This bibliography was initially compiled by ARSTM leadership in June 2020 as an action item in response to our organizational commitment to anti-racism.
Action 1 on our action plan reads:
Challenge our members to begin or redouble efforts to learn and highlight the histories of rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine’s use and abuse in service of racism, especially anti-Black racism. We call on ourselves and our members to learn about racism, anti-Blackness, and the connections of both to our areas of study. We call on ourselves and our members to use the reading list we are sharing, the bibliography of anti-racist RSTM scholarship we are developing, and our own skills and resources as researchers to self-educate, so that we can knowledgeably build anti-racist practices into our research methods, our pedagogy, and our service to our communities.
This bibliography is a starting point for us and for ARSTM members, especially white members, to begin or continue the process of learning about the role of racism and anti-Blackness in the topics we study. Simply learning is a necessary, but insufficient, condition for change. We learn, so that we can act.
If you would like to recommend additions to this bibliography, please use the submission form at the bottom of this page.
Please read the full action plan for anti-racist change and the June 8, 2020, ARSTM Statement on Anti-Black Racism and the Murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and David McAtee and Others for further context and ideas for next steps towards anti-racist change within our organization and within your own local contexts.
Bibliography
Amrute, S. (2020). Bored Techies Being Casually Racist: Race as Algorithm. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(5), 903–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920912824
Banks, A. J. (2006). Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. Routledge.
Bates, B. R., Lynch, J. A., Bevan, J. L., & Condit, C. M. (2005). Warranted concerns, warranted outlooks: A focus group study of public understandings of genetic research. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 60(2), 331–344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2004.05.012
Benezra, A. (2020). Race in the Microbiome. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(5), 877–902. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920911998
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (1 edition). Polity.
Benjamin, R. (2016). Catching our breath: Critical race STS and the carceral imagination. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 2(0), 145–156. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2016.70
Braun, L. (2014). Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics. U of Minnesota Press.
Brock, A. (2009). “Who do you think you are?”: Race, representation, and cultural rhetorics in online spaces. Poroi, 6(1), 15–35. https://doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1013
Campeau, K. L. (2019). Vaccine barriers, vaccine refusals: Situated vaccine decision-making in the wake of the 2017 Minnesota measles outbreak. Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 2(2), 176–207.
Carlin, E., & Kramer, B. (2020). Hair, Hormones, and Haunting: Race as a Ghost Variable in Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(5), 779–803. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920908647
Ceccarelli, L. (2013). On the frontier of science: An American rhetoric of exploration and exploitation. Michigan State University Press.
Changing the odds for Black mothers. (2020, April 14). Gender Policy Report. https://genderpolicyreport.umn.edu/changing-the-odds-for-black-mothers/
Chowkwanyun, M., & Reed, A. L. (2020). Racial health disparities and Covid-19—Caution and context. New England Journal of Medicine, 0(0), null. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2012910
Condit, C. M. (2008). Race and genetics from a modal materialist perspective. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 94(4), 383–406. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630802422212
Condit, C. M., Parrott, R. L., Harris, T. M., Lynch, J., & Dubriwny, T. (2004). The role of “genetics” in popular understandings of race in the United States. Public Understanding of Science, 13(3), 249–272. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662504045573
Davis, D. (2019). Reproductive Injustice. NYU Press.
Durá L., Sals C., Medina-Jerez, W., & Hill, V. (2015). De aquí y de allá: Changing perceptions of literacy through food pedagogy, Asset-Based Narratives, and Hybrid Spaces. Community Literacy Journal, 10(1).
Ehlers, N., & Hinkson, L. (Eds.). (2017). Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine. https://www.amazon.com/Subprime-Health-Debt-Race-Medicine/dp/1517901502/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Subprime+Health+Debt+and+Race+in+U.S.+Medicine&qid=1591726398&s=books&sr=1-1
Endres, D. (2009). The rhetoric of nuclear colonialism: Rhetorical exclusion of American Indian arguments in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste siting decision. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6(1), 39–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420802632103
Eubanks, V. (2017). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor (First Edition). St. Martin’s Press.
Fausto-Sterling, A. (2008). The bare bones of race. Social Studies of Science, 38(5), 657–694. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312708091925
Galeano, E., & Allende, I. (1997). Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Anniversary edition). Monthly Review Press.
Geronimus, A. T., Hicken, M., Keene, D., & Bound, J. (2006). “Weathering” and age patterns of allostatic load scores among blacks and whites in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 96(5), 826–833. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2004.060749
Gilliard, C. (2018, October 15). Friction-free racism. Real Life. https://reallifemag.com/friction-free-racism/
Gil-Riaño, S. (2018). Relocating anti-racist science: The 1950 UNESCO Statement on race and economic development in the global South. The British Journal for the History of Science, 51(2), 281–303. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087418000286
Gould, S. J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Green, L. B., Mckiernan-González, J., & Summers, M. (Eds.). (2014). Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America (1 edition). Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Haas, A. M. (2012). Race, rhetoric, and technology: A case study of decolonial technical communication theory, methodology, and pedagogy. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 277–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651912439539
Hammonds, E. M., & Herzig, R. M. (Eds.). (2009). The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics. MIT Press.
Hansen, H., Parker, C., & Netherland, J. (2020). Race as a Ghost Variable in (White) Opioid Research. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(5), 848–876. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920912812
Happe, K. E. (2013). The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity after the Human Genome Project. NYU Press.
Hardeman, R. R., Medina, E. M., & Kozhimannil, K. B. (2016). Dismantling structural racism, supporting Black lives and achieving health equity: Our role. The New England Journal of Medicine, 375(22), 2113–2115. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1609535
Harding, S. (Ed.). (1993). The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Indiana University Press.
