Episode 32: The Politics of Expertise and Retelling the Story of Racism in the Pulse Oximeter ft. Amy Moran-Thomas

The Received Wisdom

This month, Jack and Shobita talk about the challenges of ensuring that AI and gene editing reflect human values, and reflect on what the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio tells us about the politics of knowledge. And they chat with Amy Moran-Thomas, Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT, about her clarion call to address the racial biases embedded in the pulse oximeter, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in August 2020.

- Amy Moran-Thomas (2020). "How a Popular Medical Device Encodes Racial Bias." Boston Review. August 5.

- Amy Moran-Thomas (2021). "Oximeters used to be designed for equity. What happened?" WIRED. June 4.

- Amy Moran-Thomas (2019). Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic. University of California Press.

- Kadija Ferryman (n.d.) "Framing Inequity in Health Technology: The Digital Divide, Data Bias, and Racialization." SSRC: JustTech.

- Andrea Ballestero and Yesmar Oyarzun (2022). "Devices: A location for feminist analytics and praxis." Feminist Anthropology. 3(2): 227-233.

- Yesmar Oyarzun, Juliann Bi, Eddie Jackson (n.d.) Undertones.

Study questions and transcript available at thereceivedwisdom.org.