ;
    Fullwiley, Duana
    ;
    Duster, Troy
    ;
    Cooper, Richard S.
    ;
    Fujimura, Joan H.
    ;
    Kahn, Jonathan
    ;
    Kaufman, Jay S.
    ;
    Marks, Jonathan
    ;
    Nelson, Alondra
    ;
    Ossorio, Pilar
    ;
    Reardon, Jenny
    ;
    Reverby, Susan M.
    ;
    TallBear, Kimberly
    ;
    Morning, Ann
    Commercially available tests of genetic ancestry have significant scientific limitations, but are serious matters for many test-takers.
      5  46
  • Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?
    (PLOS Medicine, 2007-09-25)
    Braun, Lundy
    ;
    Fausto-Sterling, Anne
    ;
    Fullwiley, Duana
    ;
    Hammonds, Evelynn M.
    ;
    Nelson, Alondra
    ;
    Quivers, William
    ;
    Reverby, Susan M.
    ;
    Shields, Alexandra E.
      7  36
  • Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry
    (Sage Publications, 2008)
    Nelson, Alondra
    This paper considers the extent to which the geneticization of 'race' and ethnicity is the prevailing outcome of genetic testing for genealogical purposes. The decoding of the human genome precipitated a change of paradigms in genetics research, from an emphasis on genetic similarity to a focus on molecular-level differences among individuals and groups. This shift from lumping to splitting spurred ongoing disagreements among scholars about the significance of 'race' and ethnicity in the genetics era. I characterize these divergent perspectives as 'pragmatism' and 'naturalism'. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I argue that neither position fully accounts for how understandings of 'race' and ethnicity are being transformed with genetic genealogy testing. While there is some acquiescence to genetic thinking about ancestry, and by implication, 'race', among African-American and black British consumers of genetic genealogy testing, test-takers also adjudicate between sources of genealogical information and from these construct meaningful biographical narratives. Consumers engage in highly situated 'objective' and 'affiliative' self-fashioning, interpreting genetic test results in the context of their 'genealogical aspirations'. I conclude that issues of site, scale, and subjectification must be attended to if scholars are to understand whether and to what extent social identities are being transformed by recent developments in genetic science.
      28  43
  • Social Text
    (Duke University Press, 2009)
    Nelson, Alondra
    Alondra Nelson revisits “The New Right and Media,” an article from Social Text's inaugural issue that explored how “media politics” and forms of mediated, networked communication were used by conservative countermovements to advance their ideological agendas. The idea of “social textronics” is taken up from this article, revised and expanded in order to suggest how new technologies and mediated communication are—borrowing from Fredric Jameson—“a symbolic vehicle” for, and an object of, progressive critique.
      14  36
  • Biomedicalizing Genetic Health, Diseases and Identities
    (Routlege, 2009)
    Clarke, Adele E.
    ;
    Shim, Janet
    ;
    Shostak, Sara
    ;
    Nelson, Alondra
    As the focus of the natural sciences shifted from cellular to molecular levels over the last half of the twentieth century, the question ‘What is life?’ has increasingly been raised. Rose (2007: 6–7) recently posited a parallel epistemic shift in biomedicine from the clinical gaze to the molecular gaze such that ‘we are inhabiting an emergent form of life’. Through biomedicine, molecularisation is transforming what Foucault called ‘the conditions of possibility’ for how life can and should be lived. The emergent biomedical molecular gaze offers possibilities of changing bios – ‘life itself’ – especially, but not only, through genetics and genomics. These new biomedical practices are increasingly transforming people’s bodies, identities and lives.
      24  31
  • Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination
    (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
    Nelson, Alondra
    Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization's broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party's health activism-its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination-was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Nelson argues that the Party's focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers' People's Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent. The Black Panther Party's understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy-and that struggle-continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.
      11  110
  • Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History
    (Rutgers University Press, 2012)
    Nelson, Alondra
    ;
    Wailoo, Keith
    ;
    Lee, Catherine
    Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to perform a kind of racially charged cultural work: to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the "nature" of identity in the present. "Genetics and the Unsettled Past" considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history. This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines-biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology-to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book's essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.
      6  58
  • DNA Ethnicity as Black Social Action?
