The STS+MH Hub is a collegial biweekly gathering for emerging scholars (graduate students, postdocs, early-career faculty, etc) to share their work and research. Our aim is to encourage institutional community around scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Medical/Health Humanities (MH), as well as allied disciplines. The Hub is co-sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine and the Program in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities.

 

The STS + MH Hub will meet on Monday 2/10 from 6-7:30pm in Mergenthaler 266 on the Homewood campus. Dinner and drinks will be served.

MD/PhD student Leigh Alon will workshop a talk for the Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine, to be held at Harvard University on 2/20.

Please email Hub organizer Gabrielle Robbins (grobbin4@jhu.edu) for talk audio and slides, as well as a link for Zoom participation.

---

The STS+MH Hub is a collegial biweekly gathering for emerging scholars (graduate students, postdocs, early-career faculty, etc) to share their work and research. Our aim is to encourage institutional community around scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Medical/Health Humanities (MH), as well as allied disciplines. The Hub is co-sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine and the Program in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities.

Roughly 80 percent of healthcare’s oversized carbon footprint derives from the production, transportation, use, and disposal of a single-use medical supply chain. Yet as health care organizations try to practice ‘resource stewardship’ – that is, to move away from single-use disposable items toward sustainable use of durable items – they encounter widespread perceptions that disposability is a necessary virtue in modern health care. Caregivers, patients, and health-system managers fear that any move from disposability to sustainability must lead to trade-offs in safety (from infectious threats), efficacy (in pharmaceutical delivery) or efficiency (in cost-effectiveness).

This year’s Levi Symposium will question these perceived trade-offs, disentangling legitimate evidential and moral reasoning from the inertia of convenience. Convening scholars and practitioners in bioethics, clinical practice, environmental justice, practice innovation, and health policy, we aim to host a multi-disciplinary exploration of how we can elucidate policy pathways that harmonize clinical safety, efficacy, and efficiency with sustainability. For more information and to register: https://bioethics.jhu.edu/disposability