We’re pleased to announce the first of our Spring Speaker Series, Aja Lans.
Aja Lans completed her PhD in Anthropology at Syracuse University in 2021, where she concentrated in historical archaeology and cultural heritage preservation. Her dissertation traces the long history of violence against Black women in the United States by merging skeletal data with archival resources. These various archival traces shed light on the ways biocultural processes in the past continue to shape daily life, health, and well-being in the present. Aja is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Inequality in America Initiative. She continues to pursue decolonizing research while focusing on the ethics of museum collections, the objectification of human remains, and the history of race. Aja was a fellow for the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. during the summer of 2021.
Her talk is titled Uncovering the Roots of Racism in Medicine: A Practice in Reading Against the Archival Grain:
As an anthropological archaeologist, I utilize an expanded notion of archives that includes artifacts housed in museums, including human remains. I read against the archival grain while investigating the links between racism and the professionalization medicine and physical anthropology over the long 19th century. To do so, I consult a variety of archival texts and documents, as well as their links to collecting and curating human remains. This requires a deep understanding of the historical context in which collections were assembled and supposedly objective scientific studies performed. In this way, we might identify inherent biases, which were often intimately linked to scientific racism.