Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Resisting the Invisible Morality
October 12–13 2006
Rackham Auditorium and fourth floor conference rooms
915 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Thursday, October 12

8:30am | REGISTRATION AND MORNING COFFEE

9:30am | INTRODUCTIONS

Welcome: Carol Boyd, Director, Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Opening Remarks: Why ‘Against Health?’, Jonathan Metzl , Conference Chair

10:00am | OPENING ADDRESS

Introduction: Kenneth Warner, Dean and Avedis Donabedian Distinguished University Professor of Public Health
Opening Address: What is Health and How Do You Get It?, Richard Klein, Professor, Romance Studies, Cornell University

11:00am | BREAK
Coffee and juice served

11:15am | PANEL DISCUSSION: AGAINST HEALTH?
Moderator: Jonathan Metzl

• Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law.
• Susan Kippax, Director, National Centre in HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales
• Kathleen LeBesco, Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Arts, Marymount Manhattan College
• Carl Elliott, Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota

12:30pm | BOX LUNCH

1:00pm | AFTERNOON KEYNOTE

Introduction: Carol Boyd, Director, Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Keynote: Against Health? How Ideologies of Health & Healthcare Can Stand in the Way of Good Living, Joycelyn Elders, Former United States Surgeon General

2:15pm | BREAK

2:30pm | CONCURRENT WORKSHOPS (4)

• Panelist 1 Workshop: Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland & Ellis Professor, Northwestern University School of Law; The Social Immorality of Health: How Health Trumps Social Justice;

  Facilitator: Elizabeth Wingrove, University of Michigan

  Rackham Amphitheater

  In contemporary debates about the bioethics of health policies, the primacy of guaranteeing good health is often deployed to deflect concerns about racism and sexism. Health is distinguished from political and social interests and is supposed to trump social justice. I illustrate the social immorality of health by examining how the duty to ensure the health of the fetus imposed on women at both ends of the reproductive caste system -- poor Black substance abusers and affluent consumers of high tech reproductive tools -- reinforces race and gender hierarchies. I also examine arguments that the health benefits of race-specific pharmaceuticals outweigh their power to reify race as a biological category. All of these examples support the neo-liberal shift of responsibility for public welfare from the state to the private realm of family and market, accompanied by new forms of punitive governance.

• Panelist 2 Workshop: Susan Kippax, Director, National Centre in HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales;
  Privatising and Stigmatising the Sexual: the Power of the Biomedical in Shaping the Response to HIV.

  Facilitator: David Halperin, University of Michigan

  East Conference Room

  This year, 2006, marks the 25th anniversary of the identification of what became known as AIDS: in June in 1981 in the United States a young gay man was ‘diagnosed’ with the most devastating immune deficiency. A couple of years later HIV, the virus that causes AIDS was identified and in 1985 we saw the development of a test to detect HIV infection in persons who showed no signs of disease. The HIV test and the development of the first effective treatments for those living with HIV – antiretroviral therapy (ART) – in 1996, were watersheds in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As a social researcher reflecting on these moments in HIV and on the responses of communities and governments to the threat of HIV, I examine the unintended consequences of biomedical policies and practices. In the celebration of the medical, gender and sexuality are left unpoliticized and existing power relations – between men and women, heterosexual and homosexual – are reinforced. I also consider the ways in which social science has tried to trouble certain myths and moralistic responses around sexuality and combat heterosexual male privilege and prejudice.

• Panelist 3 Workshop: Kathleen LeBesco, Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Arts, Marymount Manhattan College;
  Health at Every Size: Resisting or Deploying the Invisible Morality?

  Facilitator: Paul Campos, Professor of Law, University of Colorado

  Rackham Assembly Hall

  In recent years, many activists and scholars who resist the medical pathologization of fatness have gravitated toward a Health at Every Size (HAES) paradigm. HAES emphasizes total health enhancement and well-being, rather than weight loss; it encourages self-acceptance and respect for bodily diversity; it highlights the pleasure of eating well, based on internal cues of hunger and satiety, rather than on external food plan or diets, and promotes the joy of movement, encouraging all physical activities rather than prescribing a specific routine of regimented exercise (Kratina, Hayes & King, 1996). The HAES paradigm has been politically useful inasmuch as it allows fat people to be aligned with models of health that are unthinkable in mainstream discussion today. However, some fat-friendly critics have decried the HAES perspective, suggesting that in the rush to be able to say “we’re healthy, too!”, fat activists are missing the point and in fact reinforcing “healthism.” This workshop will explore the strategic viability of the Health at Every Size paradigm for resisting the medicalization of morality around issues of body size.

