
Making Space for Social Medicine in Medical School Curricula: Transnational Perspectives and Pedagogy
Title: Making Space for Social Medicine in Medical School Curricula: Transnational Perspectives and Pedagogy What: Online Global Social Medicine Workshop When: June 1-2, 2022 For more info: https://globalsocialmedicine.org/online-workshop-making-space-for-social-medicine-inn-medical-school-curricula-transnational-perspectives-and-pedagogy/ Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/global-social-medicine-network-online-workshop-tickets-319707332237 Focus: Illness and healing can never fully be separated from social context. Yet while medical education around the world has legible standards for bioscientific subject materials, we are far more uneven in how we teach the social sciences necessary for the study of health and medicine. This event, sponsored by the Global Social Medicine Network, brings together educators from four continents on the challenges and opportunities for teaching social medicine in the 21st century....
MoreMaking Space for Social Medicine in Medical School Curricula: Transnational Perspectives and Pedagogy
Title: Making Space for Social Medicine in Medical School Curricula: Transnational Perspectives and Pedagogy What: Online Global Social Medicine Workshop When: June 1-2, 2022 For more info: https://globalsocialmedicine.org/online-workshop-making-space-for-social-medicine-inn-medical-school-curricula-transnational-perspectives-and-pedagogy/ Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/global-social-medicine-network-online-workshop-tickets-319707332237 Focus: Illness and healing can never fully be separated from social context. Yet while medical education around the world has legible standards for bioscientific subject materials, we are far more uneven in how we teach the social sciences necessary for the study of health and medicine. This event, sponsored by the Global Social Medicine Network, brings together educators from four continents on the challenges and opportunities for teaching social medicine in the 21st century....
MoreConference: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine
Title: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine
What: Two-day hybrid conference, for more information visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/
Where: Hybrid – Virtual & Armstrong 150 West
When: Thursday, May 5th and Friday, May 6th
Who: All are welcome to attend virtually. In person registration is limited to invited speakers and guests and Hopkins Affiliates. Numbers will be capped to ensure distancing.
How to Register: Visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/
...MoreTitle: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine
What: Two-day hybrid conference, for more information visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/
Where: Hybrid – Virtual & Armstrong 150 West
When: Thursday, May 5th and Friday, May 6th
Who: All are welcome to attend virtually. In person registration is limited to invited speakers and guests and Hopkins Affiliates. Numbers will be capped to ensure distancing.
How to Register: Visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/
Conference: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine
Title: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine
What: Two-day hybrid conference, for more information visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/
Where: Hybrid – Virtual & Armstrong 150 West
When: Thursday, May 5th and Friday, May 6th
Who: All are welcome to attend virtually. In person registration is limited to invited speakers and guests and Hopkins Affiliates. Numbers will be capped to ensure distancing.
How to Register: Visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/
...MoreTitle: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine
What: Two-day hybrid conference, for more information visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/
Where: Hybrid – Virtual & Armstrong 150 West
When: Thursday, May 5th and Friday, May 6th
Who: All are welcome to attend virtually. In person registration is limited to invited speakers and guests and Hopkins Affiliates. Numbers will be capped to ensure distancing.
How to Register: Visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/
Trans/Medicine Workshop
Medicine and medical understandings have played prominent and problematic features in framing transgender historiography. Often, the critical role of trans people in shaping and contesting medical knowledge and practices has been overlooked. In this workshop, we propose to turn the question around and ask what transgender history says about the history of medicine. How can we use transgender history and trans medicine as a lens to analyze broader developments in medicine? What does trans medicine tell us about knowledge production, medical technologies, and clinical practices in modern medicine? This workshop seeks to illuminate the history of trans/medicine as a broad analytical field with a variety of actors (activists, patients, media, institutions, experts), technologies (paper, pamphlets, membership magazines, newspaper articles, diagnostic tools, hormones, scalpels), and practices (community meetings, parties, rallies, blood tests, clinical examinations, construction of nosologies). The workshop approaches history as a meaningful way of responding to pressing issues for trans people and trans medicine in the present.
Organizers: Ketil Slagstad, MD and Jacob Moses, PhD
...

Workshop on Transgender Politics & Medicine
More information to come!...
MoreSusceptibility, Surveillance, and Stigma: A Conversation on History, Infectious Disease, and Genomics
Robert H. Levi Leadership Symposium in Bioethics and Health Policy Susceptibility, Surveillance, and Stigma: A Conversation on History, Infectious Disease, and Genomics Modern public health practices for both infectious and noninfectious diseases rely heavily on screening technologies that can predict disease or susceptibility to disease before symptoms are present. Testing technologies have focused on transmission for infectious diseases and on inheritance or susceptibility for genetic diseases, with each category raising social and ethical issues for the people and populations tested and ‘labeled’ with disease. Increasingly, the distinctions between the two types of testing (and diseases) are dissolving, raising a new constellation of social and ethical issues. This public event will bring together a panel of experts to explore how screening technologies for infectious and noninfectious diseases have been used over time to understand and categorize not only disease, but also the people who have the disease. This moderated conversation will explore historical perspectives on (primarily genetic and infectious) disease causation and the relationship of causation to surveillance and stigma, with particular attention to the interplay with social and biological understandings of race. Panelists: Amy Fairchild, Dean and Professor, College of Public Health, Ohio State University Robin Scheffler, Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Quayshawn Spencer, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania Moderator: Jeremy Greene, William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, and Director of the Department of the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, Johns Hopkins University...
MoreBlack Beyond Data: Combating Racial Injustice Through the Digital Humanities: An Introduction
The Sawyer Seminar on Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data (a grant co-sponsored with Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine’s and the Department of Anthropology) presents “Black Beyond Data: Combating Racial Injustice Through the Digital Humanities: An Introduction” on Friday, September 17th at 9am. Register here for event link. For more information about the Black Beyond Data project, for which CMHSM’s own associate director Sasha White is co-PI, see the article here....
MoreBioethics: Reckoning with Structures
Featuring Dr. Robbie Shilliam and Dr. Jeffrey Kahn of Johns Hopkins University. To register, visit Zoom Webinar. Part of the "Epidemic//Endemic" year-long speaker series sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. Moderated by Dr. Alexandre White, Associate Director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. About the Epidemic//Endemic Speaker Series: The COVID-19 epidemic has starkly illuminated a series of structural forces in health and society that produce endemic disparities. As a result, older questions of inequalities, social relations, and political and economic ideology are now occurring in direct conversation with current issues associated with health and health care systems. The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins seeks to use this moment to bring scholars together for a yearlong discussion on the role of the COVID-19 epidemic in raising questions of wider importance to the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa. Note on proceedings: We will be using the Q&A option of Zoom Webinar to collect questions throughout the talk to be asked to our speakers in the last section of the event. If your question is selected, we will ask you to come on screen and converse directly with the speakers. If you do not wish to come on screen, please let us know when submitting your question....
MoreVERDANT MEDICINE: Hildegard’s Resonant Apothecary
VERDANT MEDICINE: HIlDEGARD'S RESONANT APOTHECARY, a livestream concert by medieval ensemble Alkemie and a roundtable conversation on the medicinal use of plants by composer, abbess, and apothecary Hildegard of Bingen.Register by Apr. 22 to receive mailed "intersensory program cards"!
MoreGlobal Health, Justice, & Activism
Featuring Dr. Gregg Gonsalves & Dr. Alexandre White
Fourth iteration of speaker series – Epidemic//Endemic: Medical Humanities & Social Medicine 2020-21
Zoom Webinar Registration
For more information on the series, see below.
The COVID-19 epidemic has starkly illuminated a series of structural forces in health and society that produce endemic disparities. As a result, older questions of inequalities, social relations, and political and economic ideology are now occurring in direct conversation with current issues associated with health and health care systems. The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins seeks to use this moment to bring scholars together for a yearlong discussion on the role of the COVID-19 epidemic in raising questions of wider importance to the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa.
...

Public Health and the State
Public Health and the State
Featuring Dr. Lawrence Brown & Dr. Graham Mooney
Fourth iteration of speaker series – Epidemic//Endemic: Medical Humanities & Social Medicine 2020-21
Zoom Webinar Registration
For more information on the series, see below.
The COVID-19 epidemic has starkly illuminated a series of structural forces in health and society that produce endemic disparities. As a result, older questions of inequalities, social relations, and political and economic ideology are now occurring in direct conversation with current issues associated with health and health care systems. The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins seeks to use this moment to bring scholars together for a yearlong discussion on the role of the COVID-19 epidemic in raising questions of wider importance to the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa.
...

Health Disparities and Structural Racism
Health Disparities and Structural Racism
Featuring Dr. Claire Decoteau & Dr. Lisa Cooper
Speaker series – Epidemic//Endemic: Medical Humanities & Social Medicine 2020-21
Zoom Webinar Registration
For more information on the series, see below.
The COVID-19 epidemic has starkly illuminated a series of structural forces in health and society that produce endemic disparities. As a result, older questions of inequalities, social relations, and political and economic ideology are now occurring in direct conversation with current issues associated with health and health care systems. The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins seeks to use this moment to bring scholars together for a yearlong discussion on the role of the COVID-19 epidemic in raising questions of wider importance to the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa.
...

