Adria L. Imada | Photography as Surveillance and Survival: Lessons from an Archive of Kin

This is an Archive of a Past Event

This presentation considers the diverse use and meanings of photography during a prolonged public health crisis. In settler colonial Hawaiʻi, generations of people suspected of having leprosy (Hansen’s disease) were removed from their communities and sentenced to lifelong medical segregation between 1866 and 1969. How did exiled people produce their own visual archives of care, disability, and interdependence while experiencing extreme conditions of isolation?

About the Speaker

Adria L. Imada was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. She is professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where she also teaches in its Medical Humanities program. Her recent book, An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration (University of California Press, 2022) analyzes the visual culture of Hansen’s disease and kinship in Hawai‘i during the longest medical quarantine in modern history.


About the Series

Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop

The Medical Humanities is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.