• Panelist 4 Workshop: Carl Elliott, Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota
  Pharma Goes to the Laundry: The Art of Pharmaceutical Public Relations.

  Facilitator: Lennard Davis, University of Illinois, Chicago

  West Conference Room

  Many types of pharmaceutical marketing have become such a part of ordinary medical life that they are no longer seen as remarkable, such as sales visits from drug representative and advertising in medical journals. But the most interesting marketing practices are those that do not initially look like marketing. This workshop will explore the various ways in which the pharmaceutical industry sells prescription drugs by using tools of public relations, such as video news releases, ghostwritten journal articles, and the cultivation of “thought leaders.”

Friday, October 13

9:00am | MORNING COFFEE

9:30am–10:45 am | CONCURRENT WORKSHOPS I

Workshop 1: Roddey Reid [UCSD]

Facilitator: David Halperin

East Conference Room

Theme: The Social Marketing of Healthy Behavior
Brief Description: This workshop will look at the power and limits of social marketing as the current media-based approach of choice for translating public health agendas into community practices and promoting healthy behaviors. Its proponents have claimed that by virtue of its application of commercial marketing methods to issues of public interest together with community input it was more attentive to citizen-consumer needs than older public health approaches plagued by top-down paternalism and sectarian, stigmatizing tendencies. By the mid-1990s social marketing had overcome reservations expressed by some community, women´s, and gay and lesbian health advocates concerning the transformation of citizens into individualized consumers. In taking as our example the California anti-smoking campaigns, which arguably marked the ascendancy of social marketing methods in US public health, we will re-open some of these debates, especially concerning the liabilities of using mass media, and drawing on participants´ own experience, will explore the possible advantages of smaller, more community-based channels, especially afforded by new digital technologies and narrowcast media (CDs, DVDs, podcasts, etc.) as alternative ways to broach health issues in the public media sphere.

Workshop 2: Rebecca Herzig [Bates]/Sarah Jain [Stanford]

Facilitator: Elizabeth Roberts

West Conference Room

Theme: Injury, Suffering, Temporality: Living in Prognosis
Brief Description: This workshop explores the centrality of time to contemporary biomedical framings of "health," focusing on the relationship between dislocations of time and matters of social justice. We will discuss how, for individuals engaged in contemporary biomedicine, acts of disease, diagnosis, and treatment almost invariably involve a particular organization of the experience of time, in which past and present injury are weighed against an imagined future waiting on the other side of medical intervention. We will ask participants to imaging ways in which living in prognosis materializes these calculations of time by manifesting unspoken assessments of the value of suffering in specific technical procedures, and to consider alternative temporalities.

Workshop 3: Lisa Kane Low [UM], Libby Bogdan-Lovis [MSU], Ray Devries [UM]

Facilitator: Lisa Kane Low

Rackham Amphitheatre

Theme: Having it Her Way: Constructing Autonomy in Childbirth
Brief Description: In March 2006, the National Institutes of Health convened a "State of the Science" Conference to address what was framed as increased "Maternal Requests for Cesarean Delivery" (MCRD). Rhetoric commonly used throughout the conference and in follow-up publications conflated issues of choice and demand, thereby duplicitously characterizing the discussion as a considered response to reasonable consumerism. Curiously there was (and is) no documented evidence that such a demand is real. Given such an evidence gap, what forces are behind this illusory "demand" for surgical birth? How is the much-valued notion of autonomous choice being appropriated to extend and protect professional jurisdictions? This workshop will explore the sociological, ethical, feminist, and medical perspectives on this latest chapter in the pursuit of women's reproductive autonomy and its varied constructions (and deconstructions) during childbirth.

Workshop 4: Petra Kuppers [UM]

Facilitator: Lennard Davis [University of Illinois, Chicago]

East Lounge (second floor)

Theme: Re-Visioning Health: Reclaiming Agency Through Art Practice
Brief Description: Artists in disability culture and beyond are creating exciting and thoughtful responses to the visusalisations, narratives and performances they see, experience, and collaborate with in contemporary biomedical practice. In our time together, we will look closely at some of these practices to see how concepts of health can be challenged and re-emerge in difference, and how social and systemic change can be thought at the nexus of contemporary art practice, health activism and community arts.

