Jon Shaffer
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jonshaffer.bsky.social
Jon Shaffer
@jonshaffer.bsky.social
3.3K followers 3.2K following 890 posts
Assistant Professor of Sociology @UVM | STS | Med Soc | Social Movements | Previously Post-doc @BermanInstitute, Partners In Health

Personal Website: https://www.jonathanshaffer.net
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jonshaffer.bsky.social
Paul Giamatti as Edwin Chadwick biopic when?
Edwin Cadwick, c. 1860 Science Museum Group Collection
January 14, 2026 at 10:59 AM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Fascinating rapid response from Pablo Yedlin (@pyedlin.bsky.social), National Deputy in the Argentine National Congress, to our @bmj.com opinion piece.

"What is happening today in the United States is a warning."

www.bmj.com/content/392/...
Dear Editor: I read with great interest this article recently published in The BMJ, which analyzes the role of senior officials and influential physicians in the dismantling of public health in the United States under the administration of Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As a former Minister of Health of the Province of Tucumán, a professor of public health, a pediatrician, and a current National Deputy in Argentina, I feel compelled to express my solidarity with the U.S. scientific and health community, while also warning that what is happening there is not foreign to us. History shows that health policies in the United States do not only have an impact within its borders, but often radiate to other countries, particularly in our region. Argentina is not an exception. In recent months, we have observed with alarm how certain decisions, discourses, and approaches currently applied in the United States are beginning to be replicated—uncritically and dangerously—in our country. I am particularly concerned about the advance of anti-scientific narratives that downplay evidence, discredit vaccination, cast doubt on essential medicines, and erode public trust in the health system. We know from our own experience that these narratives have serious consequences: sustained declines in vaccination coverage, the reemergence of preventable diseases, increased infant morbidity and mortality, and growing inequality in access to quality care.
January 7, 2026 at 2:42 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Trump & RFK Jr.'s coterie of bootlicking doctors are real pieces of shit, we argue in the British Medical Journal, essentially.

Link: www.bmj.com/content/392/...
Trump and RFK Jr are dismantling public health—aided and abetted by powerful doctors High profile physicians should be using their positions of power to resist Trump and RFK Jr’s damaging policies, not collaborating with them, say Gavin Yamey and Jonathan Shaffer President Donald Trump and secretary of health and human services Robert F Kennedy Jr have held many press events during which they have promoted dangerous health misinformation.1 2 Despite taking an oath to“first do no harm,” influential doctors have stood by Trump and RFK Jr’s sides during these briefings, lending their support. The wider medical community needs to tackle this phenomenon with evidence based strategies, including warning the public about the risks of misleading information, highlighting scientific consensus, mapping the institutional networks that spread controversial information, and countering them using political and legal strategies.3
January 7, 2026 at 2:08 AM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Nice shoutout on this research in today's @statnews.com newsletter:

Newsletter link: www.statnews.com/2025/12/08/h...

Link to the paper: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
EMTALA violations increase in Texas Ever since the constitutional right to abortion was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2022, experts have worried about how abortion bans might affect people’s ability to get emergency, lifesaving obstetric care in situations where an abortion is medically necessary. A new study shows there was reason to worry: In Texas, which bans abortion without exceptions for the health of the pregnant person, there was a small but substantial increase between 2018 and 2023 in obstetric-related violations of EMTALA, the federal law that ensures everyone receives emergency medical care regardless of their ability to pay. (The increase came out to about one additional violation per quarter.) That’s according to a study published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, which analyzed all EMTALA violation filings between 2018 and the first quarter of 2023. The five other states with similarly strict bans had smaller, imprecise increases. The numbers are small, but the study authors emphasize that these are only the confirmed violations – in reality, there could be many more that were never formally recognized. And before the bans, these states had less than one EMTALA violation per year. So the quarterly increase may seem small, study author Liana Woskie said in an email to STAT, but “from a relative perspective it’s large.”
December 8, 2025 at 3:44 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
🚨New Paper🚨

Obstetric-Related Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act Violations and No Health Exception Bans

w/ Liana Woskie and colleagues at Tufts.

Link: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Screen shot from our new paper titled "Obstetric-Related Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act Violations and No Health Exception Bans"
December 5, 2025 at 4:19 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Janus: "once the machine works people will be convinced" "the machine will work when all the relevant people are convinced"
December 1, 2025 at 12:03 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
🚨Check out our new research on the representational harms embedded in AI image captioning🚨

We investigated how AI models interpret photographs from exploitative human exhibitions from the 19th and 20th centuries where colonized peoples were put on display.

Open Access: doi.org/10.1007/s001...
Theorizing the failures of computer vision algorithms requires shifting from detecting and fixing biases towards understanding how algorithms are shaped by social, historical, and political real-world precursors. To better understand the socially embedded and historically rooted representational harms of these algorithms, we analyze how Al image captioning depicts archival images of living ethnological exibitions (so-called 'human zoos), mass stereotype-producing public exhibitions of colonized people common in Europe and the US from the 1870s to the 1930s, which were meant to symbolize the imagined superiority of Western societies and justify their colonial violence. We collected and analyzed more than 3800 captions from 100 archival images using MidJourney—a modern, state-of-the-art generative Al platform. Combining quantification with close reading of the captions, we found evidence of a 'colonial gaze,' an epistemological viewpoint from the perspective of colonizers characterized by significant representational harms representing five main themes: essentialism (41.6% of captions), cultural erasure (54.5%), dehumanization (11.1%), othering (28.4%), and infantilization (26.8%), with striking parallels between Al-generated captions and the original framings of human zoos informed by a broader colonial epistemology. Based on this analysis, we propose to conceptualize the colonial gaze in generative Al as an automated process of object identification and relational interpretation that draws on historical visual tropes and hierarchical logics rooted in colonial epistemologies. Trigger warning: This article contains extremely racialized text and images produced by both colonizers and the machines.
November 17, 2025 at 4:15 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
New paper out today in AI & Society w/ Arsenii Alenichev and colleagues.