Conference: Critical Conversations on Reproductive Health/Care: Past, Present, and Future
Place: Online Conference, event links will be sent to those who register. Dates: February 3-7, 2021
Register here! See below for draft schedule.
THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS
We are grateful for sponsorship from the Ilza Veith Endowment of the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, The Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, The Department of History, The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, The Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, The Center on Racism Immigration and Citizenship, The Center for Africana Studies, The Program in Latin American Studies, The Berman Institute of Bioethics, and the Department of Anthropology.DRAFT SCHEDULE:
WEDNESDAY, FEB 3 • THURSDAY, FEB 4 • FRIDAY, FEB 5SATURDAY, FEB 6 • SUNDAY, FEB 7 FULL SCHEDULE PDF WITH PANEL DETAILSWEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 3
1:30 pm- 2:45 p.m.
Panel One: Historical Perspectives on Sterilization, Reproductive Governance, and Obstetric Violence3:00-3:30 p.m.
Opening remarks from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine3:30- 5:00 p.m.

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 4
2:30 – 3:45 p.m.
Panel Two: Historical Perspectives on Birth Control and Abortion in Bolivia, Brazil, China, and the U.S.4:00- 5:15 p.m.
Panel Three: Reproduction, Racial Capitalism, and Family-Making in Barbados, South Africa, Mexico, and Canada6:00- 8:15 p.m.

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 5
1:00 – 2:15
Panel Four: Race-Making in Public Health and Clinical Practice in South Africa, Central America, and South America3:00 – 4:15
Panel Five: Pregnancy and Midwifery in Early Modern Medicine5:00- 6:30 p.m.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 6
11:00 a.m -12:15 p.m. Panel Six: Race, Pain, and Care: Issues in Public Health and Clinical Practice in the U.S. 1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. Workshop and Q&A with Rebecca Mwase, performance artist and cultural organizer 3:00- 4:30 p.m.
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 7
11:00 a.m -12:15 p.m.
Panel Seven: Global Perspectives on Reproductive Governance and Obstetric Violence1:00- 2:30 p.m.

3:00- 4:15 p.m.
Panel Eight: Historical Perspectives on Enslavement, Resistance, and Reproductive Health/Care in Brazil and the U.S.STATEMENT OF INTENT:
Scholars from across disciplines at the Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine are organizing a conference entitled “Critical Conversations on Reproductive Health/Care: Past, Present, and Future,” to take place during the first week of February 2021. This conference will bring together historians, anthropologists, pregnancy caregivers, artists, activists, and journalists to address key issues in the history of reproduction and the practice of reproductive medicine. We are particularly interested in how reproductions intersect with phenomenon such as, but not limited to: midwifery, parenting, and kinship-making; trauma in obstetric and abortion care; obstetric racism in the past and present; colonialism, migration, and displacement; and incarceration and detention. The virtual meeting will consist of a series of conversations spread over multiple days, and with multiple forms of interaction. It will feature “reverse keynotes,” or discussions of key new books by leading scholars, as well as panel discussions about pre-circulated papers. In addition, there will be a documentary film screening and discussion, as well as community-centered discussions with maternal healthcare activists and artist Rebecca Mwase. Recognizing that “reproduction” is a loaded term, in part, due to its capitalistic productive connotation, we intend to clarify the complexities of the term by interrogating reproduction as a site of intense struggle for healthcare access and justice; as the site of pressing issues regarding incarceration and decarceration; and as a site of the production and reification of settler-colonial and neo-colonial narratives about race, nation, and autonomy. We further recognize that activists of color have redefined modern-liberal, whitecentered, and individualistic notions of reproductive choice, and that they have done so by promoting the intersectional teachings of reproductive justice. Inspired by this tradition—and recognizing our limits in engaging with it and drawing on its analytics in our own work—we aim to recognize and learn from historic legacies while envisioning reproductive futures based on dignity, solidarity, and historically-informed collective action. We also aim to engage with the intimate aspects of reproductive care/taking, especially by unpacking complex notions of parenting, nurturing, and care. In the context of the COVID-19 crisis—which is laying bare the destructive logic of racial capitalism—we recognize that there is no way to “go back to normal.” We must instead envision a radically different future, guided by questions of what kind of society are we producing, reproducing, and nurturing. Can we insist on the value of reproductive labor without ascribing a moralized or normative view of caretaking? How do these discourses come to bear on reproductive health/care, past and present?CALL FOR PAPERS (CLOSED):
We welcome proposals for papers on various aspects of reproduction, from any epoch and place, such as (but not limited to) those that seek to:- Examine gender and reproduction in early modern and pre-modern times.
- Engage with the history and practice of nursing and midwifery, especially in light of the World Health Assembly’s designation of 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.
- Explore the boundaries between reproduction, parenting, and reproductive labor.
- Reimagine health/care by interrogating the ways that communities, healthcare systems, and universities engage with the social structures that define or provide access to high-quality reproductive healthcare; historicize the barriers to accessing high-quality reproductive healthcare.
- Expose the history and practice of obstetric violence; highlight grassroots, scholarly, and legal activism against violations of people’s dignity during reproduction and childbirth.
- Interrogate the use of racialized risk calculators in obstetric and reproductive healthcare.
- Examine affect and emotion in reproductive healthcare, including people’s responses to emergency medical procedures such as hysterectomy.
- Analyze how reproduction intersects with mass incarceration, decarceration, depopulation, and abolition.
- Address immigration and reproduction of the national body politic by analyzing detention and the use of violence to force the reproductive, care-based, and family choices of migrants, refugees, and their families; including, for example, the forced separation of migrants and refugees from their children.
Convocatoria para la presentación de ponencias: “Diálogos Críticos Sobre la Medicina Reproductiva: Pasado, Presente, y Futuro.”
Lugar: Online Fechas: Semana del 1º al 7 de febrero de 2021 Idiomas: Ingles y español Profesores, investigadores, y médicos de la Universidad de Johns Hopkins y la Escuela de Medicina de Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, MD), organizarán un congreso llamado “Diálogos Críticos Sobre la Medicina Reproductiva: Pasado, Presente, y Futuro”, el cuál se llevará a cabo durante la primera semana del mes de febrero del año 2021. Este congreso reunirá a historiadores, antropólogos, trabajadores de la salud maternal, artistas, activistas, y periodistas para abordar aspectos claves en la historia de la reproducción y la práctica de la medicina reproductiva. Nos interesa revisar especialmente la forma en que las reproducciones se interrelacionan con fenómenos como: la partería, la crianza de los hijos, los traumas en la atención obstétrica, la interrupción voluntaria del embarazo; el racismo obstétrico en el pasado y el presente; el colonialismo, la migración y el desplazamiento, así como la encarcelación y la detención de mujeres, migrantes y niños, entre otros temas. El encuentro virtual consistirá en una serie de charlas y conferencias durante varios días con multiples formas de interacción en línea. Contará con “discursos inaugurales al reves,” o discusiones de nuevos libros de destacados académicos, así como mesas de discusión sobre ponencias pre-circuladas. Además, el congreso contará con la proyección de un documental, una discusión con activistas de la salud materna, y la participación de la artista Rebecca Mwase. Reconociendo que “la reproducción” es una categoria de análisis compleja, en parte, debido a su connotación con la producción capitalista; nos proponemos clarificar las complejidades del término, interrogando la reproducción como un sitio de intensa lucha por el acceso a la asistencia y la justicia médica. También como el lugar de problemas apremiantes relativos a la encarcelación y la decarcelación; y como escenario de la producción y codificación de las narrativas coloniales y neo-coloniales sobre la raza, la etnicidad, la nación, y la autonomía. Por otra parte, reconocemos que los activistas de color han redefinido los paradigmas de los derechos reproductivos, que solían ser centrados bajo una mirada individualista, eurocéntrica y proveniente de una ideología moderno-liberal. Inspirados por esta tradición crítica -y reconociendo nuestros limites al comprometernos con ella y al utilizar sus análisis en nuestro propio trabajo-, nos orientamos a reconocer y aprender de los legados históricos, al tiempo que visualizamos futuros reproductivos basados en la dignidad, la solidaridad, y la acción colectiva históricamente informada. También nos comprometemos con los aspectos íntimos del labor y cuidado reproductivo, especialmente desentrañar las nociones complejas relacionadas con la crianza, el afecto y la labor emocional de los cuidados reproductivos. En el contexto de la crisis mundial del COVID-19, que ha expuesto la lógica destructiva del capitalismo racial, admitimos que no hay manera de volver a la “normalidad.” Por el contrario, consideramos que es necesario imaginar un futuro radicalmente diferente guiados por preguntas como: ¿Qué tipo de sociedad estamos produciendo, reproduciendo y fomentando?, ¿Podemos insistir en el valor del trabajo reproductivo sin atribuir una visión moralizada o normativa de la atención? ¿De qué manera estos discursos se relacionan con la salud/cuidado reproductivo, en el pasado y el presente? Son bienvenidas las ponencias sobre cualquier aspecto de reproducción, de cualquier época y lugar, tal como las que se anuncian a continuación:- Examinar el género y la reproducción en tiempos pre-modernos y en la modernidad temprana
- Involucrarse con la historia y la práctica de la enfermería y la partería, especialmente a la luz de la designación por parte de la Asamblea Mundial de la Salud del año 2020 como el Año
- Internacional de la Enfermera y la Partera.
- Explorar las diferencias entre la reproducción, la crianza de los hijos, y el labor reproductivo.
- Reconceptualizar la asistencia/médica, interrogando las maneras en que las comunidades, los sistemas de salud, y las universidades interactúan con los sistemas sociales que definen o proporcionan el acceso a la atención medica reproductiva de alta calidad.
- Exponer la historia y la práctica de la violencia obstétrica; resaltar el rol del activismo académico y legal contra las violaciones de la dignidad humana durante la reproducción y el parto.
- Interrogar la racialización de los “calculadores de riesgo” en la atención médica obstétrica y reproductiva.
- Examinar el afecto y la emoción en la asistencia medica, incluyendo las respuestas de las personas a los procedimientos médicos de emergencia como la histerectomía.
- Analizar cómo la reproducción se cruza con el encarcelamiento masivo, la decarcelación, la despoblación y la abolición. Abordar la inmigración y la reproducción del cuerpo político (body politic), analizando la detención y el uso de violencia para influenciar las decisiones reproductivas de los migrantes, los refugiados y sus familias; incluyendo, por ejemplo, la separación forzada de migrantes y refugiados de sus hijos.
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...MorePlace: Online Conference, event links will be sent to those who register. Dates: February 3-7, 2021

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS
We are grateful for sponsorship from the Ilza Veith Endowment of the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, The Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, The Department of History, The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, The Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, The Center on Racism Immigration and Citizenship, The Center for Africana Studies, The Program in Latin American Studies, The Berman Institute of Bioethics, and the Department of Anthropology.DRAFT SCHEDULE:
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 3
1:30 pm- 2:45 p.m.
Panel One: Historical Perspectives on Sterilization, Reproductive Governance, and Obstetric Violence3:00-3:30 p.m.
Opening remarks from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine3:30- 5:00 p.m.