Harper, K. C. (2020). The ethos of black motherhood in America: Only white women get pregnant. Rowman & Littlefield. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793601421/The-Ethos-of-Black-Motherhood-in-America-Only-White-Women-Get-Pregnant
Hatch, A. R. (2016). Blood Sugar. https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sugar-Anthony-Hatch/dp/0816696187/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Blood+Sugar+Racial+Pharmacology+and+Food+Justice+in+Black+America&qid=1591726025&sr=8-1
Hatch, A. R. (2020). Du Boisian propaganda, Foucauldian genealogy, and antiracism in STS research. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 6(0), 58–65. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.311
Hirsch, S. L. (2020). Making Global Problems Local: Understanding Large-scale Environmental Issues Using Ethnographic Methods. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(5), 963–973. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920903767
Inda, J. X. (2016). Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life. Routledge.
Jackson Jr., J. P. (n.d.). Whatever happened to the cephalic index? The reality of race and the burden of proof. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40(5), 438–458.
Jackson Jr., J. P., & Depew, D. J. (2017). Darwinism, Democracy, and Race: American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century (1 edition). Routledge.
Jackson Jr, J. P. (2006). Argumentum ad hominem in the science of race. Argumentation and Advocacy, 43(1), 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2006.11821659
Jasanoff, Sheila. (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power.
Jones, Cassandra L. “The Data Thief, the Cyberflaneur, and Rhythm Science: Challenging Anti-Technological Blackness with the Metaphors of Afrofuturism.” CLA Journal 61, no. 4 (2018): 202-217; Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa, ed. What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017
Jones, N. N., Moore, K. R., & Walton, R. (2016). Disrupting the past to disrupt the future: An antenarrative of technical communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 25(4), 211–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2016.1224655
Karkazis, K., & Jordan-Young, R. (2020). Sensing Race as a Ghost Variable in Science, Technology, and Medicine. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(5), 763–778. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920939306
Lennon, M. (2020). Postcarbon Amnesia: Toward a Recognition of Racial Grief in Renewable Energy Futures. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(5), 934–962. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243919900556
Lynch, J. A. (2019). The Origins of Bioethics: Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong (1 edition). Michigan State University Press.
Lynch, J. (2008). Geography, genealogy and genetics: Dialectical substance in newspaper coverage of research on race and penetics. Western Journal of Communication, 72(3), 259–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310802210130
Lynch, J. (2006). Race and radical renamings: Using cluster agon method to assess the radical potential of “European American” as a substitute for “white.” The KB Journal, 2(2). https://www.kbjournal.org/lynch
Lynch, J. A., & Stuckey, M. E. (2017). “This Was His Georgia”: Polio, Poverty and Public Memory at FDR’s Little White House. Howard Journal of Communications, 28(4), 390–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2017.1315689
Lynch, J., & Condit, C. M. (2006). Genes and race in the news: A test of competing theories of news coverage. American Journal of Health Behavior, 30(2), 125–135. https://doi.org/10.5555/ajhb.2006.30.2.125
Lynch, J., & Dubriwny, T. (2006). Drugs and double binds: Racial identification and pharmacogenomics in a system of binary race logic. Health Communication, 19(1), 61–73. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327027hc1901_7
M’charek, A., Toom, V., & Jong, L. (2020). The Trouble with Race in Forensic Identification. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(5), 804–828. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243919899467
Mascarenhas, Michael. (2018). White space and dark matter: Prying open the black box of STS. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 43(2), 151–170.
Metzl, J. (2011). The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (50486th edition). Beacon Press.
Moore, K., Jones, N., Cundiff, B., & Heilig, L. (2018, February). Contested sites of health risks: Using wearable technologies to intervene in racial oppression: Communication Design Quarterly: Vol 5, No 4. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3188387.3188392
Munyikwa, M. (2020). (De)Racializing Refugee Medicine. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(5), 829–847. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920905014
Nelson, A. (n.d.). Beacon Press: The Social Life of DNA. Retrieved June 9, 2020, from http://www.beacon.org/The-Social-Life-of-DNA-P1243.aspx
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press.
Owens, D. C. (2017). Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (1 edition). University of Georgia Press.
Pollock, A. (2014). On the suspended sentences of the Scott Sisters: Mass incarceration, kidney donation, and the biopolitics of race in the United States. Science, Technology, & Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243914539569
Reed, A. L., & Chowkwanyun, M. (2011). Race, class, crisis: The discourse of racial disparity and its analytical discontents. Socialist Register, 48, 149–175.
Roberts, D. (1998). Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (64864th edition). Vintage.
Roberts, D. (2012). Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (50852nd edition). The New Press.
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Roundtree, A. K. (2013). Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination: How Virtual Evidence Shapes Science in the Making and in the News. Lexington Books.
Roundtree, A. K. (2018). Hospital tweets on H1N1 and death panels: Text mining the situational crisis communication response to health crises and controversies. KOME, 6(1), 32–62. https://doi.org/10.17646/KOME.2018.13
Schell, E. (2015). Racialized Rhetorics of Food Politics: Black Farmers, the Case of Shirley Sherrod, and Struggle for Land Equity and Access. Poroi, 11(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1214
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Additional Bibliographies & Resources
The African American Intellectual History Society’s “Syllabus: A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine”
The Council on Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication’s Bibliography on Issues of Diversity, Social Justice, and Intercultural Communication
“Responses to 10 Common Criticisms of Anti-Racism Action in STEM” website, compiled by biologists, complete with citations, resources, and infographics
What Can You Do Right Now? Starting Points for Anti-Racist Learning and Action
Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist (First Edition). One World.
Anti-Racism Resources
Black Futures Lab
Colorofchange.org
How to Fight Racism Using Science
MIT Race-Science Links
MORHE: Measuring and Operationalizing Racism to Achieve Health Equity