The year 2020 marks one of those global tipping points – time divided into pre-COVID and the promise of after […]
Post-Pandemic Architecture Needs to Be Healthier
As an architecture student, I’d normally be building a model in my studio on campus right now. Instead, six months […]
Creating Community and Finding Connection: A Black Nurse’s Experience in Vietnam, 1966–67
Nobody wanted Elizabeth Allen in Vietnam. From her master’s advisor who questioned why on earth she would want to enlist […]
Beyond Florence: Valuing Nurses in the History of Health Care
Before COVID-19 was even a blip on the horizon, the World Health Organization had declared 2020 the Year of the […]
Bodies in the Way: Delhi’s Dead and the Pressures of Space
In 1930, Delhi’s residents were sorely in need of a new hospital. The city’s population had ballooned by more than […]
Tracing the Red in “Redbone”: Colorism and Misogyny in Black History
“My peanut butter chocolate cake with Kool-Aid” – this line from the 2016 song “Redbone” by Childish Gambino (aka Donald […]
Dead Babies in Boxes: Dealing with the Consequences of Interrupted Reproduction
One morning in June 2019, two city workers in Lyon, France, pulled a plastic bag out of the river that […]
Hygeia: Women in the Cemetery Landscape
We’ve all seen her. Hunched over the grave of an important poet. Standing meekly atop deceased philosophers, businessmen, and writers […]
Burying the Dead, and Then Digging Them Up
About a week after my partner Clayton was murdered in 2015, I went back to his gravesite with one of […]
Fresh to Death: African Americans and RIP T-Shirts
My 28-year-old nephew, Willie Lee “Chill” Oglesby, Jr., was murdered on November 8, 2017. One of the first things that […]
