Emily Mendenhall’s research explores the power of stories, what people say and how they choose to talk about suffering; as well as the interactions between health and other dimensions of people’s lives, that require just as much, if not more, attention than the physical for people to heal. This became central to her work that was her focus for more than a decade, where Professor Mendenhall spent time learning about people’s perceptions and experiences living with social trauma, depression, and type 2 diabetes in urban contexts in the United States, India, South Africa, and Kenya. This led to several articles and a book entitled, Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV, as well as her first book focused on four years of research at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women. Much of her other work had focused on the concept of syndemics, which–although an anthropological concept–brings people across disciplines to consider how social and health conditions travel together. Her most impactful work was published in The Lancet medical journal as a Series on Syndemics.
Mendenhall also put stories at the center of her most recent book on COVID-19 in her hometown in northwest Iowa. While spending the 2020 summer with her family, she conducted an ethnographic study about how and why many people prioritized the economy over public health prevention. The work questioned why people turned toward local beliefs and priorities during a global crisis, setting a scene for informing policymakers navigating divergent views of small rural communities who will face future global challenges. This was published as a book, Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji, as well as a series of comics in the magazine, Sapiens.
In this book, Emily Mendenhall writes about what happened in her hometown, Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town.…
Emily Mendenhall, Timothy Newfield and Alexander Tsai introduce an Special Issue of Social Science & Medicine, focused on Rethinking Syndemics through time, space, and method.…
Emily Mendenhall and Seth M. Holmes introduce the BMJ Global Health journal’s issue on “Migration and Health in Social Context”, focused on the social, political and economic structural factors that impede or facilitate health among the most vulnerable migrants seeking care from clinical settings globally.…
In Rethinking Diabetes, Emily Mendenhall investigates how global and local factors transform how diabetes is perceived, experienced, and embodied from place to place.…
“What stories will we tell our grandchildren? How will the pandemic look to us in 10, 20, 30 years, or more? How will the pandemic period affect how we relate to each other in the future?”. These are some of the questions that Emily Mendenhall explores in her article “What Will We Tell Our Grandkids About The Last Two Years?”, published on Scary Mommy.…
Although vaccination has been proven crucial for protecting children and families, many parents are choosing not to vaccinate school-aged children. Emily Mendenhall argues that, to protect the most vulnerable, and to end this pandemic before a new coronavirus mutation takes over, we need to have a federal vaccine mandate for children in public schools.…
Aaron Gronstal, an astrobiologist and visual artist from Okoboji, uses comic illustrations to translate Emily Mendenhall’s Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji into visual form.…
Lauren Carruth interviews Emily Mendenhall about how people in her hometown in northwest Iowa responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. She describes why people unmasked and how social relations within the community played out over the course of the pandemic. Many people were very cautious, while some people ignored public health recommendations for personal gain.…
The Walsh School of Foreign Service presents Emily Mendenhall’s upcoming book, “Unmasked: COVID, Community and the Case of Okoboji”. “Unmasked” unpacks the “everyday disagreements” about COVID-19 Mendenhall observed firsthand in her hometown during that first pandemic summer. The book is also an examination of the performance of politics as social and cultural practice.…
On its coverage of America’s need to prepare for new disease outbreaks, The Atlantic highlights Emily Mendenhall’s research about syndemics and the influence that every aspect of society has on public health.…
Emily Mendenhall and Sarah S. Willen talk about “Flourishing and Health in Critical Perspective: An Invitation to Interdisciplinary Dialogue,” the first series of the Social Science & Medicine – Mental Health journal. The conversation centers around how interdisciplinary dialogue can improve the way we study flourishing and health – and the clinical and policy interventions we propose.…
On April 4 , 2022, the Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) Program, in partnership with the Global Health Initiative and the Mortara Center for International Studies, will host The Annual Maloy Distinguished Lecture on Global Health. Join the panel discussion of Emily Mendenhall’s newest book, Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji.…
On March 19, 2022, Emily Mendenhall and Rebecca Katz met at the Politics and Prose independent bookstore to discuss her recently launched book, Unmasked.…