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 4
2:30 – 3:45 p.m.
Panel Two: Historical Perspectives on Birth Control and Abortion in Bolivia, Brazil, China, and the U.S.4:00- 5:15 p.m.
Panel Three: Reproduction, Racial Capitalism, and Family-Making in Barbados, South Africa, Mexico, and Canada6:00- 8:15 p.m.

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 5
1:00 – 2:15
Panel Four: Race-Making in Public Health and Clinical Practice in South Africa, Central America, and South America3:00 – 4:15
Panel Five: Pregnancy and Midwifery in Early Modern Medicine5:00- 6:30 p.m.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 6
11:00 a.m -12:15 p.m. Panel Six: Race, Pain, and Care: Issues in Public Health and Clinical Practice in the U.S. 1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. Workshop and Q&A with Rebecca Mwase, performance artist and cultural organizer 3:00- 4:30 p.m.
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 7
11:00 a.m -12:15 p.m.
Panel Seven: Global Perspectives on Reproductive Governance and Obstetric Violence1:00- 2:30 p.m.

3:00- 4:15 p.m.
Panel Eight: Historical Perspectives on Enslavement, Resistance, and Reproductive Health/Care in Brazil and the U.S.STATEMENT OF INTENT:
Scholars from across disciplines at the Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine are organizing a conference entitled “Critical Conversations on Reproductive Health/Care: Past, Present, and Future,” to take place during the first week of February 2021. This conference will bring together historians, anthropologists, pregnancy caregivers, artists, activists, and journalists to address key issues in the history of reproduction and the practice of reproductive medicine. We are particularly interested in how reproductions intersect with phenomenon such as, but not limited to: midwifery, parenting, and kinship-making; trauma in obstetric and abortion care; obstetric racism in the past and present; colonialism, migration, and displacement; and incarceration and detention. The virtual meeting will consist of a series of conversations spread over multiple days, and with multiple forms of interaction. It will feature “reverse keynotes,” or discussions of key new books by leading scholars, as well as panel discussions about pre-circulated papers. In addition, there will be a documentary film screening and discussion, as well as community-centered discussions with maternal healthcare activists and artist Rebecca Mwase. Recognizing that “reproduction” is a loaded term, in part, due to its capitalistic productive connotation, we intend to clarify the complexities of the term by interrogating reproduction as a site of intense struggle for healthcare access and justice; as the site of pressing issues regarding incarceration and decarceration; and as a site of the production and reification of settler-colonial and neo-colonial narratives about race, nation, and autonomy. We further recognize that activists of color have redefined modern-liberal, whitecentered, and individualistic notions of reproductive choice, and that they have done so by promoting the intersectional teachings of reproductive justice. Inspired by this tradition—and recognizing our limits in engaging with it and drawing on its analytics in our own work—we aim to recognize and learn from historic legacies while envisioning reproductive futures based on dignity, solidarity, and historically-informed collective action. We also aim to engage with the intimate aspects of reproductive care/taking, especially by unpacking complex notions of parenting, nurturing, and care. In the context of the COVID-19 crisis—which is laying bare the destructive logic of racial capitalism—we recognize that there is no way to “go back to normal.” We must instead envision a radically different future, guided by questions of what kind of society are we producing, reproducing, and nurturing. Can we insist on the value of reproductive labor without ascribing a moralized or normative view of caretaking? How do these discourses come to bear on reproductive health/care, past and present?CALL FOR PAPERS (CLOSED):
We welcome proposals for papers on various aspects of reproduction, from any epoch and place, such as (but not limited to) those that seek to:- Examine gender and reproduction in early modern and pre-modern times.
- Engage with the history and practice of nursing and midwifery, especially in light of the World Health Assembly’s designation of 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.
- Explore the boundaries between reproduction, parenting, and reproductive labor.
- Reimagine health/care by interrogating the ways that communities, healthcare systems, and universities engage with the social structures that define or provide access to high-quality reproductive healthcare; historicize the barriers to accessing high-quality reproductive healthcare.
- Expose the history and practice of obstetric violence; highlight grassroots, scholarly, and legal activism against violations of people’s dignity during reproduction and childbirth.
- Interrogate the use of racialized risk calculators in obstetric and reproductive healthcare.
- Examine affect and emotion in reproductive healthcare, including people’s responses to emergency medical procedures such as hysterectomy.
- Analyze how reproduction intersects with mass incarceration, decarceration, depopulation, and abolition.
- Address immigration and reproduction of the national body politic by analyzing detention and the use of violence to force the reproductive, care-based, and family choices of migrants, refugees, and their families; including, for example, the forced separation of migrants and refugees from their children.
Convocatoria para la presentación de ponencias: “Diálogos Críticos Sobre la Medicina Reproductiva: Pasado, Presente, y Futuro.”
Lugar: Online Fechas: Semana del 1º al 7 de febrero de 2021 Idiomas: Ingles y español Profesores, investigadores, y médicos de la Universidad de Johns Hopkins y la Escuela de Medicina de Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, MD), organizarán un congreso llamado “Diálogos Críticos Sobre la Medicina Reproductiva: Pasado, Presente, y Futuro”, el cuál se llevará a cabo durante la primera semana del mes de febrero del año 2021. Este congreso reunirá a historiadores, antropólogos, trabajadores de la salud maternal, artistas, activistas, y periodistas para abordar aspectos claves en la historia de la reproducción y la práctica de la medicina reproductiva. Nos interesa revisar especialmente la forma en que las reproducciones se interrelacionan con fenómenos como: la partería, la crianza de los hijos, los traumas en la atención obstétrica, la interrupción voluntaria del embarazo; el racismo obstétrico en el pasado y el presente; el colonialismo, la migración y el desplazamiento, así como la encarcelación y la detención de mujeres, migrantes y niños, entre otros temas. El encuentro virtual consistirá en una serie de charlas y conferencias durante varios días con multiples formas de interacción en línea. Contará con “discursos inaugurales al reves,” o discusiones de nuevos libros de destacados académicos, así como mesas de discusión sobre ponencias pre-circuladas. Además, el congreso contará con la proyección de un documental, una discusión con activistas de la salud materna, y la participación de la artista Rebecca Mwase. Reconociendo que “la reproducción” es una categoria de análisis compleja, en parte, debido a su connotación con la producción capitalista; nos proponemos clarificar las complejidades del término, interrogando la reproducción como un sitio de intensa lucha por el acceso a la asistencia y la justicia médica. También como el lugar de problemas apremiantes relativos a la encarcelación y la decarcelación; y como escenario de la producción y codificación de las narrativas coloniales y neo-coloniales sobre la raza, la etnicidad, la nación, y la autonomía. Por otra parte, reconocemos que los activistas de color han redefinido los paradigmas de los derechos reproductivos, que solían ser centrados bajo una mirada individualista, eurocéntrica y proveniente de una ideología moderno-liberal. Inspirados por esta tradición crítica -y reconociendo nuestros limites al comprometernos con ella y al utilizar sus análisis en nuestro propio trabajo-, nos orientamos a reconocer y aprender de los legados históricos, al tiempo que visualizamos futuros reproductivos basados en la dignidad, la solidaridad, y la acción colectiva históricamente informada. También nos comprometemos con los aspectos íntimos del labor y cuidado reproductivo, especialmente desentrañar las nociones complejas relacionadas con la crianza, el afecto y la labor emocional de los cuidados reproductivos. En el contexto de la crisis mundial del COVID-19, que ha expuesto la lógica destructiva del capitalismo racial, admitimos que no hay manera de volver a la “normalidad.” Por el contrario, consideramos que es necesario imaginar un futuro radicalmente diferente guiados por preguntas como: ¿Qué tipo de sociedad estamos produciendo, reproduciendo y fomentando?, ¿Podemos insistir en el valor del trabajo reproductivo sin atribuir una visión moralizada o normativa de la atención? ¿De qué manera estos discursos se relacionan con la salud/cuidado reproductivo, en el pasado y el presente? Son bienvenidas las ponencias sobre cualquier aspecto de reproducción, de cualquier época y lugar, tal como las que se anuncian a continuación:- Examinar el género y la reproducción en tiempos pre-modernos y en la modernidad temprana
- Involucrarse con la historia y la práctica de la enfermería y la partería, especialmente a la luz de la designación por parte de la Asamblea Mundial de la Salud del año 2020 como el Año
- Internacional de la Enfermera y la Partera.
- Explorar las diferencias entre la reproducción, la crianza de los hijos, y el labor reproductivo.
- Reconceptualizar la asistencia/médica, interrogando las maneras en que las comunidades, los sistemas de salud, y las universidades interactúan con los sistemas sociales que definen o proporcionan el acceso a la atención medica reproductiva de alta calidad.
- Exponer la historia y la práctica de la violencia obstétrica; resaltar el rol del activismo académico y legal contra las violaciones de la dignidad humana durante la reproducción y el parto.
- Interrogar la racialización de los “calculadores de riesgo” en la atención médica obstétrica y reproductiva.
- Examinar el afecto y la emoción en la asistencia medica, incluyendo las respuestas de las personas a los procedimientos médicos de emergencia como la histerectomía.
- Analizar cómo la reproducción se cruza con el encarcelamiento masivo, la decarcelación, la despoblación y la abolición. Abordar la inmigración y la reproducción del cuerpo político (body politic), analizando la detención y el uso de violencia para influenciar las decisiones reproductivas de los migrantes, los refugiados y sus familias; incluyendo, por ejemplo, la separación forzada de migrantes y refugiados de sus hijos.
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Policing, Incarceration, and Health
Featuring Dr. Vesla Weaver & Dr. Carolyn Sufrin
Fourth iteration of speaker series – Epidemic//Endemic: Medical Humanities & Social Medicine 2020-21
Zoom Webinar Registration
For more information on the series, see below.
The COVID-19 epidemic has starkly illuminated a series of structural forces in health and society that produce endemic disparities. As a result, older questions of inequalities, social relations, and political and economic ideology are now occurring in direct conversation with current issues associated with health and health care systems. The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins seeks to use this moment to bring scholars together for a yearlong discussion on the role of the COVID-19 epidemic in raising questions of wider importance to the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa.
Next event: Friday, January 15th at 2pm
To register, visit: Zoom Webinar Registration
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Race and Health in the Classroom with Alexandre White & Iro Filippaki
Welch Library Building, Room 303 POSTPONEMENT OF 11/30 SESSION: RACE AND HEALTH IN THE CLASSROOM. The session is rescheduled for January 2019, with the purpose of fostering conversation amongst interdisciplinary tutors of race, health, and gender. More information on session content will be uploaded here. Any suggestions or comments, please email afilipp6@jhmi.edu...
MorePrecision and Uncertainty in a World of Data: Reading Group
Welch Library Building, Room 303
More details to come.
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More details to come.
International Order, Organizations, and Cooperation in the 2020’s
International Order, Organizations, and Cooperation in the 2020’s
Featuring Dr. Christy Thorton & Dr. Nistan Chorev
Speaker series – Epidemic//Endemic: Medical Humanities & Social Medicine 2020-21
Zoom Webinar Registration
For more information on the series, see below.
The COVID-19 epidemic has starkly illuminated a series of structural forces in health and society that produce endemic disparities. As a result, older questions of inequalities, social relations, and political and economic ideology are now occurring in direct conversation with current issues associated with health and health care systems. The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins seeks to use this moment to bring scholars together for a yearlong discussion on the role of the COVID-19 epidemic in raising questions of wider importance to the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa.
Next event: Friday, January 15th at 2pm
To register, visit: Zoom Webinar Registration
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Photo contest Picturing Pandemic Baltimore
NOW ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS through Nov. 21, 2020! (1) $650 grand prize, (2) $250 runners-up prizes. For details visit https://tinyurl.com/ppbalt
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Epidemic Narratives: Data, Visualization, and the Mediation of Care
Kirsten Ostherr and Kim Gallon Co-Sponsored with the Sawyer Seminar on Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data
Featuring Dr. Kirsten Ostherr & Dr. Kim Gallon Speaker series – Epidemic//Endemic: Medical Humanities & Social Medicine 2020-21 Zoom Webinar Registration For more information on the series, see below. The COVID-19 epidemic has starkly illuminated a series of structural forces in health and society that produce endemic disparities. As a result, older questions of inequalities, social relations, and political and economic ideology are now occurring in direct conversation with current issues associated with health and health care systems. The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins seeks to use this moment to bring scholars together for a yearlong discussion on the role of the COVID-19 epidemic in raising questions of wider importance to the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa.

