This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects examine the capacity to care and public discourses surrounding bodies and illness. These projects challenge us to think about how we might address deficits of compassion—whether instigated by fear of illness or ableism—to expand the scope of human dignity.
Brendan Griebel
Independent Scholar
Emily K. Hobson
University of Nevada, Reno
Eunjung Kim
Syracuse University
Brendan Griebel
Project: Crafting Freedom from Confinement in the Canadian Prairies
Brendan Griebel is an Arctic anthropologist, curator, and researcher of museology and material culture. His work facilitates the documentation and retelling of stories through material form, and he works closely with Indigenous communities and independent scholars to communicate their collections to broader audiences. Griebel has spent more than 20 years working with Inuit organizations and knowledge across the Canadian Arctic to facilitate the making, use, and interpretation of cultural objects ranging from traditional technologies to architecture, museum collections, and digital media. Griebel holds a PhD in anthropology, was the 2022 Fulbright Research Chair in Arctic studies, and is a research associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
In 2016, I became involved in a project to bridge Indigenous communities with historical craftwork produced by patients while confined in a Prairie tuberculosis hospital. These powerful collections spoke to the strong role that unscripted “making” can play in resilience, hope and assertion of individual identity in an otherwise anonymous institutional setting. They also raised my awareness of the Canadian Government’s problematic history of locking people up. In 1921, Weyburn, Saskatchewan became home to the largest asylum in the British Commonwealth with “Prairie madness” becoming a popular catch-all diagnosis. As my research turned up more, largely-forgotten collections of institutionally produced craftwork, the objects assembled into a compelling counter-narrative to colonial tales of the land’s endless horizons and opportunity.
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
Summer 2024 was spent working with small museums and archives across the Prairies to identify and document objects once produced in nearby carceral institutions—prisons, hospitals, asylums, internment camps. I wasn’t sure what I would find; early government-run institutions did not always promote patient creativity, or safe-keep any items made. The results, however, was a stunning array of objects ranging from clandestine, functional items—replica keys, shoes made from horse-hair, body doubles used during escape attempts—to visionary artwork documenting daily experiences and imagining other possibilities. These items exist today because they were collected and cared for by local people, often staff, who understood them as an important part of their community’s story.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
My work focuses on institutions operating between 1890 to 1960. Researchers have very few avenues for accessing information about these historical institutions. Many records were purposefully destroyed, rife with issues of patient confidentiality, and controversies deemed best left in the shadows. Many of the remaining records reflect what institutions wanted people to see: bold architecture, qualities of order, morality, and discipline. Material study of craftwork opens up new avenues for thinking about human experience in these spaces. Craftwork provided one of few means for the incarcerated to voice their circumstances, protest their surroundings, and seek psychological sanctuary in longed-for worlds otherwise denied to them. Showcasing material collections will provide a new lens to reconsider and humanize confinement in the Prairies.
Emily K. Hobson
Project: AIDS and Abolition: A History of Care Work Against the Carceral State
Emily K. Hobson is an associate professor of history and gender, race, and identity at the University of Nevada, Reno. A historian of radical social movements and queer politics in the post-1960s United States, she is the author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (2016) and coeditor, with Dan Berger, of Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973–2001 (2020). Articles and chapters have appeared in the Radical History Review, QED, Sinister Wisdom, The Abolitionist, and Truthout, among other venues. Her current research examines the history of the HIV/AIDS prison movement, whose activists brought together feminist, queer, and abolitionist opposition to the convergence of state neglect and state violence that defined the Reagan through Clinton eras. Hobson is a past chair of the Department of Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a 2023–2025 member of the National Council of the American Studies Association.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
While finishing research for my first book, about gay and lesbian radicalism of the 1960s through 1980s, I found a folder of ACT UP protests to improve conditions for incarcerated people with HIV/AIDS. The story went far beyond one folder and beyond solidarity from the outside. Across the 1980s and 1990s, incarcerated people organized AIDS peer education and care, protested harmful prison policies, and spoke out through correspondence and publications. The HIV/AIDS prison movement opened insights into the harms of the carceral state and voiced strategies for a freer, healthier society. I ask: What did prisons teach people about AIDS? What did AIDS teach people about prisons? And what have been the legacies of this activism? On the last question, I am tracing significant influence on the prison abolition movement of the late 1990s forward.
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
From the outset I have been surprised by the extent of HIV/AIDS prison activism, both geographically and tactically, as well as its longevity over time. I had initially thought this movement was fascinating analytically but limited in scope and scale. But it reached state and federal prisons around the country and gained sustained grassroots attention across the wider HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ movements. HIV/AIDS prison activists were variously Black, Latinx, white, Indigenous, and Asian; queer and straight; women, men, and transgender; HIV-positive and HIV-negative; veteran activists and newcomers to organizing. Whatever their location, they united against the indifference that accelerated and minimized death.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
The 1980s and 1990s United States saw significant public discourse about HIV/AIDS and little critique of incarceration; today the dynamics are reversed. In that context, the history of HIV/AIDS prison activism offers important insights into ongoing crises, particularly those related to state violence, public health, the care economy, and climate. Beyond the analytical inquiry of my study, I am motivated by larger, existential questions: How do people find purpose after committing harm and in the face of life-threatening disease? How does challenging harm require confronting inequities of health and of caregiving? How can mutual care both respond to crisis and prefigure social transformation? No one person can answer these questions, but I hope my book helps us think about them together.
Eunjung Kim
Project: Dignity Archives: Accompanying the Dead and Posthumous Care
Eunjung Kim, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of Women’s and Gender Studies and Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University. Eunjung Kim’s research and teaching interests include transnational feminist disability studies; kinship, vulnerability, and human/nonhuman boundaries; Korean cultural history of disability, gender, and sexuality and anti-violence movements; Asian women’s movements and arts; critical humanitarian communications and human rights; asexualities and queer theories. Her book Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (Alison Piepmeier Book Prize, National Women’s Studies Association; James B. Palaise Prize, Association for Asian Studies) examines what the social and material investment in curing illnesses and disabilities tells us about the relationship between disability and Korean nationalism.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
In 2016 in Sagamihara, Japan, a former staff member entered a large residential institution for people with disabilities and killed nineteen people. International disability communities, including South Korean activists, condemned the violence and the eugenic and ableist logic behind the killings. The police and most of the families decided not to reveal the identities of the victims even during the trial, which was criticized as a violation of their posthumous dignity. Paying attention to the commemoration of the victims, I asked what kind of political work the dying and the dead were doing, and what kind of connections and disconnections were happening around them. The project gradually expanded to form a kind of ecology of afterlives that raise questions of dignity.
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
Although dignity is considered a universal and inherent value, definitions and meanings of dignity are vague and contested. A UN agency distributes so-called “dignity kits” containing essential hygiene items in disaster areas, making a specific reference to dignity based on basic human needs. In conceptual discussions, dignity seems to be determined on the basis of a being’s characteristics and capacities and pay little attention to the society at large. The study of the conditions of posthumous dignity of bodies whose dignity is questioned or denied requires more attention to the social and material relationalities formed around them.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I am currently writing about the animal bodies on the roadside and the artists and activists who mourn and draw attention to this loss and challenge the expansion of roads in South Korea. By bringing the practices of mourning nonhuman animal deaths into the discussion of dignity, I hope to contribute to the growing connections between critical disability studies and ecological studies. I also hope that this inquiry encourages others to rethink the primacy of ability and health in the discussion of dignity, as reflected in the popularized term “death with dignity” to mean “voluntary assisted death.”