This humanities-based, interdisciplinary program explores the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and health. Central to the program's approach is the belief that disease and difference are intimately related, and that bodies marked by particular racial, gender, and ethnic identities experience disease in specific ways. We thus believe that scholars at all levels should learn about cultures at the same time they begin to learn about diseases and bodies. For instance, osteoporosis is complicated by a number of factors that cannot be explained by individual pathology alone. Access to nutritional resources, particular cultural dietary practices, and types of labor have all historically influenced the manifestation, duration, and even the visibility of the disease. As another example, the different definitions of epilesy between Hmong and American cultures described in Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down; arise from divergent assumptions about religion, wellness, disease, spirit, and soul. In her account, the Western medical establishment's inability to recognize these differences, frustrate the well-intentioned efforts of doctors and nurses to treat a Hmong child.
This program, housed at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, combines humanities and medical faculty from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (UM), Michigan State University (MSU), and Wayne State University (WSU). We mean to build upon the recent creation of a Life Sciences Corridor between the three universities-a linking of these institutions "in the important development of medical and biotechnology applications"-but to enhance it by devising a cross-cultural humanties component. Our ultimate goal is the creation of a regional corridor of interdisciplinary exchange.
We seek to work against the forces of geographical and institutional isolation in an attempt to create new approaches to information and exchange. We acknowledge, and build upon, recent efforts of scholars in the social sciences to examine the interactions of the domains of ethicity, race, gender, class, and health. Yet, we mean to take a decidely interdisciplinary approach to these issues. Our project will impart tools of written and verbal communication, self reflection, critical reading, and comparative thinking vital to seemingly divergent disciplines in the humanities and medical sciences. Along the way, participants will learn to negotiate what academic psychiatrists Alexander Ortega and Robert Rosenheck call "the differential effect of ethnocultural factors on symptom presentation," and to realize how ethnocultural factors shape their own perceptions.
The centerpiece of the program's first two years is a major conference, scheduled for October 12-13, 2006, "Against Health." The conference will explore ways in which categories of "health," though essential for human well-being, also pose particular barriers or normativizing constraints that favor certain groups of people in relation to others. Thus, while the conference respects the advances of medicine and public health, it also means to show how medical and popular categories of health can be as exclusive as they are inclusive. Invited speakers and participants from medical and humanities backgrounds will constructively examine how categories of health contain embedded value judgements about ability, sexuality, race, or class; justify certain imbalances even as they work to correct them; or, in some instances, potentially undermine a host of important clinical , from access to care, to diagnosis, to treatment delivery. Potential topic area include:
In the year leading up to the conference, four nationally-known scholars will be invited to participate in public Against-Health Colloquia. Each term a distinguish guest will be asked to prepare a brief presentation on a "controversy" related to the subject matter of the conference, which will then be followed by the response of a core faculty and/or health care practitioner response, and general discussion. For example Albert Gaw (Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts) might be invited to discuss his controversial work, "Interethnic Differences in Metabolism of Psychopharmacological Drugs," in conversation with an undergraduate student whose semester project examines "genetic definitions of race." This would then be followed by a response by John Carson (History, UM), whose work examines the notion of interethnic differences from an historical perspective. The goals of these public colloquia are community formation between students anfaculty, and education and exposure to national and international perspectives pertaining to cross-cultural health and health care.
Workshops for core Faculty will continue to take place bi-monthly for the first two years of the project. Core faculty members of the program represent a balance of campuses, disciplines, and constituencies. The series of afternoon working conferences will have as its main goals (1) to plan the conference; (2) to coordinate lectures and campus visits; (3) to invite local experts in relevant disciplines whose conversations with faculty will help plan expansion; and (4) to examine feedback from formative evaluations in order to clarify the overarching goals of the project.
The program is unique for two reasons. First, we present an innovative model of how to develop a critical-health program to enhance awareness of different forms of diversity. Participating faculty and students will be exposed to a diverse range of methodologies and frameworks that will help them to become more aware of these differences, and to consider how those differences may be manifested in the presentation of symptoms or in their own readings of a given case. In the process, we will enable ongoing exchange between the health sciences and the humanities, and build bridges between often disparate disciplines, communities, and campuses. In addition, our model shows how this successful integration does not require the creation of a separate medical humanities department, but can rather call upon resources already present in-and indeed between-seemingly divergent departments, schools, and universities in a state system.
The program is directed by Jonathan Metzl (Psychiatry and Women's Studies) For more information, please contact him at (jmetzl@umich.edu).