You are cordially invited to attend our first COMMA meeting of Spring Quarter, Friday, April 11 @ 3:00 PM, in South Hall 2623 (Sankey Room).

Please join us to discuss selections from cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2018 book Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. We will also read a chapter from health humanities scholar Colleen Derkatch’s 2022 Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture.

• “Why are the poor blamed and shamed for their deaths?”  (an edited excerpt of Ehrenreich’s “Death in its Social Context” chapter, as published in The Guardian)
• “Body Work” (an exited excerpt of Ehrenreich’s “Crushing the Body” chapter, as published in The Baffler)
• “Wellness as Survival Strategy” from Colleen Derkatch’s Why Wellness Sells (complete ebook available through the UCSB library.)

Please feel free to forward this event to your colleagues. We would be delighted if you joined us for the conversation. For more details and other questions, or if you have any difficulty accessing the linked readings, please contact Leila Stegemoeller, lstegemoeller@ucsb.edu.