    (American Anthropology Association, 2013)
    Nelson, Alondra
      10  27
  • The Social Life of DTC Genetic Testing: The Case of 23andMe
    (Routledge, 2014)
    Nelson, Alondra
    ;
    Joan H. Robinson
    The decoding of the human genome in the summer of 2002 was accompanied by the swift commodification of direct-to-consumer (or DTC) genetic tests – that is, DNA data analyses for sale to the lay public. DNA-based paternity testing had been publicly available since the early 1990s first, at select laboratories, and later through online commerce. In the late 1990s, medical genetic tests such as Myriad’s BRAC Analysis (for hereditary predisposition to breast and ovarian cancers) were introduced in clinical settings. But the subsequent decade saw a watershed of DTC genetic testing services aimed at a far broader market than potential parents and possible cancer sufferers. Readily available for purchase on the internet, these new commercial technologies targeted luxury consumers, genealogy buffs, and DIY-science geeks, among many others, and promised to tell us who we are, where we come from, and how we can live optimally. The trajectory of DTC genetic testing over the last dozen years offers science and technology studies (STS) scholars a rich site at which to examine institutionalization – the process by which objects or practices circulate in regulatory and other types of organizations and through this process come to be understood as normative or “regular” facets of the social world. The DTC genetic testing case is informative as well because it takes place in the context of today’s robust neoliberalism and thus sheds light on the effects of the twinned-forces of deregulation of various institutional domains concurrent with the diminution of social welfare programs for healthcare and other services (Moore, Kleinman, Hess and Frickel 2011). Additionally, the DTC genetic testing case provides a productive contrast with one of the more well-studied trajectories of institutionalization: the pharmaceutical market. With pharma, a significant aspect of the institutionalization process precedes the introduction of a product into the marketplace. When a drug enters the market, the product reflects the outcome of months or years of institutionalization, including in the form of laboratory science, clinical trials, the scrutiny of regulatory agencies (e.g., the United States Food and Drug Administration or FDA), and the framing of an illness and its treatment on the part of varied stakeholders (for example, social movements, patient advocates, and professional associations) (Epstein 1996, Dumit 2012). Both over-the-counter and prescription pharmaceuticals have been directly advertised to consumers for decades and, in some ways, this practice both anticipated and precipitated the rise of DTC genetics. The origins of DTC DNA services lie at the juncture of two sociotechnical processes – molecular biology and supercomputing; these institutional predecessors of today’s commercial genetic testing are analogous to some initial aspects of pharmaceutical development. Yet there are important differences in the institutionalization processes of these products that are worth noting: In contrast to pharma, the DTC genetic services industry was introduced by a set of actors – including businesspersons, investors, and scientists – whose scientific claims and products went mostly uninterrogated by outside reviewers or other types of checks and balances and received scant governmental regulation and ethical oversight. Consequently, efforts to institutionalize DTC DNA testing have mostly come after products and services have entered the marketplace. And, in contrast with pharma, customers and industry leaders have been able to play sizeable – if uneven – roles in this process. Whether institutionalization occurs before or after the introduction of a commercial product, it enables classification – the sorting of new or contested objects and entities into classes, categorical boundaries, or architectures of social meaning. Because the introduction of commercial DNA testing proceeded with little external oversight, the classification of this new commercial entity – by state and federal agencies, consumers, industry professionals, and others – remains in formation. Boundaries are actively under negotiation. With DTC genetic testing, institutionalization is evolving as the tests do, making the dynamics of this process readily observable by scholars. In the face of this regulatory lag, purveyors and consumers of DTC genetic testing may seek to shape the course of institutionalization. When enterprises and organizations are established with a low regulatory threshold, it may be the industry insiders themselves who initiate the institutionalization process. Anticipating regulation, they may seize the opportunity to set the terms of their own surveillance, as did some entrepreneurs who pioneered some of the first commercial genetic ancestry testing services in the United States (e.g., Kittles and Shriver 2004, also see Wagner 2012).On the other hand, genetic testing companies may capitalize on the lack of clarity about the classification of their products to resist institutionalization and create their own boundaries and norms: Some purveyors of DTC genetics have claimed that tests should be understood as personal, leisure pursuits that are non-medical or recreational and, therefore should not fall under the stringent regulatory schemes of agencies like the FDA (e.g., Lee 2013). Similarly, as we describe, consumers may want to keep regulatory institutionalization at bay for fear that it will restrict their access to genetic data, as was the case when federal agencies held hearings on DTC DNA testing several years ago. Consumers testified powerfully about their “right” to their own genetic information, free from government oversight (see our discussion below and also FDA 2010, Vorhaus 2010, Lee 2013). DTC genetic testing’s categorical