Lochlann Jain: Things That Art

Lochlann Jain discusses Things That Art: A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity with Chris Richardson. Jain is an award-winning scholar and artist. Jain’s work in the medical anthropology and the history of medicine and law has investigated how scientific research questions are framed and what factors are excluded. Jain is the author of three books. Most recently, a book of drawings, Things that Art (University of Toronto Press, 2019), reconsiders and interrupts the ways in which categories underpin knowledge systems and also aims to realize drawing as a useful and provocative method in the social sciences. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (UC Press: 2013) examines the ways in which institutions such as law, medicine, and the media have established ways of understanding, justifying, and carefully managing the social understanding of cancer. Injury (Princeton UP: 2006), analyzed the twentieth century emergence of tort law in the United States as a highly politicized and problematic form of regulating the design of mass-produced commodities in light of their propensity to injure naïve consumers. The book analyzes the history of the way in which product design has encoded assumptions and biases that have impacted how injuries are distributed and subsequently understood in law. Jain is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and a Visiting Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’ College London.