Jessica Hardin Headshot

Jessica Hardin

Associate Professor

Department of Sociology and Anthropology
College of Liberal Arts
jahgss@rit.edu
585-475-5546
Office Location
EAS-3169

Jessica Hardin

Associate Professor

Department of Sociology and Anthropology
College of Liberal Arts

Bio

I am a cultural and medical anthropologist who is interested in how the intersection of medicine and religion shapes lived experiences of chronic illness. Focusing on metabolic disorders, my research bridges critical medical anthropology (on nutrition, fat, metabolic disorders) and the anthropology of Christianity (on the body, healing, denomination). As a result, both my research and teaching are committed to illuminating how structural inequalities operate in everyday life. I draw from feminist methodologies in my work and in the classroom to investigate how macro-level change influences everyday life.

My long-term fieldwork, conducted in Samoa from 2011 to 2012, supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, built on over a year of preliminary research, and language training supported by a Fulbright-Hays grant, in the islands (Samoa and American Samoa) and diaspora (Hawai’i and California). My book project, which highlights several voices including health professionals, pastors and their families, healers, and Pentecostal individuals suffering with metabolic illness, offers a revision to scholarly understandings of the medicalization of food, fat, and fitness from the perspective of Pentecostal Christians in Samoa. I explore how they translate health risks associated with metabolic disorders into moral risks associated with living a good religious life.

I received my PhD in Anthropology from Brandeis University in 2014, and now I am an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology.

jahgss@rit.edu
585-475-5546
Personal Links
Personal Website
Curriculum Vitae
Areas of Expertise
Food studies
Critical nutrition
Gender
Feminist theory
Christianity
Religion
Diabetes
Obesity
Fatness
Pacific Islands
Oceania
Global health
Medicine
Public health
Biomedicine
Science and technology studies
Health

Select Scholarship

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Books

2021    SturtzSreetharan, Cindi, Alexandra Brewis, Jessica Hardin, Sarah Trainer and Amber Wutich. Fat in Four Cultures: A Global Ethnography of Weight in Samoa, Paraguay, Japan and the US. “Teaching Culture” series. Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press. 

2019    Faith and the Pursuit of Health: Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa. “Health, Inequality, and Social Justice” series. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

Forthcoming.  Trainer, Sarah, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Amber Wutich, Alexandra Brewis and Jessica Hardin. “Fat is all my fault: Globalized metathemes of body self-blame.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

2021    Hardin, Jessica. “Life before Vegetables: Nutrition, Cash and Subjunctive Health in Samoa.”Cultural Anthropology 36(3): 428–457.

2021    Wutich, Amber, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Sarah Trainer, Jessica Hardin, Alex Brewis. “Metatheme analysis: A qualitative approach to comparative and multi-sited research.” International Journal of Social Research Methods 20: 1-11.

2020    “Ceaseless Healing and Never-Natural Disaster.” Vital Topics Forum: “Chronic Disaster Reimagining Noncommunicable Disease.” American Anthropologist 122(3): 650-651.

2020    Trainer, Sarah, Jessica Hardin, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Alex Brewis. “Worry-nostalgia: Anxieties around the fading of local cuisines and foodways.” Gastronomica 20(2): 67-78.

2019    “’It’s almost like paying for praying’: Giving Critiques and the Discursive Management of Denominational Difference.” Anthropological Quarterly 92(4): 1099-1122. Special issue: “Institutions, Infrastructures, and Religious Sociality,” edited by Courtney Handman and Minna Opas.

2019    Garth, Hanna and Jessica Hardin. “On the Limitations of Barriers: Social Visibility, Fear of Consequences and Weight Management in Cuba and Samoa.” Social Science & Medicine (239). Doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112501

2019    Hardin, Jessica and Christina Ting Kwauk. “Elemental Eating: Samoan Public Health and Valuation.” The Contemporary Pacific 31(2): 381-415.

2019   “’Father Released Me’: Accelerating Care, Temporal Repair, and Ritualized Friendship among Pentecostal Women in Samoa.” American Ethnologist 46(2): 150-161.