dynamism presents STS researchers with a challenge. How can scholars study a social phenomenon that is in formation, that may defy classification, or that vacillates between numerous institutions and organizations? One tried-and-true strategy for dealing with this challenge is to fix an object and study it within a single institutional location. For example, medical sociologists are most likely to study diagnostic genetic technologies and may do so at a physician’s office or among one group of patients (Atkinson, Parsons and Featherstone 2001). But genetic data is never simply one kind of information. Even if the outcome of genetic testing is supposed to be solely for medical use, the inherent nature of DNA means that it also always contains information about one’s health and may also be deemed to be informative for ancestry inference or in a criminal justice setting, even if these uses are not intended. The growing, problematic use of “familial searching” in criminal investigations, such as that leading to the apprehension of the BTK and Grim Reaper serial murderers – that brings the relatives of crime suspects who are disproportionately members of poor communities of color, under unwarranted police surveillance – is a case in point. A flexible analytical approach is needed to account for the inherent characteristics of DNA that make it informative in numerous contexts and for the emergent, liminal nature of forms of DTC genetic testing. Much like the shift from sociology in medicine (e.g., sociologists serving an uncritical supporting role to physicians and medical education) to the sociology of medicine (a perspective that brings sociological approaches to bear on medical professions, claims, expertise, authority, etc.) (Chaska 1977), STS scholars should not take all of our analytic cues from the genetic testing industry and the categorical claims it makes about its DTC services. “The social life of DNA” (Nelson 2010, Wailoo, Nelson and Lee 2012) perspective is a more apt way of describing and analyzing the relatively recent phenomenon of DTC genetics. In keeping with anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s methodological mandate that it is by attending to “the social life of things” – “things in motion” – that we can bring “human and social contexts” into view (Appadurai 1986), in this chapter, we track one DTC genetic test product in order to understand how meaning and norms accrue to it through this flow. Here we also follow Sarah Franklin and Celia Roberts’ elaboration of “the social life of PGD” (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) in their book Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. Here the social life approach involves “researchers immers[ing] themselves in a range of different contexts to collect data about a particular object of inquiry, ‘following it around’ to build up a kind of hyperstack of definitions, images, representations, testimonies, description, and conversations…” (Franklin and Roberts 2006: xix). Franklin and Roberts offer a model of “how to account for the social dimensions of new biomedical technologies” (2006: xv) by thickly describing and analyzing these entities and their social circulation. Our understanding of the institutionalization of an emergent technology and social practice such as DTC genetic testing can be enhanced by the “social life” approach. Because DTC genetic testing is both emergent and transverses categories and boundaries, the descriptive and analytic moves proposed by Appadurai, Franklin and Roberts are apt. Moreover, for genetic testing in particular, a social life of DNA perspective can also help to highlight the symbolic qualities with which we imbue genes and which partly derive from its use as a social explanation in many fora simultaneously (Nelkin and Lindee, 1995). And, most importantly, this perspective attends to the particular physical properties of DNA that help to constitute how we make meaning of and with it. For, genes are omnibus; they contain multitudes. A social life of DNA perspective offers a way to conceive how the techniques and logics of genetics (especially, the centrality of ideas of kinship; bio-banks and the database; statistics and probability; and molecular scale) are engaged in myriad social projects that may both abide and confound institutionalization. A second property of genes is that they are transitional. Genetic tests and the data they yield move between institutions and organizations, being engaged in various uses ranging from “optimization” to health to “security.” A social life of DNA perspective also helps to account for the boundary blurring that attends the low institutionalization of DTC genetic tests and, by following the circulation of them at varied sites, helps to bring into relief how institutional boundaries take shape, recombine, and collapse. Additionally, following these tests and the contexts in which they draw meaning is precisely what allows us to see how DTC genetic testing does not abide the domains and boundaries that both entrepreneurs and social scientists – for very different reasons – endeavor to put around them. Focusing on the well-known genetic testing company 23andMe, this chapter charts one course of the institutionalization of DTC genetics. We first briefly describe the technical facets of the spectrum of DTC genetic tests and the socio-cultural meanings that they engender. Next, we describe the boundary crises produced around so-called “recreational” genetic tests that are not merely an idle pursuit and that, furthermore, do not abide the categorical distinctions. In the second half of the chapter, we explain the current framework for regulation of DTC genetic testing in the U.S., returning to the specific case of 23andMe and describing struggles over the regulation of this (and similar) company’s services. In closing we discuss what the regulatory struggles over 23andMe suggest about the institutionalization of new technologies.
