An Interview with Merlin Chowkwanyun

From: Crisis and Contagion

$2.20

In this chapter, Ian McKay interviews Merlin Chowkwanyun about issues relating to COVID-19. Merlin Chowkwanyun is the Donald H. Gemson Assistant Professor in Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University, New York. Dr. Chowkwanyun has just brought out a book, All Health Politics is Local: Community Battles for Medical Care and Environmental Health, with University of North Carolina Press. In a close examination of health politics in New York City, Central Appalachia, Los Angeles, and Cleveland in the 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Chowkwanyun argues that bird’seye views of health politics in the US, often reliant on “large aggregate, nationally representative data sets,” tend to lose sight of fundamentally important local phenomena and edit out all the local activists and local experiences that “challenged the paradigms of more powerful actors working on the national level.” Dr. Chowkwanyun is currently at work on another book about political unrest at medical schools and neighbourhood health activism. He was also the principal investigator on a research grant for ToxicDocs, where one can find millions of

pages from once-secret documents pertaining to industrial toxins.

With Adolph L. Reed, Jr., he recently published an article in