Viral Justice: Pandemics, Policing, and Public Bioethics
Ruha Benjamin Co-Sponsored by the Berman Institute of Bioethics & Department of Sociology
Featuring Dr. Ruja Benjamin Speaker series: Epidemic//Endemic: Medical Humanities & Social Medicine 2020-21 Zoom Webinar Registration For more information on the series, see below. The COVID-19 epidemic has starkly illuminated a series of structural forces in health and society that produce endemic disparities. As a result, older questions of inequalities, social relations, and political and economic ideology are now occurring in direct conversation with current issues associated with health and health care systems. The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins seeks to use this moment to bring scholars together for a yearlong discussion on the role of the COVID-19 epidemic in raising questions of wider importance to the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa.

Theater of War presents Antigone in Ferguson
Antigone in Ferguson was conceived in the wake of Michael Brown Jr.’s murder in 2014, through a collaboration between Theater of War Productions and community members from Ferguson, MO. Antigone in Ferguson fuses a dramatic reading by leading actors of Sophocles’ Antigone with live choral music performed by a choir of educators, activists, police officers, youth, and concerned citizens from Ferguson and New York City. The performance is the catalyst for panel and audience-driven discussions about racialized violence, structural oppression, misogyny, gender violence, and social justice. This event will have a focus on racialized police violence and health inequity in the Baltimore area, and is open to the public.
This event is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Registration is required–please visit AIFBALTIMORE.EVENTBRITE.COM to register.
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Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers
The Johns Hopkins University Program in Arts, Humanities, & Health is excited to partner with the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Theater of War Productions to present Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers via ZOOM on Sunday, May 24th at 7pm. This innovative project links dramatic readings by acclaimed actors of scenes from ancient Greek plays in conversation with front-line nurses, doctors, medical students, first responders, and other health care providers to produce healing, constructive discussions about the unique challenges and stressors of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Johns Hopkins’ Program in Arts, Humanities, & Health recognizes the healing and transformative power of the arts and humanistic inquiry and engages the Johns Hopkins medical campuses and surrounding communities with programming that fosters empowerment, equity, and community. This event leverages Theater of War Productions’ formidable record engaging hundreds of thousands of people around the world through meaningful performances with Johns Hopkins’ national and international leadership in responding to COVID-19. The May 24th event will also serve as a pilot for innovative and interactive programming that addresses the complex and often traumatic experience of medical providers dealing with the pandemic, in ways that can be expanded to benefit providers across the country and world in this time of crisis.
The two-hour event begins with a powerful reading of scenes from ancient Greek plays by actors Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, Zombieland), Frances McDormand (Fargo, Almost Famous), Frankie Faison (The Wire, The Good Wife), and David Strathairn (The Bourne Ultimatum, Lincoln), carefully curated to address themes and issues that medical providers are facing during the pandemic. Then, four panelists–members of the JH medical community–respond to what they heard in the preceding performance that resonated with their experiences caring for patients during the pandemic. Following the community panelists’ remarks, a skilled facilitator will then prompt the audience to join the discussion with a series of questions encouraging reflection and dialogue about the complex themes raised by the plays.
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Medicine and Emotion: Empathy and Beyond
THIS EVENT IS PODSTPONED DUE TO COVID-19. MORE INFORMATION WILL BE POSTED HERE SOON.
West Reading Room, Welch Medical Library, 1900 East Monument Street Free event, open to all Sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine The last decade saw the blending of emotion theories and scientific inquiry. Once considered to belong outside of science and medicine in particular, emotions and affective expressions are currently present in research on medical education, training, and even diagnosis. This event brings together scholars from different disciplines in order to discuss the role of affect in medical education, and the future of a medical practice that uses affective expression as a possible resource. For questions or to RSVP, contact afilipp6@jhmi.edu Part I: Workshop for medical practitioners, RSVP required, places limited (1pm-3pm) In the first part of the event, an experiential workshop will be led by Christiana Giordano and Greg Pierotti who use theoretical and historical texts as a way to weave them into the empirical and blur the lines between the two. Through their Affect Theatre, Giordano and Pierotti provide an active thinking and acting space, addressing the question of how medical practitioners remain affected by worlds encountered after leaving the field of work and research. Part II: Panel: Feeling and medical practice, open to all (3:15-5pm) In the second part of the event, Giordano and Pierotti will discuss the relationship between emotion, medicine, and methodology, and Kelly Underman will discuss the gynecological teaching programs of pelvic examination, showing how they embody the tension between scientific thought and human emotion in medical education. Speakers and workshop leadersChristiana Giordano is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (2014), won the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing (2016), and the Boyer Prize in Psychoanalytic Anthropology (2017). Her current research investigates new ways of rendering ethnographic material into artistic forms. Greg Pierotti is Assistant Professor in Experimental Dramaturgy at the University of Arizona. He coauthored The Laramie Project (2000), Laramie: 10 Years Later (2008), and The People’s Temple (2004), which have garnered Humanitas, Bay Area Theatre Critics awards, and an Emmy nomination. He has coauthored The Moment Work Book (2018) with members of Tectonic Theater Project. His research investigates dramaturgical practices that deal with problems of narrative and truth claims in theatre of the real. Kelly Underman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Drexel University. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. Her first book, Feeling Medicine: How the Pelvic Exam Shapes Medical Training will be published with NYU Press in August 2020. Her work has also appeared in Social Science & Medicine, Gender & Society and Sociological Forum. ...MoreTHIS EVENT IS PODSTPONED DUE TO COVID-19. MORE INFORMATION WILL BE POSTED HERE SOON.
West Reading Room, Welch Medical Library, 1900 East Monument Street Free event, open to all Sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities & Social MedicineOne Health Care Community One Book
A year-long celebration of reading
One Health Care Community One Book proposes to engage members of Johns Hopkins Medicine in a year-long celebration of reading and discussing one story.
“Fidelity,” our inaugural year 2019-2020
“Fidelity,” by Wendell Berry, award-winning author of the National Humanities Medal, is a beautifully written story about the struggle of a family in a rural farming community to cope with medical care provided to a relative at the end of life.Who
Sponsored by AfterWards: An Interprofessional Program in Narrative Medicine, the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, and the Program for the Arts, Humanities, and HealthWhy
Research shows that narrative medicine- enhances empathy and reflection
- promotes personal and professional growth
- fosters holistic care and compassion
- builds community across the health care professions
- promotes self-care
What
Throughout the year, members of the Hopkins health care community will have opportunities to engage with “Fidelity” through- keynote address
- book conversations
- book talks
- other arts presentations
Where
Practically everywhere throughout Johns Hopkins Medicine! For more information, contact onebook@jhu.edu Lauren Small lsmall2@jhmi.edu Jeremy Greene jgree115@jhmi.eduHow
· Start a conversation. You are warmly invited to read and discuss “Fidelity” with a group of your friends or colleagues anytime and anywhere you like. Download a discussion guide here or contact us to arrange for a facilitator. Contact onebook@jhu.edu for more information. Refreshments provided. · Hear a book talk. RSVP’s are requested but not required. Contact onebook@jhu.edu for more information. · Attend a cultural event. RSVP’s are requested but not required. Contact onebook@jhu.edu for more information.Get started
Download “Fidelity” by clicking on image below and begin reading now! Copies also available at the Bayview Harrison Medical Library and the Welch Medical Library.
You are invited
- to a talk by Dr. Margaret Chisolm of the Department of Psychiatry, titled “Living the good life: lessons from Wendell Berry’s Fidelity,” on January 24 at 12:15 pm, in the Eudowood Room, on the 8th floor of the Children’s Center.
- to a book talk by Dr. Brian Volck, titled “Reading Wendell Berry in Honduras: the neglected role of love in community health,” date and time TBA.
One Book News & Mentions

