2022 Spring Lecture Series: Chuan Hao (Alex) Chen

Whose lives matter in an emerging pandemic? How do racial hierarchies, capitalism, and American imperialism shape the contours of pandemic response? Deploying ethnographic, historical, and architectural analysis of biocontainment architecture, this lecture reveals how the “twin pandemics” of systemic racism and COVID-19 in 2020 are deeply intertwined, from Cold War biological weapons laboratories to the contemporary creation of ephemeral testing and vaccination sites.

Chuan Hao (Alex) Chen is a Taiwanese American MD/Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Master in Design Studies degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Focusing on biocontainment technologies and laboratory architecture, his dissertation ethnographically explores American notions of safety, uncertainty, and race as infected in the building of emerging disease infrastructures. His research is funded by the Graham Foundation and the Wenner Gren Foundation. His writing has appeared in Medicine Anthropology Theory, American Anthropologist, and LA+ (Landscape Architecture Plus).