Currently Teaching

ANTH-105
Humans, Health, Technology
3 Credits
You want to be a health care provider. You want to design health technologies. You want to help people and these seem like the best options. Helping people, though, requires understanding those people and the contexts in which those people live, work, and play. This means questioning how socioeconomic, infrastructural, financial, racial, cultural, gendered and political dynamics shape who gets sick, who accesses technology, and who is healthy, the entangling of which manifests in healthcare disparities. In this course we will evaluate how emergent technologies affect human health and healthcare disparities. Evaluating impact requires considering the ethical stakes involved in technological development and application. Our guiding questions will be threefold: How do cultural expectations about health shape the pursuit of technologies and medicine? and What are the impacts of particular technologies on human health? How can we ethically evaluate those impacts? To these ends, we will consider various research forms, including ethnographies, that focus on the intersection of culture, technology, and health. First, we will orient to technology and health through the lens of social construction. Second, we will situate ourselves in feminist approaches to biotechnologies; including critical studies of epigenetics, using core concepts of kinship and gender. We will then explore specific technologies, such as spirometers to oximeters to pharmaceuticals more generally, heeding particular attention to inequalities in areas like race. Finally, we explore the various methodologies available to those designing biotechnologies derived from the social sciences. In each section, we will identify core ethical questions faced by engineers, designers and healthcare providers in their daily work while brainstorming ways that these ethical issues might be resolved to improve human health.
ANTH-244
Designing For Humans: Disability, Accessibility and Anthropology
3 Credits
How do we imagine the people that we design for? How do social differences around race, gender and class impact how we design for others? How is design a cultural process? How can ethnography make for better design? This course introduces the fundamentals of the field of design anthropology with specific attention dedicated to disability studies and accessibility. The course explores how designers—from industrial designers, game designers to biomedical engineers—can use research-based practices to design better, reflecting the RIT mission to “leverage the power of technology, the arts, and design for the greater good.” We will begin by orienting ourselves to design thinking, exploring key conceptual frameworks from feminist scholarship, science and technology studies, disability studies and approaches to the social aspects of technical thinking. We will then explore different design domains, including access technology, global disability movements, universal design and UX design. Throughout the term we will learn about how ethnographic methods can create human-centered design by starting with lived experiences, exploring power relations and ultimately learning about the perspectives of those whom we design for.
ANTH-246
Gender and Health
3 Credits
This course examines connections between gender and health that are both conceptual and empirical. Students will explore the causes of gender-based differences in health outcomes through case studies of sexual and reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS epidemics and violence. Students will also examine global gender and health trends. The course concludes with an examination of gender inequity in health care and policy implications of these inequities.
ANTH-270
Cuisine, Culture and Power
3 Credits
Physically, culturally, and socially, humans live through food and drink. Spanning the globe, as nearly limitless omnivores, humans have developed myriad ways of collecting and cultivating food and taking advantage of local environments. We also put food to work for us socially by creating cuisine. Through cuisine, we forge and nourish relationships, commune with deities, and through luxury choices, demonstrate our "taste" and lay claim to elite status. Through the cultural practices of production and consumption of food and drink, we wield power. Food and drink consumption patterns have sustained slavery, poverty, malnutrition, and illegal immigration, and have laid waste to the environment. In this class, we explore physical, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions of food and become more aware of how the private, intimate act of a bite connects us to the rest of humanity.
ANTH-502
Scholar's Thesis I
3 Credits
This is the first course of a two-semester Scholar's Thesis sequence in anthropology, in which students will conduct an original research project. In this first course, working with a thesis advisor, students will formulate a research question, conduct a literature review, prepare the research design, write a research proposal, and begin data collection, following the conventions of cultural anthropology or archaeology.
INGS-101
Global Studies
3 Credits
Within the past three decades, planetary computerization, burgeoning media industries, and other global processes have significantly altered the ways in which we experience our local and global worlds. Global reconfigurations of time and space change our consciousness, sense of self and others, and the material realities in which we live and work. This course provides the conceptual tools to assess emerging global processes, interactions and flows of people, ideas and things that challenge historical patterns of international studies and relations. The course will introduce you to international and global processes in areas such as global cultural economies, global cities, new forms of democracy and civil society, global religions, sexualities, health, and environments, increased competition for resources, political conflict, war and terrorism. Beyond understanding the causes and consequences of global change, this course will introduce you to ethical dilemmas in global justice movements, and in transferring ideas and technologies in new global contexts.
INGS-270
Cuisine, Culture and Power
3 Credits
Physically, culturally, and socially, humans live through food and drink. Spanning the globe, as nearly limitless omnivores, humans have developed myriad ways of collecting and cultivating food and taking advantage of local environments. We also put food to work for us socially by creating cuisine. Through cuisine, we forge and nourish relationships, commune with deities, and through luxury choices, demonstrate our "taste" and lay claim to elite status. Through the cultural practices of production and consumption of food and drink, we wield power. Food and drink consumption patterns have sustained slavery, poverty, malnutrition, and illegal immigration, and have laid waste to the environment. In this class, we explore physical, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions of food and become more aware of how the private, intimate act of a bite connects us to the rest of humanity.
ITDL-210
Vertically Integrated Projects
1 - 3 Credits
Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) engage undergraduate students in long-term, large-scale, multidisciplinary project teams that are led by faculty. VIP courses are project-based, team-based courses directly supporting faculty research and scholarship. VIPs under this course number have a particular focus on interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences expertise, with membership in teams across RIT colleges.
SOCI-246
Gender and Health
3 Credits
This course examines connections between gender and health that are both conceptual and empirical. Students will explore the causes of gender-based differences in health outcomes through case studies of sexual and reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS epidemics and violence. Students will also examine global gender and health trends. The course concludes with an examination of gender inequity in health care and policy implications of these inequities.

In the News

  • May 17, 2023

    college student sitting in a chair with an open book.

    Graduate Sophia Williams wins Fulbright award to pursue graduate education in the UK

    The earliest written record of hearing loss is believed to date from 1550 BC in ancient Egypt, and written evidence for early sign language and changing attitudes toward deaf individuals comes from Plato in 350 BC—but, according to Sophia Williams ’23, there isn’t much that reflects the significance of these findings in archaeological scholarship. Williams received a Fulbright U.S. Student Award to fund her graduate education at University of York so she can help fill this gap of knowledge.

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