Member Profile

Joyce Lu

MD/PhD student, Rutgers University

Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog

About Joyce

I am a MD/PhD student in Anthropology at Rutgers U. interested in the intersections of political ecology, therapeutic economies, and development. My research follows the social lives of antibiotics in the western highlands of Guatemala in the context of global health discourses on antimicrobial resistance.

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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog

View all of Joyce's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.

From Hotspots to Outbreaks: Keywords for (Un)Grounding Space, Temporality, and the Boundaries of Infection

This special series examines the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. As a primarily analytic approach, the authors in this series unpack epidemiologic keywords such as outbreak, hotspot and epidemic, to assess their uptake, uses and meanings amongst scientists, public health and healthcare practitioners, experts and broader publics. As disruptions to public health ripple through the healthcare landscape in the United States, and whilst the global COVID-19 pandemic continues to haunt our collective present, the fundamental terms or “keywords” through which we understand disease transmission demand ethnographically-grounded inquiry, critique, and theorization. The posts in this series look at how infectious diseases and their conceptualizations spread through space and time, as well as how ethnography can articulate the expansive, lived realities of infection. (more…) (read more...)