      21  30
  • Genetic Ancestry Testing as an Ethnic Option
    (Sage Publications, 2014)
    Nelson, Alondra
      8  42
  • The 'Longue Durée' of Black Lives Matter
    (American Journal of Public Health, 2016)
    Nelson, Alondra
    Black Lives Matter was first articulated just a few years ago, but it has been the leitmotif of antiracist struggles for generations. The Movement for Black Lives extends the work of previous movements that challenged forms of oppression that act on Black bodies with impunity. It should be understood in the context of Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching campaign, Fannie Lou Hamer’s reproductive justice demands, and the Black Panther Party’s health activism. The 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party is an occasion to recall that its work confronted the callous neglect and the corporeal surveillance and abuse of poor Black communities. Similar demands have been the centrifugal force of social movements that for centuries have refused to have Black lives cast beyond the human boundary. Black Lives Matter was first articulated as an affirmation, a declaration, and an exclamation just a few years ago, but it has been the leitmotif of antiracist struggles for generations. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) bloomed from the seeds of earlier, protracted struggles to attain a full measure of social, political, and physical well-being. The healing practices of enslaved Africans, for example, challenged a plantation culture concerned with whether their bodies were “sound”(p15–35) enough to labor rather than with their whole healthfulness—a paradox of power described by journalist–activist Ida B. Wells as “dwarf[ing] the soul and preserv[ing] the body”(p75).
      6  34
  • "Genuine Struggle and Care": An Interview with Cleo Silvers
    (American Journal of Public Health, 2016)
    Nelson, Alondra
    Philadelphia native Cleo Silvers moved to New York City to take up a VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) post in the mid-1960s. In the course of her VISTA service, she was awakened to the extreme deprivation faced by many Blacks and Latinos in Manhattan and the Bronx, New York. This experience also occasioned a political awakening in Silvers, who sought to systematically understand the social and economic inequality she witnessed and how to upend it. Following her VISTA service, she worked as a community mental health worker at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. She also joined the Black Panther Party in Harlem, New York. As a Panther, her work included conducting neighborhood health surveys and door-to-door testing for sickle cell anemia and lead poisoning and being a patient advocate in its clinic. Silvers later became a member of the Young Lords Party and played a role in its takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. In more recent years, Silvers served as executive director of For a Better Bronx, a community-based social and environmental justice organization. She recently retired from a position as a community outreach director at a leading New York City medical center. Silvers speaks here with Alondra Nelson, PhD, a sociologist and historian who has documented the Black Panther Party’s health activism, about the formative experiences that led her into five decades of health advocacy—an activism notable for its insistence on the inextricable links between health and socioeconomic well-being.
      27  34
  • Ten Simple Rules for Responsible Big Data Research
    (PLOS Computational Biology, 2017-03-30)
    Zook, Matthew
    ;
    Barocas, Solon
    ;
    boyd, danah
    ;
    Crawford, Kate
    ;
    Keller, Emily
    ;
    Peña Gangadharan, Seeta
    ;
    Goodman, Alyssa
    ;
    Hollander, Rachelle
    ;
    Koenig, Barbara A.
    ;
    Metcalf, Jacob
    ;
    Narayanan, Arvind
    ;
    Nelson, Alondra
    ;
    Pasquale, Frank
      10  30
  • Our Ancestors are Angels, Too
    (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018)
    Nelson, Alondra
    This volume documents a groundbreaking convening on January 28, 2017 in The Met’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, inspired by the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Mastry on view at The Met Breuer October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017. During the daylong event twenty noted thought leaders and creative practitioners considered the role of creativity, hard work, social justice, and imagination in art history, performance, science, and other disciplines inspired by visual artist Kerry James Marshall’s practice and work. The event was a mix of rich extended conversations and exciting nine-minute performances and presentations.
      17  84