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 epilepsy 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 Fadiman’s 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 creation of a Life Sciences Corridor between the three universities—a linking of these institutions “in the important development of medical and biotechnology applications”—and to enhance it by devising a cross-cultural humanities 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 ethnicity, race, gender, class, and health. Yet we mean to take a decidedly 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 was a major conference, held on October 12-13, 2006, titled AGAINST HEALTH: RESISTING THE INVISIBLE MORALITY. This international conference called on the expertise of a vast array of disciplines to examine the ways in which the category of "health," the norms associated with "health," and the social functioning of those norms are, in some instances, at odds with human well being. Of particular interest were the ways that certain appeals to health risk authorizing, justifying, and immunizing from possible criticism an array of practices and power relations that would otherwise be vulnerable to challenge. We thus explored how politics, ideologies about race, gender and class, social norms and morés, and commercial and economic structures all work to define "health" in ways that benefit certain groups of people while excluding others.
In the year hence, Professors Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland have worked to produce an edited manuscript (NYU Press, forthcoming 2010) based on the conference proceedings. Contributors include Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law at Northwestern Law School; Kathleen LeBesco, Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Marymount Manhattan College and author of Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity; Carl Elliott, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Minnesota; Rebecca Herzig, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Bates College; Roddey Reid, Professor of Literature at the University of California San Diego; Sarah Jain, Assistant Professor of History of Consciousness at Stanford University; and Nicholas King.
In Academic year 2009-10, the Program will host a public lecture series on the topic of Gender and Science: Contemporary Debates. Details about the series are forthcoming.
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).