Seminar with Professor Susan Erikson

Abstract:
"Nine months in, the public reception of my book Investable! When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance (MIT Press 2025) confounds me; readers seem to favor talking only about the small ethnographic tidbits. Yes, the book includes a lot of granular details about the World Bank’s pandemic bonds – the humans who made them up; how they financialized health risk; how the bonds both succeeded and failed to meet expectations – I still delight in debating those details. But I wrote the book to explain the larger financial system that produced them, arguing against moving the funding of global health projects away from governments to Wall Street and its similars.  

In this talk, I discuss these tensions as I reflect on social science research, especially ethnographic research, that details particulars even as it also aims to provide big-picture analyses critical to improving big weighty human-sustaining systems. Unpacking the granular details of health data and modeling use, for example, revealed how investor gains were prioritized over improving health outcomes. Both Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies methodologies were central to how I came to understand the larger global political economy of health that produced pandemic bonds as a common-sense approach to raising money for pandemics. In short, I discovered the big by first understanding the small."

Susan Erikson is a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where she studies highly complex political economies that shape human health. An award-winning medical anthropologist, Dr. Erikson has worked in Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and North America. During an earlier international affairs career, she first worked in West Africa for two years before working in Washington, DC, on foreign policy and trade issues with government departments and international organizations. As an academic, she combines her professional non-academic experience with a critical study of global political economy of health. Her new book, Investable! When Pandemic Risk meets Speculative Finance – A Cautionary Tale (MIT Press, 2025) is about the financialization of global health and capitalist speculation repurposed as save-the-world innovation. Her current research analyzes the increasing datafication and financialization of health, focusing on how global investors use data, modeling, and fintech, including AI, to gamble on catastrophe risk.

Everybody is welcome! Please bring your own lunch!