1st Annual Health & Society Lecture

The Health & Society program in the Department of Social Science is happy to announce its first annual lecture on Thursday, Feb. 14 at 2 p.m., with Dr. OmiSoore Dryden. Please share with your networks. Everyone is welcome.
Dr. OmiSoore H. Dryden’s research interrogates Black life, health equity, illness and belonging, as demonstrated through the systems and tools of blood donation, including screening questionnaires. Dryden is the principal investigator of a two-year research project that seeks to identify the barriers African/Black gay, bisexual and trans men encounter to donating blood in Canada. Funded by the Canadian Blood Services’ MSM Research Grant Program, #GotBlood2Give / #DuSangÀDonner also analyzes how anti-Black racism, colonialism and sexual exceptionalism shapes current understandings of HIV transmission. OmiSoore has published in peer-reviewed journals and has an edited collection (with Dr. Suzanne Lenon) titled Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging (UBC Press, 2015). Her forthcoming monograph examines Canadian Blood Services’ blood donation questionnaire and how the blood stories assembled within this document, and in the larger blood system, intersect with and depict Black people, queer sexualities and the precarious conditions of Canadian citizenship.
Her paper, “To Notice Blackness: Blood Codes, ‘Sexual Deviance,’ and Health Equity,” focuses on the legacies of colonialism and anti-Black racism, which shape knowledge about blood and blood safety – specifically, how contemporary discourses of blood impact Black personhood.
Please join us.