Emily Mendenhall
Emily Mendenhall is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Previously, she was a visiting Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, National Institutes of Health Fogarty Scholar at the Public Health Foundation of India, and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she still holds an Honorary Appointment. She received a PhD in anthropology from Northwestern University and MPH in global public health from Emory University. She lives in the DC area with her husband (Adam Koon), dog, and two little girls who have honed their karate kicks and cartwheels in quarantine.
Dr. Mendenhall has published widely in anthropology, medicine, and public health. In 2017, she led a Series of articles on Syndemics in The Lancet to challenge how we understand concurrent epidemics to cluster, interact, and result from politics, climate, and society. This work was influenced by more than a decade of research about how people perceive, experience, and embody trauma and diabetes through personal stories. This culminated in the book Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV (2019, Cornell). She is also the author of Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012) and co-editor of Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives (2015). In 2017, Dr. Mendenhall was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology.
Dr. Mendenhall’s research on how people perceived and experienced coronavirus in rural Iowa have been published in Vox as well as Social Science and Medicine. She is currently writing a book, Shame: How Coronavirus Responses Failed America’s Heartland, which explores political priorities, cultural squabbles, and business interests that undermined public health efforts when no mandates were in place. She also has ongoing research on syndemics in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she has worked for nearly a decade. She is the Principle Investigator of the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center study “Soweto Syndemics” at Wits.
Works
Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements of Trauma, Poverty, and HIV
In Rethinking Diabetes, Emily Mendenhall investigates how global and local factors transform how diabetes is perceived, experienced, and embodied from place to place. Mendenhall argues that the link between sugar and diabetes overshadows the ways in which underlying biological processes linking hunger, oppression, trauma, unbridled stress, and chronic mental distress produce diabetes. The life history narratives in the book show how deeply embedded these factors are in the ways diabetes is experienced and (re)produced among poor communities around the world.
Rethinking Diabetes focuses on the stories of women living with diabetes near or below the poverty line in urban settings in the United States, India, South Africa, and Kenya. Mendenhall shows how women's experiences of living with diabetes cannot be dissociated from their social responsibilities of caregiving, demanding family roles, expectations, and gendered experiences of violence that often displace their ability to care for themselves first. These case studies reveal the ways in which a global story of diabetes overlooks the unique social, political, and cultural factors that produce syndemic diabetes differently across contexts.
From the case studies, Rethinking Diabetes clearly provides some important parallels for scholars to consider: significant social and economic inequalities, health systems that are a mix of public and private (with substandard provisions for low-income patients), and rising diabetes incidence and prevalence. At the same time, Mendenhall asks us to unpack how social, cultural, and epidemiological factors shape people's experiences and why we need to take these differences seriously when we think about what drives diabetes and how it affects the lives of the poor.
Website
Location
Washington, DC
Author Contact
Category
General Non-Fiction, Journalism, Biography & History, Essays