One Health Care Community One Book proposes to engage members of Johns Hopkins Medicine in a year-long celebration of reading and discussing one story.
“Fidelity,” our inaugural year 2019-2020
“Fidelity,” by Wendell Berry, award-winning author of the National Humanities Medal, is a beautifully written story about the struggle of a family in a rural farming community to cope with medical care provided to a relative at the end of life.Who
Sponsored by AfterWards: An Interprofessional Program in Narrative Medicine, the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, and the Program for the Arts, Humanities, and HealthWhy
Research shows that narrative medicine- enhances empathy and reflection
- promotes personal and professional growth
- fosters holistic care and compassion
- builds community across the health care professions
- promotes self-care
What
Throughout the year, members of the Hopkins health care community will have opportunities to engage with “Fidelity” through- keynote address
- book conversations
- book talks
- other arts presentations
Where
Practically everywhere throughout Johns Hopkins Medicine! For more information, contact onebook@jhu.edu Lauren Small lsmall2@jhmi.edu Jeremy Greene jgree115@jhmi.eduHow
· Start a conversation. You are warmly invited to read and discuss “Fidelity” with a group of your friends or colleagues anytime and anywhere you like. Download a discussion guide here or contact us to arrange for a facilitator. Contact onebook@jhu.edu for more information. Refreshments provided. · Hear a book talk. RSVP’s are requested but not required. Contact onebook@jhu.edu for more information. · Attend a cultural event. RSVP’s are requested but not required. Contact onebook@jhu.edu for more information.Get started
Download “Fidelity” by clicking on image below and begin reading now! Copies also available at the Bayview Harrison Medical Library and the Welch Medical Library.
You are invited
- to a talk by Dr. Margaret Chisolm of the Department of Psychiatry, titled “Living the good life: lessons from Wendell Berry’s Fidelity,” on January 24 at 12:15 pm, in the Eudowood Room, on the 8th floor of the Children’s Center.
- to a book talk by Dr. Brian Volck, titled “Reading Wendell Berry in Honduras: the neglected role of love in community health,” date and time TBA.
One Book News & Mentions

Psychiatry As Social Medicine Workshop
Psychiatry as Social Medicine: History of Psychiatry Workshop
To register, click here or scroll to the bottom of the page.
The problem of integrating the social world into the medical body has appeared and reappeared many times in the history of psychiatry. While psychiatry has always been seen as one of the more evidently ‘social’ branches of medicine, this social ground is often seen as a liability to a clinical field seeking to ground itself more firmly in a biological science of mental illnesses and cures. In this workshop we aim to explore the “social” in psychiatry in its many forms – the embeddedness of its knowledge in social practices, its organization of social spaces, and its normative function in society regarding crucial social distinctions, such as deviant and usual, or pathological and normal.
November 21, 2019, 5pm – Film Screening & Panel
Mountcastle Auditorium, Preclinical Teaching Building, East Baltimore Campus
Film Screening of Crownsville Hospital: From Lunacy to Legacy
Panel featuring R. Todd Stevens, director of the film
November 22, 2019, 1pm – Workshop
West Reading Room, Welch Library Building, East Baltimore Campus
Featured speakers listed on the poster below; program can be found here.
Events sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine, the Norwegian Research Council, and the University of Oslo Institute of Health & Society
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Conference – Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogues
Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogues November 15-16, Baltimore Attendance is free for everyone. To register, scroll down or click here. For the program of the event, click here.
THIS CONFERENCE IS CO-SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR MEDICAL HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL MEDICINE AND THE ALEXANDER GRASS HUMANITIES INSTITUTE
Virtually all institutions are sustained through production of narratives (Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory). These narratives reflect the power relations and ideologies of institutions and reveal the politics of the larger structures that govern them. In the light of the ongoing global forced migration, socio-political negotiations of gender and trauma, and persistent urban inequalities worldwide the concept of trauma bears transdisciplinary interest and impact. Trauma’s theorizations, for example Freud’s notion of hysteria, the Great War epidemic of shell shock, the Holocaust survivor’s syndrome, Cesaire’s argumentation on postcolonial, racialized trauma, and the recent concept of “institutional betrayal” (Freyd 2008) reinforced or deconstructed institutional narratives of medical, legal, psychoanalytical, sociological, and political nature. Even though institutional presence, and the narratives it engenders, bears unambiguous influence on the traumatized individuals and collectives, this presence is insidious in its workings. If, as Michael Rothberg poignantly writes, “trauma implies some ‘other’ mode of living on,” it is worth examining the ways through which institutional practices, theories, and narratives support, enable, or challenge the “living on” of the traumatized. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of trauma was already referred to as “debased currency” by Ruth Leys, on the basis of how often, differently, and in some cases arbitrarily the term was used. Almost twenty years later, trauma studies as a field is somewhat polarized. Cathy Caruth’s largely dominant humanities view on the difficulty to narrate trauma has been challenged by a number of critics. These critics argue that the apparent narrative fragmentation of trauma and the western-centric approach of the majority of trauma theories blur the roles of victim and perpetrator. At the same time, Bessel Van der Kolk’s recent psychiatric argument that traumatic experience leaves an imprint on the brain’s memory system that defies all potential for representation has also divided the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies. In any case, the socio-historical, anthropological, and cultural theorizations of institutional roles and narratives and the ways that they influence traumatized individuals need further exploration. Following this line of thought and relying on the work that has been solidified by JHU affiliates and practitioners working in the Baltimore area in the past decades, the purpose of this conference is to address important questions on a global scale: How are institutions positioned to manage psychic and bodily trauma and how does trauma manifest and develop under institutional narratives of power? What are the experiences of trauma that are caused, for example, by living under racist rhetoric and structures? How is the experience of trauma changed when it is enacted by social institutions, and when it has institutional power behind it? And, importantly, what kind of a narrative is trauma itself, and how does it shape the content and methodology of different disciplines? Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Dr Jennifer Freyd Timetable TBA
THIS CONFERENCE IS CO-SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR MEDICAL HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL MEDICINE AND THE ALEXANDER GRASS HUMANITIES INSTITUTE

