Bharat Jayram Venkat
Biographic Data
| ID | 651655 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bharat Jayram Venkat |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bharat Jayram |
| FAMILY NAME | Venkat |
| SIGNATURE | VENKAT B J |
| AFFILIATIONS | UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics & Department of History, Los Angeles, CA, USA |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5246-9586 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Carceral heat exposure as harmful design
In an era of climate change-driven weather events, extreme heat has become the most lethal form of "natural disaster" in the United States. However, its negative consequences are unequally distributed. Incarceration exacerbates vulnerability to heat-related illnesses and deaths. This article reviews and synthesizes a range of literature related to carceral heat exposure to characterize the complex biological, social, infrastructural, financial, a…
Reservoirs
Emerging out of a discussion of reservoirs at a workshop on ‘2020 studies’ hosted by the editors of History + Technology, this special issue seeks to generate a lively, interdisciplinary, and cross-cutting discussion on the ways in which thinking about reservoirs might animate analyses on a variety of topics, including but not limited to disease, disability, climate change, ecosystems, the built environment, finance, computing networks, social fo…
Reservoirs of history
In this essay, we argue that the concept of reservoir, as it has been deployed across various scientific and popular writing, articulates a distinctive logic of historical time. Rather than offer an intellectual history of the concept of reservoir, we focus specifically on the entailments of this concept for the ways in which we think and write about disease and epidemics. We argue that the concept of reservoir entails a particular bio-logic of h…
Through a glass darkly
This article explores the role of what might be termed embodied experience in generating knowledge about climate – specifically by focusing on conversations about the effects of climate on the body in late nineteenth-century India. Central to the story is the question of how race maps onto ideas about the body's capacity to register or perceive its environment, and how this question articulates with concerns about standardization and judgement in…
Iatrogenic life
Drawing on fieldwork with the veterinary staff at an Indian wildlife sanctuary, this paper examines the controversy surrounding an epizootic outbreak of tuberculosis among a population of sloth bears. As these bears fell ill and began to die, the veterinary staff asked whether they might be culled, inciting allegations of incompetence and cruelty from both the media and government bureaucrats. This paper works through a series of ethico-legal que…
At the Limits of Cure
than a definitive diagnosis that holds fast across space and time.It is a kind of theory that emerges from narrative description, from the juxtaposition of scenes, and from allowing oneself to be lost, at least for a time, in a sanatorium at the foothills of the Himalayas, on a coolie ship returning from a South African plantation, or in a hectic research hospital near the Mumbai coastline-in other words, in the imagination of cure.1. Rajya Sabha…
At the Limits of Cure
Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable? Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, Bharat Jay…
A Vital Mediation
As drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis spread across India, commentators have warned that we are returning to the sanatorium era. Such concerns might be symptomatically read in terms of loss; however, prophecies of return might also signal that there is something to be regained. Rather than lamenting the end of the antibiotic era, I shift the focus to ask about the sanatorium, not simply as a technology of the past, but as a technology of an i…
Of Cures and Curses
Research Article| May 01 2018 Of Cures and Curses: Toward a Critique of Curative Reason Bharat Jayram Venkat Bharat Jayram Venkat Bharat Jayram Venkat is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. His recent publications include “Scenes of Commitment” (Cultural Anthropology, February 2017) and “Cures” (Public Culture, September 2016). He is currently completing a book titled “India after Antibiotics: Tub…
Scenes of Commitment
What shape does ethical reasoning assume in the face of potentially contradictory commitments? Drawing on fieldwork in a private clinic in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I examine how patients, their families, and the clinic's staff navigated ethically complex situations in which one was called on as both family member and patient. I argue that the doctors and counselors at the clinic attempted to reconfigure the re…
Cures
What is a cure and how do we know it? This essay examines the history of tuberculosis research to trace how ideas of cure shifted from Robert Koch's development of tuberculin in late nineteenth-century Berlin to the earliest randomized studies of the efficacy of antibiotics in midcentury Britain and India. What sorts of evidence were required to know that a cure was in fact a cure? How did scientists ascertain when and if a cure had failed? And w…
In Uncertain Times
Scenes of Commitment
What shape does ethical reasoning assume in the face of potentially contradictory commitments? Drawing on fieldwork in a private clinic in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I examine how patients, their families, and the clinic's staff navigated ethically complex situations in which one was called on as both family member and patient. I argue that the doctors and counselors at the clinic attempted to reconfigure the re…
Cures
What is a cure and how do we know it? This essay examines the history of tuberculosis research to trace how ideas of cure shifted from Robert Koch's development of tuberculin in late nineteenth-century Berlin to the earliest randomized studies of the efficacy of antibiotics in midcentury Britain and India. What sorts of evidence were required to know that a cure was in fact a cure? How did scientists ascertain when and if a cure had failed? And w…