Workshop 5: Magdalena Harris [UNSW]

Facilitators: Sean McCabe/Wendy Bostwick

West Lounge (second floor)

Theme: Chronic Illness, Stigma and Social Exclusion
Brief Description: This workshop will use the example of hepatitis C as a framework to explore ideas relating to stigma, social exclusion and the norms and mores around what constitutes 'health'. Hepatitis C is a virulent, often chronic, condition infecting 170 million people worldwide. Stigma and discrimination experienced by people living with the virus primarily result from the perception that it is a 'junkie's disease'. Intertwined with this stigma are public fears of transmission and societal intolerance for chronic illness. Within this workshop we will reflect upon and interrogate the assumptions underlying and exacerbating these stigmas and ask how, in a context where health and functionality are reified and prohibition socially sanctioned, can the stigmas and discrimination associated with illnesses such as hepatitis C be alleviated?

Workshop 6: Kane Race [UNSW]

Facilitator: Justin Schmandt

Assembly Hall

Theme: HIV Politics, Harm Reduction, and Pleasure
Brief Description: Viewed in terms of the conditions of its emergence in the initial AIDS crisis, it is possible to see how 'harm reduction' took distance from a prohibitive moral stance, and worked by suspending moral judgment on the character of endangered groups, promoting instead pragmatic precautions such as condoms, clean needles, and targeted education on the grounds of public health. This suspension of moral judgment produced a critical leveraging point: Where conservatives objected to the institution of needle exchanges, practitioners cited the public health objective of HIV prevention. Where moral reactionaries condemned homosexual practice as a health threat outright, activists appealed to the scientific fact that HIV can be prevented by the use of condoms. In this sense harm reduction could be conceived as a radicalization of biopower that rejects the strategies of incarceration, medicalization, and normalization as productive of public health. In this workshop we will consider the sort of intervention that harm reduction makes into the field of care and consider the ambiguous place of pleasure within this broad approach.

10:45am | BREAK

11:00am–12:15pm | CONCURRENT WORKSHOPS II

Workshop 1: Roddey Reid (Repeated)

Facilitator: Michelle McLellan

East Conference Room

Theme: The Social Marketing of Healthy Behavior

Workshop 2: Rebecca Herzig/Sarah Jain (Repeated)

Facilitator: Anna Kirkland

West Conference Room

Theme: Injury, Suffering, Temporality: Living in Prognosis

Workshop 3: Kane Race [UNSW] (Repeated)

Facilitator: Michele Morales and Moya Bailey [Emory]

Assembly Hall

Theme: HIV Politics, Harm Reduction, and Pleasure

Workshop 4: Nicholas King [Case Western]

Facilitator: John Carson

East Lounge (second floor)

Theme: Is Health a Useful Proxy for Social Justice?
Brief Description: Is health a useful proxy for social justice? Appeals to health as a proxy for social justice have become common during the past two decades. Qualitative researchers argue that social, political, and economic injustice adversely impacts the health of individuals and populations through a complex web of causation. Similarly, quantitative researchers use increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques to demonstrate the links between population health and environmental degradation, income inequality, changes in the nature of work, and other macro-level political-economic processes. This research is used to support the contention that social injustice is in some way "bad for our health." This presentation examines how this pragmatic strategy often has unintended consequences, and asks whether, in some cases, the substitution of measurable health outcomes for moral outrage might be counterproductive in the long run?

Workshop 5: Brad Lewis [NYU]

Facilitator: Bernice Hausman [Virginia Tech]

West Lounge (second floor)

Theme: Postpsychiatry
Brief Description: This workshop will be devoted to the emergence of “postpsychiatry.” Postpsychiatry brings to mental health practice the tools and resources of contemporary humanities and social theory. These additional tools allow psychiatry to better understand the complexities of human suffering and to better analyze the tensions and struggles within mental health. Taking seriously the multiplicities of meaning surrounding human life, postpsychiatry opens the door to a more collaborative approach with service users and with the broader intellectual community.

12:15pm | BOX LUNCH

1:00pm | AFTERNOON KEYNOTE
Rackham Auditorium Introduction: Carol Boyd, Professor of Nursing and Chair, Institute For Research On Women And Gender
Women's Health: How Marketing Has Manufactured Diseases We Need to Prevent!, Susan Love, Clinical Professor of Surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

2:15pm–4:00pm | PLENARY SESSION: Against Health – Future Directions
Chair: David Halperin
Rackham Amphitheatre With Roddey Reid, Rebecca Herzig, Sarah Jain, Petra Kuppers, Magdalena Harris, Kane Race, Nicholas King, Lisa Kane Low, Libby Bogdan-Lovis, Ray Devries, and Brad Lewis