Sawyer Seminar
The Sawyer Seminar Series on Precision and Uncertainty in A World of Data has a new website! Visit https://worldsofdata.org for updated information on their upcoming events.
Sawyer Seminar:
Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data
The Departments of Anthropology and the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine will be launching a two-year Sawyer Seminar on the topic of Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data in the 2019-2020 academic year. This semester (Spring 2019), we are holding a series of reading group meetings to connect with faculty and students across the different divisions at Johns Hopkins University and beyond, in an effort to structure the seminar’s two-year course.
We envision for the Sawyer seminar to prompt conversations around what kinds of ethical and social issues are new about our Big Data moment, what has carried over from the past, and what kinds of approaches might help us extend our understanding of this moment’s specificity. On this page, we will be posting notes on our reading group meetings. If you have attended one of our meetings and would like to contribute to this page with your notes, please let us know! If you would like to attend our events, get on our mailing list to stay informed, or get in touch with us with any questions or comments, please send an email to Canay Özden-Schilling (ozden@jhu.edu).
Naveeda Khan
Veena Das
Jeremy Greene
Canay Özden-Schilling
EVENT CALENDAR: 2019 SPRING
2/13/2019: Automating Inequality: A discussion of Virginia Eubanks’s book
3/6/2019: Privacy and Data: A Discussion with Anita Allen (UPenn)
4/10/2019: Big Data and Resource Allocation: A Discussion with Sanmay Das (Washington University) (Washington University)
5/6/2019: Algorithms and Accountability: A Discussion with Juliet Floyd (Boston University) and Matthew Jones (Columbia University)
NOTES FROM OUR PREVIOUS DISCUSSIONS
4/10/2019 | Big Data and Resource Allocation: A Discussion with Sanmay Das | “Data Sciences and Society” Reading Group
For this meeting, we read two articles by Sanmay Das, both of which tackled the issue of how to improve the efficiency of the allocation of homelessness interventions. Dr. Das is interested in the application of optimization onto social issues, from matching markets to social networks to finance. These two articles focusing on homelessness, a topic we discussed earlier in the semester after reading Automating Inequality, gave us a welcome opportunity to see what was inside the algorithms trusted to govern social life, so often black-boxed in social analyses.
At the start, Dr. Das offered a brief overview of the two papers but concentrated on describing the case study on Homelessness Services in a metropolitan area. In addition to describing the technical issues such as the way data were collated or the model of complexity developed and the features of the algorithms for alternatives in allocation of scarce resources there was a fair amount of discussion in his summary of the issues relating to ethics and fairness and the central role of what he called human interpretability. Canay Özden-Schilling provided a detailed comment on the papers followed by a lively discussion in which various questions were fielded by Das.
Canay’s comments:
What we see when we open the black box of resource allocation algorithms is a matching system. In this paper, Das and his collaborators (from here on only “Das” for simplicity) work with data acquired from the homelessness services of a major metropolitan area. The algorithm currently in effect matches the specific interventions that alleviate homelessness (in this case five interventions ranging from simple prevention methods to the most comprehensive “permanent housing” tool) with a heterogenous population with diverse needs. But is the system accomplishing what it has set out to do? Is it, in fact, reducing homelessness to the extent possible? Das measures this by asking a counterfactual question: would the outcome have been better if different households were matched with different interventions? What the paper does is a reshuffling of cards—simulating different matching scenarios and evaluating the aggregated numbers of the homeless in each hypothetical case. The proxy for continued homelessness is re-entry into the homeless system within two years. The proxy for how a household would behave as a response to a different intervention is how other households with similar characteristics have historically behaved as a response to that particular intervention. Running a simulation with these proxies and a better optimization method, the reentry to homelessness does indeed drop to 37% from the actual 43%.
Put simply, the current system is offering too much assistance to someone who needs only a little and offering too little to someone who needs more. There is, Das argues, a huge number of households that could be helped by tweaking the algorithm for better matches. He adds, “The right approach is then to specify appropriate optimization goals, arrived at through the social processes of policy-making, which could be based on both efficiency and equity considerations.” The juxtaposition of efficiency and equity strikes me in this formulation. In our discussion on Automating Inequality, we dwelled on how some algorithmic tools conflate past marginalization with future high-risk status—hence perpetuating a feedback loop where marginalized people get more marginalized. That is to say, we talked extensively about bias, but perhaps not enough about efficiency, even though the two seem to be closely linked. Elsewhere in the paper, Das relays a striking finding—that when the inefficiencies are fixed in the allocation system, those who are helped more seem to be “those who stand out as being more in need.” Then I have to wonder: is inefficiency a form of bias? Is bias a form of inefficiency? How and where does bias occur separately from inefficiency?
This also gets back to one of the questions our reading group asked in our earlier discussion: is bias a factor of the design of algorithms or a factor of their implementation? The problem may very well be at the design level, where allocation designers choose to collect information on certain variables in trying to assess (e,g., the creditworthiness of a household) or in the way they code these variables (e.g., based on their assumptions about what kinds of living, housing, and parenting are proper). It seemed to me that in the two papers we read, the implication was that the inefficiency problem occurred at the level of implementation instead, since Das worked with the same design and data as provided to him by the homelessness service. Collecting different data would require a new set of eyes—new questions to ask the population, hence new qualitative research. This brings me to my next question: how would Das’s quantitative work, which improves upon the system’s existing quantitative approach, interface with qualitative research?
For instance, Das describes a very interesting instance of making an adjustment to his optimization algorithm for equity and fairness purposes. As a result of optimizing the allocation, Das suspects during the simulations, some households might have moved too much down the ladder of help, which would create an undue fairness issue. To correct for that, Das goes back to the algorithm to add a constraint for how much a singular household can move up and down as a result of the optimality adjustment. This struck me as a fundamentally qualitative kind of work on Das’s part—and endeavor to ask whether the quantitative work has fairness consequences that the algorithm may have been blind to. The questions, then, are compounded: is qualitative work reserved for human eyes that need to keep watch on harmed groups and constantly add constraints to the algorithm? Can we teach the machine to detect equity issues? If we are able to do so, doesn’t the defining and teaching of equity still constitute qualitative work? Is Das’s example getting to an answer to the question of how we fix bias—constant monitoring of the algorithm both qualitatively and quantitively, human and machine alike?
Das’s papers sing the praises of fixing small inefficiencies. As he puts it, “Small efficiencies in keeping people housed yield disproportionately large reductions in homelessness.” I am struck by the humility of this statement, how it presents the optimizer’s work as important and modest at the same time—not always the language we encounter in the worlds of data, machine learning, and algorithms. But this, I can’t help but notice, stands at odds with the assured title of the same paper, “Solving Homelessness.” The way I use “solve” in everyday life might not be the same as, for instance, “solving for x” in mathematics—or perhaps it is. In any case, this makes me wonder: can optimization really solve homelessness (or solve for homelessness)? Is there a place where inefficiency-fixing cannot go?
Veena’s discussion notes:
Das responded to these fascinating issues by first acknowledging that to speak of solutions of homelessness is full of problems citing one of his students who was asked if the problem of homelessness could be solved by 2020; she replied that under a particular definition of homelessness one could claim that but then new problems will come rushing in 2021. The further point Das made was that it is becoming increasingly clear that there are different notions of fairness and it is mathematically impossible as the various impossibility theorems show, to reconcile these different notions of fairness into one grand theory. For example statistical fairness might conflict with fairness to the individual. Hence human deliberation and judgement is key to understanding how to make the debate on fairness and justice in the case of homelessness operative in a given contest. Finally, one of the points Das emphasized in response was that whichever interventions you make, there will be some people who will be adversely affected by the intervention. So there is a central role for rights to appeal and efforts to modify the algorithms in view of the actual experiences of hose adversely affected. The final decision on particular cases can only be taken by those who are actually working with the homeless. This is why Das explained that he likes to work with those who have genuine stakes in the problem – transplant surgeons in cases of algorithms for kidney matches; case workers and public health specialists for working on the homeless and so on.
In the question & answer session that followed, there was discussion around four main issues. First, how does one take care of the bias in the data given that the data on the extent and type of homelessness was filtered through the case worker’s decisions. Second, what was the rationale for taking a two-year duration and would it affect the findings if the duration was reduced to one year or extended to three years, for instance. Third what was the role of counterfactuals in the model—were these equivalent to the thought experiments in philosophy that were useful for clarifying a thought? Fourth, what kinds of systematic changes was the algorithm suggesting? Was there some way to identify specific types of households whose outcomes were improving?
Das responded that, indeed, it had taken them a whole year to clean the data and that the data available from these records links homeless service records with requests for assistance through a regional homeless hotline. By using the administrative data on a weekly basis for 166 weeks and using counterfactual data to ask if a household would have reentered the homeless system within 2 years, they found that their model was well-calibrated. They used a two-year period because using a one-year period generated data that was very noisy while a three-year period had too many variables. The paper, Das said, was in the nature of a proof of concept and a case study, meant to generate further discussions of fairness and ethical issues and long-term dynamics of systems that use this kind of predictive modules. At the same time, he said, since current practices of allocation into different kinds of housings were not evidence-based, there was need to have widespread discussion of these kinds of issues among different constituencies. On the question of the ability of the algorithm to identify specific types of households that were improving Das responded that their initial attempts to find such households did not yield a “nice” characterization and he took the suggestion that they might want to do a baseline comparison with a random allocation to see how different outcomes would be under the current mechanism from a random one. There was some general discussion of how qualitative methods might be added to these models and Das responded that they did plan to interview caseworkers but not until they had very well-defined questions and they could generate some resources to help with the work of the caseworkers (e.g providing money for additional personnel for the hotline which was facing budget cuts). The caseworkers were very overworked and often very stressed with the pressures of work. But his colleagues and he would love to see some ethnographies of how case workers actually made decisions on allocations—what were their thought processes?
Overall, the papers generated a very lively discussion across boundaries of various disciplines showing that faced with urgent societal issues, different kinds of methodologies and theoretical preoccupations can be effectively calibrated to address issues of ethics.
***
3/24/2019 | Privacy and Data: A Discussion with Prof. Anita Allen | “Data Sciences and Society” Reading Group
Discussion notes by Canay Özden-Schilling, Naveeda Khan, & Veena Das:
This meeting marked the first time our reading group hosted a guest presenter, a practice we’ll continue at our next meetings this semester. We were fortunate to be joined by Prof. Anita Allen from the University of Pennsylvania, a lawyer and philosopher of law with a longstanding interest in and distinguished contribution to the theory of privacy. For the meeting, our 21 attendees read recent articles by Allen herself, Ian Kerr, and Helen Nissenbaum—all from a recent journal issue exploring the changing meanings of privacy in our data-laden moment.
In her opening discussion, Prof. Allen laid out a recent history of privacy law along with the evolution of her own thinking on the matter. Prof. Allen’s interest is in a comprehensive theory of privacy goes back to the 1980s, a pre-Internet moment when the chief privacy concerns centered on reproductive health, the right to die, and LGBTQ rights. In Uneasy Access, her first book and notably the first book-length treatment of privacy, Allen championed privacy as a women’s right—a contentious notion for feminists to whom privacy seemed to be a dangerous vehicle for the cover-up of oppression. Regardless Allen has held on to the notion that privacy as an inalienable part of freedom and is impassioned in her belief that liberal states can never allow its neglect or sacrifice.
By the same coin, Allen also argues that people in liberal states have the responsibility to protect their own privacy. This notion, as Allen pointed out, has been endlessly complicated by the emergence of the Internet and the rampant voluntary sharing of data online. In our Big Data moment, of course, the individual protection of one’s own data no longer seems straightforward. These considerations helped Allen’s thinking evolve away from her original conception of privacy in Uneasy Access, which focused on limited access to individuals’ information, towards a more positive theory that incorporates the rights to measures that will secure individuals’ privacy, to be secured by governments. We opened the floor for discussion on this note.