A Vital Mediation
As drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis spread across India, commentators have warned that we are returning to the sanatorium era. Such concerns might be symptomatically read in terms of loss; however, prophecies of return might also signal that there is something to be regained. Rather than lamenting the end of the antibiotic era, I shift the focus to ask about the sanatorium, not simply as a technology of the past, but as a technology of an i…
Carceral heat exposure as harmful design
In an era of climate change-driven weather events, extreme heat has become the most lethal form of "natural disaster" in the United States. However, its negative consequences are unequally distributed. Incarceration exacerbates vulnerability to heat-related illnesses and deaths. This article reviews and synthesizes a range of literature related to carceral heat exposure to characterize the complex biological, social, infrastructural, financial, a…
In Uncertain Times
Cures
What is a cure and how do we know it? This essay examines the history of tuberculosis research to trace how ideas of cure shifted from Robert Koch's development of tuberculin in late nineteenth-century Berlin to the earliest randomized studies of the efficacy of antibiotics in midcentury Britain and India. What sorts of evidence were required to know that a cure was in fact a cure? How did scientists ascertain when and if a cure had failed? And w…
Scenes of Commitment
What shape does ethical reasoning assume in the face of potentially contradictory commitments? Drawing on fieldwork in a private clinic in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I examine how patients, their families, and the clinic's staff navigated ethically complex situations in which one was called on as both family member and patient. I argue that the doctors and counselors at the clinic attempted to reconfigure the re…
Of Cures and Curses
Research Article| May 01 2018 Of Cures and Curses: Toward a Critique of Curative Reason Bharat Jayram Venkat Bharat Jayram Venkat Bharat Jayram Venkat is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. His recent publications include “Scenes of Commitment” (Cultural Anthropology, February 2017) and “Cures” (Public Culture, September 2016). He is currently completing a book titled “India after Antibiotics: Tub…
A Vital Mediation
As drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis spread across India, commentators have warned that we are returning to the sanatorium era. Such concerns might be symptomatically read in terms of loss; however, prophecies of return might also signal that there is something to be regained. Rather than lamenting the end of the antibiotic era, I shift the focus to ask about the sanatorium, not simply as a technology of the past, but as a technology of an i…
Iatrogenic life
Drawing on fieldwork with the veterinary staff at an Indian wildlife sanctuary, this paper examines the controversy surrounding an epizootic outbreak of tuberculosis among a population of sloth bears. As these bears fell ill and began to die, the veterinary staff asked whether they might be culled, inciting allegations of incompetence and cruelty from both the media and government bureaucrats. This paper works through a series of ethico-legal que…
At the Limits of Cure
than a definitive diagnosis that holds fast across space and time.It is a kind of theory that emerges from narrative description, from the juxtaposition of scenes, and from allowing oneself to be lost, at least for a time, in a sanatorium at the foothills of the Himalayas, on a coolie ship returning from a South African plantation, or in a hectic research hospital near the Mumbai coastline-in other words, in the imagination of cure.1. Rajya Sabha…
At the Limits of Cure
Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable? Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, Bharat Jay…
Through a glass darkly
This article explores the role of what might be termed embodied experience in generating knowledge about climate – specifically by focusing on conversations about the effects of climate on the body in late nineteenth-century India. Central to the story is the question of how race maps onto ideas about the body's capacity to register or perceive its environment, and how this question articulates with concerns about standardization and judgement in…
Reservoirs
Emerging out of a discussion of reservoirs at a workshop on ‘2020 studies’ hosted by the editors of History + Technology, this special issue seeks to generate a lively, interdisciplinary, and cross-cutting discussion on the ways in which thinking about reservoirs might animate analyses on a variety of topics, including but not limited to disease, disability, climate change, ecosystems, the built environment, finance, computing networks, social fo…
Reservoirs of history
In this essay, we argue that the concept of reservoir, as it has been deployed across various scientific and popular writing, articulates a distinctive logic of historical time. Rather than offer an intellectual history of the concept of reservoir, we focus specifically on the entailments of this concept for the ways in which we think and write about disease and epidemics. We argue that the concept of reservoir entails a particular bio-logic of h…
Carceral heat exposure as harmful design
In an era of climate change-driven weather events, extreme heat has become the most lethal form of "natural disaster" in the United States. However, its negative consequences are unequally distributed. Incarceration exacerbates vulnerability to heat-related illnesses and deaths. This article reviews and synthesizes a range of literature related to carceral heat exposure to characterize the complex biological, social, infrastructural, financial, a…
Medicine (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · History (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Colonialism (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Pathology (3 works)