"We can see a savage": a case study of the colonial gaze in generative AI algorithms

rdcu.be/ePXNQ
Abstract: "Theorizing the failures of computer vision algorithms requires shifting from detecting and fixing biases towards understanding how algorithms are shaped by social, historical, and political real-world precursors. To better understand the socially embedded and historically rooted representational harms of these algorithms, we analyze how AI image captioning depicts archival images of living ethnological exibitions (so-called 'human zoos'), mass stereotype-producing public exhibitions of colonized people common in Europe and the US from the 1870s to the 1930s, which were meant to symbolize the imagined superiority of Western societies and justify their colonial violence. We collected and analyzed more than 3800 captions from 100 archival images using MidJourney––a modern, state-of-the-art generative AI platform. Combining quantification with close reading of the captions, we found evidence of a ‘colonial gaze,’ an epistemological viewpoint from the perspective of colonizers characterized by significant representational harms representing five main themes: essentialism (41.6% of captions), cultural erasure (54.5%), dehumanization (11.1%), othering (28.4%), and infantilization (26.8%), with striking parallels between AI-generated captions and the original framings of human zoos informed by a broader colonial epistemology. Based on this analysis, we propose to conceptualize the colonial gaze in generative AI as an automated process of object identification and relational interpretation that draws on historical visual tropes and hierarchical logics rooted in colonial epistemologies. Trigger warning: This article contains extremely racialized text and images produced by both colonizers and the machines."
November 14, 2025 at 5:52 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
screen cap of Bill Ackman tweeting "•@ZohranKMamdani, congrats on the win. Now you have a big responsibility. If | can help NYC, just let me know what I can do." photo from the movie Sinners of the white bluegrass travelers trying to get into the party before they are revealed to be what they truly are.
November 5, 2025 at 3:34 AM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Mom is STOKED.
November 5, 2025 at 2:41 AM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
a rich text
November 2, 2025 at 10:21 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Marshall Ganz's beautiful, important, and above all *useful* book: "People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal"

global.oup.com/academic/pro...
Cover of Marshall Ganz's "People Power Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal"
November 1, 2025 at 11:19 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
The LA boys are very happy
Dogers celebrating
October 28, 2025 at 6:52 AM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Photo of the Vermont State House this morning!
October 17, 2025 at 2:19 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Jeff Tweedy last night. The dude rocks and his band was awesome. Two of his sons!
Photo of Jeff Tweedy Photo of Jeff Tweedy with a cool half moon guitar Tweedy and his band Tweedy and his sons
October 14, 2025 at 12:05 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
I just ran the PDX half marathon and I can attest that it is not, in fact, burning to the ground.

It’s actually been a beautiful weekend in the Rose City!
Picture of me and Sarah and Conor after the Portland half marathon!
October 5, 2025 at 8:32 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Big pumpkin made it home.
Big pumpkin getting ready for its move. Big pumpkin getting scooped by a tractor. Big pumpkin getting deposited in our neighborhood. Big pumpkin’s final home.
September 27, 2025 at 11:04 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
where my head's at, lately.
photo of a chair with a pile of books including: Selected Writings of Stuart Hall, Necro-Politics by Achille Mbembe, People Power Change by Marshall Ganz, the MAHA Report and others.
September 17, 2025 at 1:00 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Happy Friday from some big pumpkins I’m growing with friends.
Big pumpkin Second big pumpkins Big pumpkin and a dog named goob Two big pumpkins
September 6, 2025 at 12:06 AM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
I just need to lock in dot gif
September 3, 2025 at 1:38 AM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Big pumpkin update, 8/28
Big pumpkin #1 Big pumpkin #2 Big pumpkin #1 Big pumpkin #2
August 28, 2025 at 9:42 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
I’ve been growing big pumpkins this summer and here they are.

They’re getting pretty big.
One pretty big pumpkin. A second pretty big pumpkin.
August 28, 2025 at 1:39 AM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
The Guardian is covering the rise of @defendpublichealth.bsky.social.

#IHAT is evidence-based policy making and grassroots people powered movement building for justice and rights.

MAHA is policy-based evidence making rooted in fascist politics and capital-serving eugenic ideas. #IHATnotMAHA
Screen shot of the article in The Guardian titled, "‘Distracting the public’: group of health professionals call for RFK Jr to be removed". "Ahead of the second Maha report, grassroots Defend Public Health warns that everything HHS is doing is ‘horrifying’"
August 13, 2025 at 1:05 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Few better ways to spend a Monday night.
A picture of Wrigley Field during last night’s game.
August 5, 2025 at 5:05 PM
jonshaffer.bsky.social
Eugenic techno surveillance state, incoming.

apnews.com/article/trum...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration announced it is launching a new program that will allow Americans to share personal health data and medical records across health systems and apps run by private tech companies, promising that will make it easier to access health records and monitor wellness. More than 60 companies, including major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple as well as health care giants like UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, have agreed to share patient data in the system. The initiative will focus on diabetes and weight management, conversational artificial intelligence that helps patients, and digital tools such as QR codes and apps that register patients for check-ins or track medications. “For decades America’s health care networks have been overdue for a high tech upgrade,” President Donald Trump said during an event with company CEOs at the White House on Wednesday. “The existing systems are often slow, costly and incompatible with one another, but with today’s announcement, we take a major step to bring health care into the digital age.”
July 31, 2025 at 1:16 AM