This year’s Society for the Humanities Invitational Lecture will feature medical anthropologist Stacey Langwick, associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences, speaking on "Healing in a Toxic World: Reimagining the Times and Spaces of the Therapeutic."
The lecture, scheduled for 5-6:30 p.m. Nov. 11 in the Guerlac Room at the A.D. White House, is free and open to the public.
“Working at the intersection of medicine, therapy, economy and questions of knowledge sovereignty, Stacey’s work has reached across many scholarly domains," said Durba Ghosh, professor of history and Taylor Family Director of the Society for the Humanities (A&S), adding that Langwick took courses in intellectual property law and plant biology in order to research her new book.
Langwick said her lecture will draw on the story of a banana in Tanzania called kitarasa, which “has emerged as a key player in both entrepreneurial and nongovernmental experiments striving to heal bodies and soils in a world where that which enables survival in the near term, undermines it for future generations.”
Dorkia Enterprises, a small Tanzanian business, is working to commercialize kitarasa flour as a “therapeutic” food, a process that is revealing tensions between the economic and the ecological, she said. “As this charismatic banana folds the scales of bodies and lands into one another, it incites the theorizing of relations among toxicity, healing and memory.”
Langwick’s latest book “Medicines That Feed Us,” is forthcoming in 2026. She is also the author of “Bodies, Politics and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania” (2011) and co-editor of “Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Africa” (2012). She co-leads a collaborative international design project, “Uzima: Wellness,” focused on healing on and of the planet in the face of climate change. The project has a teaching, research and healing garden at a major teaching-research hospital in Tanzania, which is used as a site of medical training, together with the hospital’s clinic, classroom and laboratory. Langwick teaches classes on medicine and healing, the body and bodiliness, toxicity, postcolonial science, critical plant studies and anthropological methods.
The Annual Invitational Lecture is designed to give a Cornell audience a chance to hear a distinguished Cornell humanities faculty member who may frequently speak at other universities, but whom we seldom have the privilege of hearing.
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