Just Biomedicine
The Just Biomedicine project aims to understand how investments in data-driven and high tech approaches to biomedicine are altering what kind of healthcare is offered and to whom.
Team Lead: Hannah Finegold
The Just Biomedicine project focuses on one overarching question. Is there a correlation between the perceived successes and failures of low-income community health clinics and the rapid expansion of biomedical research conducted at biotechnology companies and hospitals in the Mission Bay and Bay View district of San Francisco?
This correlation will be analyzed in two distinct ways: 1) regression modeling and 2) ethnographic field studies as a way of layering the different visions of health, wealth, risk, and care that shape communities in San Francisco. Successes and failures will be defined according to four variables: location, annual finances, insurance plans for general care and genomics, and patients seen annually. The teams aims to visualize the emergent biomedical “hub” in San Francisco and the Greater Bay Area, and understand the social contexts that come with it. As the location of interest, San Francisco’s Third Street is the transportation route linking San Francisco’s biotech and hospital complex in Mission Bay with the low-income, community of color neighborhood of Bayview Hunters Point.
Who We Are:
Just Biomedicine is lead by a team of undergraduate and graduate students under the guidance of Professor Jenny Reardon and Professor Kate Darling at the Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz.
Objective:
The goal of the project is to further community engagement over the conditions of work and labor in these new regimes of health, and to explore the new forms of wealth, health, inequality and stratification created in these communities and landscapes. Our project pulls from the project design known as Improvement Interventions, “which can be defined broadly as purposeful efforts to secure positive change... an increasingly important focus of activity within healthcare.” We would like to expand on the benefits of data visualization and move beyond the digital map that has been created using the mapping software ArcGIS Story Maps.
Links for further information:
https://justbiomedicine.wordpress.com/
or email Hannah Finegold at hfinegol@ucsc.edu