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“Diseases Have No Eyes” is an original study of environmental racism and its health implications for farmworkers and formerly incarcerated people of color who have suffered from Valley Fever, an illness caused by a fungus spore that propagates in soil and spreads through the air. It explores the multiple layers of invisibility and vulnerability that expose the raced residents of Kern County, California – an area replete with prisons, poverty and pollution – to the disease and the inadequate public health infrastructures to treat it, and the gendered nature of care in communities coping with illness. More than a book about health inequalities, it centers the collective care, alternative knowledge production, and activism of environmental justice organizers and prison abolitionists as they mobilize to prevent and treat the disease and challenge the pharmaceutical companies, public health authorities, and agribusiness and mineral extraction interests who pin the disease’s prevalence on the cultures and biological race of those suffering from it. These networks of mutual aid constitute not only a social movement but a practiced expertise in the social ecology of health. “Diseases Have No Eyes” explores and documents the critical expertise developed in response to Valley Fever by farm workers, prisoners, environmental justice advocates, and their family members and neighbors. Their improvised responses to illness include the creation of networks of mutual aid and support, sharing strategies for accessing care, and mobilizing for cleaner air, water, and land as well as for better and safer living and working conditions as matters of both promoting public health and securing economic justice.
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Keywords
- Agriculture
- community organizing
- environmental racism
- Farm workers
- Health injustice
- Infectious Disease
- Prisons
- Public Health
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHB Sociology::JHBL Sociology: work and labour
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social and cultural anthropology
- thema EDItEUR::M Medicine and Nursing::MB Medicine: general issues::MBS Medical sociology
- Valley fever
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