Suspicion

“Suspicion is a compellingly written and superlatively theorized ethnography of public health, affect, and the persistence of racism in the Caribbean. Nicole Charles uses suspicion to understand the logic behind Black parents' decisions about whether to give their children vaccines, showing that their decisions are rooted not in ignorance and irrationality but within long histories of racial and sexual injury as well as hierarchies related to race, class, color, education, and authority. This is quite simply a remarkable book.” - Deborah A. Thomas, author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair

“In this empirically rich account of HPV vaccine promotion and refusal in Barbados, Nicole Charles depathologizes and unsettles conventional understandings of vaccine hesitancy through the urgent conceptual framework of suspicion. Deeply informed by and contributing to plural interdisciplinary conversations in Black feminisms, transnational gender studies, science and technology studies, and the history and anthropology of the Caribbean, Charles listens closely to insightful interlocutors in Barbados to illuminate the embodied affective intensity of contemporary vaccine politics.” - Anne Pollock, author of Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery

"Charles provides us with a thoroughly researched examination of an important subject at a time when such research is urgently needed in the face of a deadly pandemic. She shows us that parents in Barbados are motivated by genuine fears regarding the health of their children, and reasonable suspicion about the motivations of the state, and of vaccine manufacturers. That is significant for understanding how black Caribbean people evaluate technologies that affect health."
  - F.S.J. Ledgister, Caribbean Quarterly

"This interesting, theoretically engaging book explores vaccine hesitancy among adolescents and young women in the English-speaking Caribbean nation of Barbados. Feminist scholars, medical anthropologists, and health-care professionals in the Caribbean and other postcolonial settings will benefit greatly from exposure to the ideas outlined in this book. Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. General readers."
  - F. H. Smith, Choice

“Suspicion is a richly documented and theoretically ambitious ethnography of HPV vaccination hesitancy in Barbados. . . . Charles persuasively shows that Barbadians’ suspicion toward the HPV vaccination should be taken seriously, as it constitutes a productive tool for social and cultural analysis. . . . [Suspicion] is a theoretically sophisticated book that charts new territory within the literature.” - Cristina A. Pop, Gender & Society

“This remarkable book . . . makes an important contribution to international scholarship on vaccine hesitancy, linking personal and familial decision-making in Barbados with transnational economic trends, national health and economic policies, and local embodied experiences of postcoloniality. . . . Suspicion offers a necessary correction to current received wisdom about some people’s deeply felt discomfort about vaccines, which inevitably links vaccine hesitancy with irrationality and misinformation.” - Bernice L. Hausman, Journal of Medical Humanities

“Although numerous studies have been undertaken on vaccine confidence and its social regulators, there has rarely been a work published in this area that provides such depth of feeling to the voiced concerns of a specific community. . . . The result is a beautifully rich understanding of the complexity of human decision-making and a recognition that, at least in the case of Afro-Barbadians, ‘suspicion’ is a far more apt description of collective vaccine response than ‘hesitancy.’” - Paula Larsson, H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews

“Nicole Charles addresses the subject of vaccine hesitancy from a unique perspective, distinguishing it from vaccine refusal and arguing successfully that suspicion about the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine is part of Barbadian parents’ wish to protect their children. . . .  Racialized histories of colonialism still linger in Barbados biopolitics, as this book effectively portrays." - Cruz María Nazario, New West Indian Guide