We began our general discussion with the article we read by Allen, which takes up a 2017 decision by India’s Supreme Court (Justice K.S. Puttaswamy vs Union of India) on the controversial biometric identification system, Aadhaar, but the constitutional question before the court was if privacy was a constitutionally protected right given that the Constituent of India does not specifically mention privacy as a right. The Court ruled that privacy was a fundamental right derivable from the constitution but in its application to Adhaar it did not strike off the controversial Adhaar bill though it struck off some of the government notifications on the necessity to produce Aadhar care for receiving services. In the course of the judgment The Court cited a number of North American and European philosophers of privacy including Allen herself. In the article, Allen discusses the influence that philosophers might have on the evolution of privacy’s definitions. Some of our participants pointed to the grounding of the decision in jurisprudential thinking in India (despite citations of Allen and other legal philosophers) since the court derived the constitutional right to privacy from an expanded notion of life. It was pointed out that this expanded notion carried particular relevance in India since the Bhagwati decision during the National Emergency had held the right to life as a gift of the state and not as a natural right. This prompted Allen to specify her interest in the case as that of an American scholar, to whom this decision is a hopeful illustration of what longstanding liberal ideas can accomplish today and how old privacy theory can be repurposed to address our data-laden problems. Allen expressed her satisfaction for the Court’s recognition of poor people’s rights to privacy, but lamented the missed opportunity of defining privacy as a positive social right. It still felt to certain participants that this was a missed opportunity on Allen’s part to acknowledge that privacy is not simply an import from the Western liberal tradition but may truck with other adjoining notions—such as those of propriety, appropriateness of boundaries—within other traditions as well as a result of years of activism against the harassment by the state that the rules for use of Aadhar had entailed. The need to think not in terms of a concept and its widening field of application but lateral relations among concepts to enrich thinking and analyzing of our present was also an important consideration.
Following the interests of many in the group, our discussion then moved generally towards privacy in the biomedical and clinical fields. Allen took a question on the complications of drawing the boundaries of privacy in genomics research where one’s volunteered genetic data also pertain to those of family members. Other participants addressed the hypothesis from Ian Kerr’s article that human cognition is not a sine qua non to privacy violation—that an AI cognizer can also violate privacy. One of our medical practitioner participants argued against this hypothesis by pointing out that the bots that determine a patient’s need for vaccinations, for instance, have been privacy-enhancing. Other participants countered this point by questioning how capable or willing institutions have historically been to limit AI’s applications to their intended uses. Allen offered that in the medical field, as elsewhere, the legal definitions of privacy will have to compete with practitioners’ cultural definitions, which might not always neatly map onto institutional expectations—that people always find a way to get around privacy even though they are aware of its importance and the legal protections afforded to it. She is curious why people work around privacy, what compels them, and called on anthropologists to offer perspectives on this tendency with different case studies. Our participants also pointed out that this context-specific nature of privacy echoed the work of Helen Nissenbaum, who, in the third article we read for the event, developed the notion of privacy’s “contextual integrity”—that privacy can only ever be grasped with reference to the specifics of the “sender, recipient, subject, information type, and transmission principle.”
We circled back to what can be accomplished in the legal field to address global privacy concerns. Allen gave vivid examples from recent bioethical panels she has participated in in the U.S. and the E.U. to highlight how philosophers can help shape this debate. The challenge, she pointed out, is not to pass just any privacy law—the U.S., for instance, has more privacy laws in place than anywhere else. The challenge is to get an adequate law enacted in a timely fashion given the fast evolution of the technologies we are trying to monitor. We thank Prof. Allen for sharing with us her globally attuned perspective on the intersection of law, privacy, and data.
***
2/13/2019 | A discussion of Virginia Eubanks’s Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St. Martin’s Press, 2018) | “Data Sciences and Society” Reading Group
Discussion notes by Naveeda Khan:
I enjoyed reading this book. I was moved by it in many ways, by its attention to the specters of the poor in American history, its nuanced profiles of the poor as singular and collective in turn in contemporary U.S., and its serious call to social action. It is not often that I read scholarly books that diagnose our present so presciently, showing how inequality is being scaled up and up and up, how it has become almost inexorable, and takes up the call to keep up the good fight. Others are made much more breathless by the scaling, marked by their handwringing. Although I would not put Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction in this last category, I did think that she seemed to have less interest in historical and social context, which led her to provide only a few portraits of affected people who could do little but feel stunned by the wizardry of the new algorithms ripping through their lives. In Eubanks one could see that even as the ambitions to automate social services got more elaborate and algorithms more complex, they were still embedded within institutional settings and political contexts, driven by state and individual interests and desires, and informed by longstanding biases that hadn’t gone away with automation but had become more embedded within its structures.
But praises and comparisons aside it was precisely Eubank’s focus on the history of the poor that garnered her some criticism at the start of the discussion on her book at our Data Sciences and Society Reading Group last Wednesday. What is so new about this moment if it is only an extension of how the U.S. has always dealt with its poor? Why isn’t this more modestly claimed as a study of state bureaucracy? And if there isn’t anything new about this moment then why even bring up “high-tech tools” in the title? Why not go further into the hardware and design aspects of these tools that O’Neil at least does? We decided that some of the promise of the title was realized in chapter four of Automating Inequality, “The Allegheny Algorithm” in which Eubanks provides the three key data based components that comprise the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), notably, outcome variables, predictive variables and validation data. At the same time the author’s focus in insistently upon what is sought within existing bodies of data and how (controversial mining practice of only seeking out highly correlated data points of statistical significance) rather than where does this data come from in the first place, who has access to it and for what varied purposes.
While speaking to designers of algorithms and automated systems would gain us ready insight into their healthy doubts and skepticism about their products, this book wasn’t about tooling and creating error free systems by a few artisanal designers. It is about how such tools, which, ready or not, were captured, operationalized and managed by states. It provided the dimension of the state that we missed in O’Neil in whose book encounters between individuals and systems that fail them happened more haphazardly, whereas with Eubanks’s introduction of the dimension of the state the aggregate effect of such automation came into clearer focus.
Our discussion of Eubanks kept returning to the question of how does the past endure into the present? Is it really the case that history holds as unchanging, the return of the same, the poorhouse made into the digital poorhouse in the present? At the level of the U.S.’s proclaimed ethos of self-help and ambivalent attitudes towards the poor, one can make an argument for continuity as Eubanks does but at the level of the relationship between tools and states there are discernible shifts. If tools were created in the past to purge the numbers of poor dependents, it was initiated by states seeking a variety of ends, from the elusive search for efficiency to trying to help people. But now tools are created within the context of a widespread suspicion of government. Thus the work of automation now is not just to cut the welfare rolls but to render government irrelevant. This felt to us as an important difference from the past as it makes automation more hydra-headed, directed at the poor and at government, raising the question of what else is under attack and being undermined.
We returned to our vexation with the anti-technical bias of the book, for instance the lack of acknowledgment that centralization may be beneficial in some instances, and the need for Eubanks to have larger data sets for her research to nuance her denunciatory stance. Perhaps then we would find that high tech tools also serve the poor but different groups within them or through appeal to different aspects of their identities other than as poor, perhaps as white, male, vulnerable, pleasure-seeking individuals? Questions were raised about communities of interest within Reddit, sub Reddit, the dark web, who may be on welfare and are facing the negative effects of automation, but who have other dimensions to their lives. It is salutary that she gives the poor a face here but do they seek only this face?
Finally, the one chapter that went into any depth into the actual mechanics of an automated system, chapter four, captured a different kind of fear than automation, impersonality of services, break down of care without any possibility of human intervention and triage. The chapter also captured the fear of being modulated against one’s wishes or even conscious knowledge through interface with the machine. We got the example of the welfare counselors who started to question their judgment in terms of determining the risk level of children within families if their scores were far off from those generated by the machine with its deep backlog of data. Instead of questioning or even overriding the machine’s decision counselors began to doubt themselves and rerun evaluations to see if they could match the machine. This self-modulation, this fear of having one’s insides reshaped, offered a moment in which the present was not merely a recapitulation of the past but something new, unknown, and potentially terrifying. On reflection, this subject deserves more attention than Eubanks gave it. Our discussion sub-group, mostly anthropologists and historians, several with STS interests, and two clinicians, felt that we would like to encourage the participation of those with interest in neuroscience and cognitive science to understand and diagnose this fear of manipulation that includes the manipulation of so called inner selves.
Discussion notes by Jeremy Greene:
I agree with Naveeda that Eubanks has produced a remarkable book added greatly to the collective conversation of our interdisciplinary reading group, especially layered onto our recent reading of Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction. Eubanks’ book is elegantly structured, well-written, and compelling, and it has the potential to engage with broad popular and policy audiences. As Naveeda describes, Eubanks is able to capture in her case studies a nuanced sense of the historical and social context in which empirical knowledge about poverty is used to frame institutions that continue to separate and stigmatize. Several people in our discussion group of historians, anthropologists, clinicians, and bioethicists wondered, however, why Eubanks was not willing to look under the hood and show the reader how, exactly, these algorithms worked, in the way that O’Neil seemed consistently eager to do. Were she present in the room (as we hope she may be in a future Sawyer Seminar event), we would have like to ask her how she might productively open the “black box” and expose the innards of the technologies she describes. Better yet, perhaps, would be to put Eubanks and O’Neil in conversation with one another, as each seems to have a piece of the puzzle which the other lacks: where O’Neil really could benefit from more engagement with historical and social context, Eubanks could benefit from more engagement with the workings of the technologies themselves.
Our discussion ended with an open question regarding known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns regarding algorithms and inequality. On the one hand, how do we learn the answers to questions we already knew to be important? E.g., changing definitions of privacy, rising saturation of data surveillance, the encoding of prior biases through computation, etc. On the other hand, what new questions might emerge from these engagements? E.g., how are new collectives being formed through these technologies? Whose voices are amplified through techniques of big data and machine learning, and whose are silenced? What forms of labor are being displaced, and what new forms are emerging? How do we attend to the changing interfaces through which people become data and/or have their understandings and future behaviors shaped?
Discussion notes by Veena Das & Canay Özden-Schilling:
Our group’s discussion on Automating Inequality centered on the relation between human bias and bias introduced into decision models based on predictive algorithms. The book demonstrates how bias weaponizes these tools against poor populations. Is the problem with the design of these algorithms—e,g., the choice of certain variables, the omission of others, discriminatory assumptions about proper ways of parenting and organizing domestic space? In what ways does a certain (overwhelmingly white, middle-class) demographic become the standard for evaluating those who are at risk in decisions to determine, for instance, eligibility for social services, allocation of scarce resources over housing, and identifying which children are at risk of abuse in their home environment? Or do the problems arise from poor implementation? We found that this was an empirical question to explore that left us wanting more extensive qualitative research as well as development of mixed methods for opening up a wider set of issues. For instance, how would race play as a factor if the sites chosen for analysis of documents and interviews included poor black neighborhoods? Could one use the qualitative research as generating further hypotheses for designing surveys over a random sample of households to determine the weight of different variables as the decision models are implemented at the local level? Since the population on whom the research was conducted consisted of families who were already under surveillance either because of their own needs to access social services, or were reported for child abuse or for minor crimes, it would not be possible to assess whether there were endangered children in families who had not come under the eye of the social service or criminal justice apparatus. These comments were not offered as criticism of the book per se but as issues that arose from the study.
Several of our participants were intrigued by the book’s portrayal of continuities in poverty management and discrimination against the poor from prior eras to our current moment. Can punitive resource allocation be attributed specifically to the work of algorithms? By the same coin, are algorithms simply the henchmen of neoliberal governance? Some of us have pointed out our experience with Big Data practitioners and students who believe in the unprecedented revelatory powers of Big Data—that it allows us to see reality in ways never seen before. But if, as Virginia Eubanks argues, the digital database is a continuation of yesteryear’s poorhouse (except now scaled up and everlasting), what does that mean for the specificity of our Big Data moment? We thought that one answer might have to do with contemporary processes of data collection—the scale of surveillance, voluntary vs. involuntary sharing of data, and ownership of one’s data. We returned time and again to the relationship between Big Data and ethics. We agreed that the two were necessarily bound up with one another and that there was no way to extract the social from Big Data to arrive at neutral tools. There could be no universal ethical framework for the design and implementation of Big Data; a simple plea to return to human judgment and banish the machines wouldn’t do either. Bias in data and algorithms can take diverse forms; the ends of manipulation, be it by governments or corporations, are not uniform either. One possibility is that different kinds of questions arise over different scales of data – thus, for instance, the questions arising from population-level genomics might be very different from questions arising from the level of data contained in individual clinical records, or files in the criminal justice system. While in the current milieu questions of ethics seem closely tied up with distributional questions related to fairness and justice, were there other regions of ethics that could be unearthed from other traditions of philosophy, bioethics, and the social sciences? We are looking forward to continuing to explore this variety and the futures of resource allocation in future meetings.
...

