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New forms of sweetness: Race, science, social risk and the biopolitics of sugar.

20210427jamesdoucetbattle

It's a new environment, it's a new global world - not only of new forms of global citizenship, but new forms of consumption. The ways the environment continues to have to respond to our desires for new forms of sweetness, new forms of consumption. Whether it's palm oil or sugar, or exotic forms of coffee or cocoa in West Africa which has resulted in the diminution of 98% of the virgin forest in places like Ivory Coast... These delinkages, the forms of alienation between the sources of the things we desire to consume, and their effects not only on the environment, but also on our global physiology. The global metabolism.

Anthropologist James Doucet-Battle on the biopolitics of sugar and diabetes, racialized science and social risk and his book Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes from University of Minnesota Press.

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Guest

James Doucet-Battle

 James Doucet-Battle is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

 

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