Sarkar & Meyer Publish Article on COVID-19 in Navajo Nation
On February 3, 2021. Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University (BU), co-authored an article with Caitlin Meyer (Pardee BA ’22) in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The article, titled “Radiation Illnesses and COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation,” examines how the lack of access to running water, language barriers, and radiation-related long-term illnesses have caused an intractable public health situation for Indigenous communities in the United States such as the Navajo (Diné) during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The research for the article benefited from the Pardee School’s Global Decolonization Initiative‘s (GloDec) Nuclear Sites Project, where Meyer was a research intern in the summer and fall of 2020. The original idea of the research emerged as an op-ed assignment that Meyer did in Professor Sarkar’s course, IR315/PO358/HI335, “International Nuclear Politics” in the spring of 2020.
Meyer first analyzed the effect of widespread uranium-mining in American southwestern Indigenous communities within the op-ed assignment. She then narrowed her area of interest to the Navajo Nation during her summer 2020 research internship with GloDec. Through this research, Sarkar and Meyer realized that, despite most uranium-mining endeavors in the U.S. ending over forty years ago, the effects of it persist today and actively hinder current efforts to curb the COVID-19 pandemic within the Navajo Nation.
The full article can be read on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists‘ website.
Jayita Sarkar is Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, where she is also the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She teaches diplomatic and political history at graduate and undergraduate levels. Professor Sarkar’s areas of research expertise are 20th century South Asia, history of U.S. foreign relations, politics of nuclear technologies, and connected partitions. Her book, Ploughshares & Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, (Forthcoming, Cornell University Press, 2022), examines the first forty years of India’s nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics. Read more about Professor Sarkar on her faculty profile.