Indigenous Environments & the Anthropocene
(click for more details)
Title: Indigenous Environments & the Anthropocene
What: a symposium and roundtable discussion
Who: Featuring Candis Calison of University of British Columbia, Timothy Neale of Alfred Deakin Institute, & Zoe Todd of Carleton University
When: Monday, April 8, 2019
Where: 3rd Floor, Welch Library Building, 1900 East Monument Street, 21205
...

Symposium: Medical Humanities in Policy and Practice
Mergenthaler 111, Homewood Campus
in collaboration with the Concentration on Medicine, Science, & Humanities

Media & Monsters: Two Centuries of Frankensteins
The Work of Diagnosis: Medical Concepts in Social Life
In collaboration with the Department of Anthropology

30th Anniversary of “Seize Control of the FDA”
Bloomberg School of Public Health, Sommer Hall
In collaboration with the Office of Public Health Practice and Training

Introduction:
- Joshua M. Sharfstein, MDVice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement Professor of the Practice Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Panel: A Landmark Protest, 30 Years Later
Moderator:- Chris Beyrer MD, MPHDesmond M. Tutu Professor Director, Center for Public Health and Human Rights Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
- Peter StaleyAIDS Activist
- Ann NorthropVeteran journalist and Activist Longtime member of ACT UP (New York) Co-host of news program Gay USA
Panel: Legacy of “Seize Control of FDA” for Public Health
Moderator:- Jeremy A. Greene, MD, PhDProfessor of Medicine and the History of Medicine Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
- Susan S. Ellenberg, Ph.D.Professor of Biostatistics Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy (secondary) Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics Perelman School of Medicine University of Pennsylvania
- Gregg Gonsalves, PhDAssistant Professor, Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases Yale School of Public Health
- Mark HarringtonExecutive Director Treatment Action Group
- David Kessler, MD, JDFormer Commissioner US Food and Drug Administration
In collaboration with the Office of Public Health Practice and Training

Introduction:
- Joshua M. Sharfstein, MDVice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement Professor of the Practice Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Panel: A Landmark Protest, 30 Years Later
Moderator:- Chris Beyrer MD, MPHDesmond M. Tutu Professor Director, Center for Public Health and Human Rights Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
- Peter StaleyAIDS Activist
- Ann NorthropVeteran journalist and Activist Longtime member of ACT UP (New York) Co-host of news program Gay USA
Panel: Legacy of “Seize Control of FDA” for Public Health
Moderator:- Jeremy A. Greene, MD, PhDProfessor of Medicine and the History of Medicine Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
- Susan S. Ellenberg, Ph.D.Professor of Biostatistics Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy (secondary) Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics Perelman School of Medicine University of Pennsylvania
- Gregg Gonsalves, PhDAssistant Professor, Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases Yale School of Public Health
- Mark HarringtonExecutive Director Treatment Action Group
- David Kessler, MD, JDFormer Commissioner US Food and Drug Administration
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Lessons for the Future
Bloomberg School of Public Health, Sheldon Hall
In collaboration with Berman Institute of Bioethics

In collaboration with Berman Institute of Bioethics

Advocacy and Action: Supporting the Needs of Our Immigrant Neighbors
School of Nursing, Room 320
In collaboration with SOURCE and the Program in Racism, Immigration, & Citizenship

In collaboration with SOURCE and the Program in Racism, Immigration, & Citizenship

125th Anniversary of the School of Medicine Events
Welch Library Building, West Reading Room
...

Health, Medicine, & Civil Unrest
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN!
Register here.
NEW: Preliminary schedule of events: pdf.
NEW: Conference Visitor Packet: pdf
Please direct any questions or inquiries to hopkinsmedicalhumanities@gmail.com.
In lieu of a registration fee, please donate to the East Baltimore Historical Library.
- Visit http://www.fusiongroup.org/donate and click donate.
- Click "add special instructions to the seller" and type "East Baltimore Historical Library" to donate specifically to the library.
- Enter in the amount.
- Log into paypal or enter your credit card information.
What: CONFERENCE: Health, Medicine, & Civil Unrest When: May 4th & 5th, 2018 Where: Johns Hopkins Medical Campus, Baltimore, MD Why: Civil unrest raises important issues for public health and medicine. Emergency medical services, health care facilities, and health departments play a role in responding to outbreaks in the short and long term. Yet historical trauma, persistent health inequalities and unequal access to medical care contribute to the root causes of unrest. From multiple disciplinary and global perspectives, this conference explores the impact of civil unrest on health outcomes and the moral responsibility to work toward solutions for eliminating structural violence, preventing civil unrest, and achieving a more just society.


- Visit http://www.fusiongroup.org/donate and click donate.
- Click "add special instructions to the seller" and type "East Baltimore Historical Library" to donate specifically to the library.
- Enter in the amount.
- Log into paypal or enter your credit card information.
What: CONFERENCE: Health, Medicine, & Civil Unrest When: May 4th & 5th, 2018 Where: Johns Hopkins Medical Campus, Baltimore, MD Why: Civil unrest raises important issues for public health and medicine. Emergency medical services, health care facilities, and health departments play a role in responding to outbreaks in the short and long term. Yet historical trauma, persistent health inequalities and unequal access to medical care contribute to the root causes of unrest. From multiple disciplinary and global perspectives, this conference explores the impact of civil unrest on health outcomes and the moral responsibility to work toward solutions for eliminating structural violence, preventing civil unrest, and achieving a more just society.
