February 10, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall

The Story of Sovaldi^™: How Intellectual Property Matters In Places That Do Not Dr. Zahra Hayat University of British Columbia, Vancouver

ABSTRACT: Pakistan has among the world’s lowest drug prices, and almost no drug patents filed by Western multinational corporations. Despite the absence of these quintessential barriers to pharmaceutical access, it is afflicted by severe shortages of basic lifesaving and palliative drugs. Drawing from my broader research on these seeming paradoxes of access, in this talk I examine the unprecedented arrival in Pakistan of Silicon Valley-based company Gilead Sciences’ revolutionary Hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, just a year after its U.S. launch. Priced at $84,000 per course—$1,000 per pill—in the U.S., Sovaldi was sold in Pakistan at only $2 per pill, enabling the government to establish free Hepatitis C treatment centers across the country. Complicating the common narrative of Gilead’s benevolence in bringing Sovaldi to Pakistan, I suggest that Pakistan’s insignificance in global pharmaceutical circuits was a paradoxical condition of possibility of its access to the drug. More broadly, I suggest that given the increasing prominence of biological drugs in new pharmaceutical development, understanding the relationship between intellectual property and access requires broadening our focus beyond patents to a broader rubric of ‘pharmaceutical intellectual property’, which exceeds any individual legal property form.

BIOGRAPHY: Zahra Hayat is a medical anthropologist and lawyer. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2024-2026). Her research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology and law, examining how global regimes of pharmaceutical pricing, intellectual property, and narcotics control shape access to lifesaving and palliative drugs in the Global South. Dr. Hayat received her PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley in 2022. She obtained her first law degree from Oxford University, followed by an LL.M. from Yale Law School. Before starting her PhD, she practiced law in the San Francisco Bay Area for five years as a mental health advocate for children in foster care, and subsequently as an intellectual property litigator. 

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Hayat’s talk.

February 17, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall

Continents Apart: Disability, Thermal Inequality, and the Narrowing of Worlds Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat University of California, Los Angeles

ABSTRACT: For some people, climate change has quite literally made their world smaller. This talk focuses on the ways in which rising temperatures have reshaped how certain people—frequently disabled and/or experiencing chronic illness—relate to their bodies, their homes, and their worlds. Drawing on research with people who experience thermoregulatory symptoms, I argue that the narrowing of the world is both a consequence of how heat disproportionately impacts disabled people and a strategy utilized by disabled people to survive in what are increasingly hostile climates.

BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, and the Institute for Society & Genetics. His first book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021; Bloomsbury India, 2022), is the winner of three awards: the RAI Wellcome Medal (from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Wellcome Trust), the Edie Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing (from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology), and the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences (from the American Institute of Indian Studies). His current book project—titled Swelter: The Fate of Our Bodies in a Warming World—is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the plight of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. This book reflects on the existential and planetary crisis posed by extreme heat, but from the perspective of our bodies as they experience this crisis. Swelter will be published by Crown in the United States, and Picador in the United Kingdom. Dr. Venkat is also the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab. His work has been funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and most recently, by a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, which is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty.

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Venkat’s talk.

February 24, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Krystal A. Smalls University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

March 3, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Anna T. Browne Ribeiro University of Louisville

March 31, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin Wellesley College

April 7, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Jennifer C. Hsieh University of Michigan

April 14, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Usha Reena Rungoo Harvard University

April 28, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Vivian Lu Rice University

May 5, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Khadene Harris Rice University

May 12, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Undergraduate Thesis Symposium

Please join us for this year’s Anthropology Undergraduate Symposium, which will showcase the work of graduating fourth years who have completed a BA Thesis for Departmental Honors.

The symposium will be followed immediately by a department picnic in the Classics Quad outside Haskell Hall.