Long COVID has been defined by digital activism around the globe, bringing together patients, researchers, and clinicians afflicted by the chronic condition. Long COVID itself was spun through patient activism and has cultivated a culture of patient idiomatic power in how the illness has been understood in the public sphere. This knowledge production has a form of access intimacy as patients have spun personal devastation with political power in order to fight to be recognized, taken seriously, and given legitimacy within the public, medical, and policy spheres. This talk describes how many Kenyans are engaging with digital networks differently and from different places of geographic, cultural, linguistic, and technological power, possibly cultivating divergent idioms, interpretations, and experiences of the post-viral condition.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Global Health Science and Security, the School of Health’s Department of Health Management and Policy and the Department of Global Health, the Center for Global Health Practice and Impact, and the Global Health Institute.
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Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist, Guggenheim Fellow, and professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Mendenhall has published widely at the boundaries of anthropology, psychology, medicine, and public health. This work focuses on social and biological links between social trauma and diabetes, the theory and experience of syndemics, how and why people use idioms of distress, mental health and well-being, complex chronic illness, and the politics of pandemics. Her monographs include Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012), Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV (2019), and Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (2022). Currently she is writing: Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid.