Embed equity throughout innovation.

The social benefit of technologies is frequently unevenly realized across the United States. Rural communities, individuals with disabilities, and historically marginalized groups face out-of-reach costs or lack access to products that meet their needs. Blame is typically placed on complicated regulatory processes or complex delivery systems, but this response neglects the problem that equity is not baked into the nation's innovation process at any stage. The United States needs to rethink its entire innovation ecosystem to incorporate equity as a foundational guiding principle-from research design and funding requirements to policies and regulations that govern the delivery and oversight of new products to the public.

Spectacles of Difference: The Racial Scripting of Epidemic Disparities.

This essay explores how epidemics in the past and present give rise to distinctive, recurring racial scripts about bodies and identities, with sweeping racial effects beyond the Black experience. Using examples from cholera, influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, and COVID-19, the essay provides a dramaturgical analysis of race and epidemics in four acts, moving from Act I, racial revelation; to Act II, the staging of bodies and places; to Act III, where race and disease is made into spectacle; and finally, Act IV, in which racial boundaries are fixed, repaired, or made anew in the response to the racial dynamics revealed by epidemics. Focusing primarily on North America but touching on global racial narratives, the essay concludes with reflections on the writers and producers of these racialized dramas, and a discussion of why these racialized repertoires have endured.

Cancer and Race: What They Tell Us about the Emerging Focus of Health Equity.

This article examines the history of concepts and frames (such as "equity" or "disparities") and how these frames have guided public policies and explanations about differences in health across the population. Considering the emblematic case of cancer, which has stimulated long and heated debate over social, economic, and biological causes, the article argues that the vocabularies of health reform are both semantic and also deeply political-framing different reform agendas. The article describes the evolving US debate over the biological, social, or environmental origins of differential cancer mortality along lines of social difference and race, tracing important shifts and reversal over time. Through this analysis, the article explains how and why equity concerns have figured (sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly) in health reform discussions, often in tension with other frames. It examines how Americans have used these frameworks to justify different kinds of action and inaction, concluding with a discussion of how these frameworks of "disparities" and "equity" should be understood today in scientific, political, and policy discourse.1.

Thinking Through the Pain.

For many decades, the care of people in chronic pain has vexed caregivers, challenged policymakers, and bedeviled the lives of people seeking relief from low back pain, migraines, arthritis, and other ailments. In two books-Pain: A Political History (2014) and Dying in the City of the Blues (2001)-I have argued that controversy over pain care persists because pain is at once a clinical, a cultural, and a political problem. The questions surrounding people in pain are fraught. Are complainants truly in the pain they claim to endure, and how do we know? And if so, what type of relief do they need or deserve? Is painkiller drug relief counterproductive, leading to addiction? Are disability benefits warranted? To say that pain is political is merely to recognize the deep connection between these questions of clinical judgment and swirling dilemmas surrounding social welfare in America.