Reproduction, Health, and Society

Understanding that human reproduction imbricates a range of intersecting political, economic, social, racialized, biological, and historical forces, the Program in Reproduction, Health, and Society engages with scholarship and practice that critically examine how these forces come to bear on individuals, institutions, and communities.  Whether governing reproduction through norms and policies that differentially value people’s worth as social and biological reproducers or that differentially restrict or promote people’s abilities to determine their reproductive wellbeing, structures of society profoundly and inequitably shape the material, corporeal, political and social experiences of reproduction and kinship.   

Scholars at our center whose work falls under this program bring expertise from anthropology, public health, direct clinical care, sociology, history, gender studies, literature, sociology, critical race studies, and bioethics, among other.  From these disciplinary backgrounds, scholars also engage with community partners as we seek to understand and intervene on processes that have sustained inequities and shaped how people experience the multi-faceted dimensions of social and biological reproduction.  

Right Fallopian tube by Susan Lockhart

Researchers

Joanna Behrman

Graduate Fellow

Talia Katz

Graduate Fellow

Jacob Moses, CMHSM Postdoctoral Fellow

Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-22)

Carolyn Sufrin, Associate Director

Associate Director, Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine; Professor, SOM

Upcoming Events

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Past Events

May 5, 2023
11:00 am / 2:00 pm

Exploring the Opioid Industry Documents: Research Communities, Educational Opportunities, and Community Data

**See the “Schedule for May 5th” (below) for links to the Webinar recordings** The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) invites you to Exploring the Opioid Industry Documents: Research Communities, Educational Opportunities, and Community Data. This event will feature a webinar where scholars will discuss how they successfully used OIDA and other Industry Documents Library (IDL) collections. We will also conduct a hands-on virtual workshop that will help researchers navigate and explore the OIDA’s under-researched and rich collections. Millions of once-private industry documents have recently been made public as a result of the nationwide litigation related to the opioid crisis.  Over the past year a joint effort between UCSF’s IDL and the Johns Hopkins University has made them all accessible online: a repository comprised of opioid manufacturers, pharmacies, wholesalers, and consulting firms – with more to come. In addition to revealing the central role these companies and pharmacies played in the opioid crisis, the documents also provide a rich set of sources for scholars in health policy, medical sociology, medical anthropology, business ethics, public health, law, legal history, history of medicine, history of public health, business history, and more. Schedule for May 5th

Webinar

For the full webinar recording, click here. The recordings for the individual talks can be found below.

 

11:00 – 11:45   Webinar Plenary Talk:

“Voices and Stories in the Digital Archive: Reflections on the Making of Pushing Cool and Insights for Storytelling from the Opioid and Tobacco Archives”

 

Keith Wailoo, PhD – Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs, Princeton University

A recording of Keith Wailoo’s talk can be found here

11:45 – 12:15   Introduction to the Industry Documents Library (IDL) and Opioid Industry

Documents Archive (OIDA)

Kate Tasker, IDL Managing Archivist, UCSF

                        A recording of Kate Tasker’s talk can be found here

12:15 – 12:45  Researchers’ Experience Using OIDA

Adam Koon, PhD; MPH – Assistant Scientist, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

“The Opioid Industry Documents Archive: New Directions in Research”

A recoding of Adam Koon’s talk can be found here

Gaurab Bhardwaj, PhD; MBA – Associate Professor of Strategy, Babson College

“Searching the Opioid Industry Documents Archive”

A recording of Gaurab Bhardwaj’s talk can be found here

12:45 – 1:00       Break

 

Workshop

1:00 – 2:00   Exploring the OIDA Collections: Search Strategies and Discussion (open to registered attendees only)

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April 28, 2023

New “For the Medical Record” Episode with Jessica Leigh Hester

A new episode of the Center's podcast "For the Medical Record" will be published on Friday, April 28! In this episode, we talk to science journalist and Johns Hopkins History of Medicine PhD student Jessica Leigh Hester about her recent book Sewer (Bloomsbury, 2022). We discuss the medical, social, and structural intricacies of sewers – and sewer stewardshipas well as Jessica’s PhD research on graverobbing and the display of human remains. Thanks for listening!  Subscribe to our podcast “For the Medical Record” to be alerted when new episodes drop – you can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
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April 14, 2023

New “For the Medical Record” Mini Episode with Courtney Thompson

A new episode of “For the Medical Record” will be published April 14! In one of our mini episodes based on colloquium talks given here at Hopkins, we speak to Courtney Thompson about the paper that she presented at the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine & Technology’s colloquium series titled "A Calculus of Compassion: Emotion, Medicine, and Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century America." Subscribe to our podcast “For the Medical Record” to be alerted when new episodes drop – you can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
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March 31, 2023
12:00 pm

New “For the Medical Record” Episode with Walker Magrath

A new episode of “For the Medical Record” will be published March 31! Join us in our conversation with medical student Walker Magrath about his recent work as a scholarly concentrator in the history of medicine. In 2022, Walker published an article in Annals of Internal Medicine titled The Fall of the Nation’s First Gender-Affirming Surgery Clinic. In this episode, we discuss the history of this gender-affirming surgery clinic here at Johns Hopkinshow studying the medical humanities and medical history can improve medical education and practiceand the continued struggle for equity in LGBTQIA+ healthcare. Thanks for listening!  Subscribe to our podcast “For the Medical Record” to be alerted when new episodes drop – you can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
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March 15, 2023
1:00 pm

New “For the Medical Record” Mini Episode with Alexandre White Released

A new episode of “For the Medical Record” will be published March 15! In one of our mini episodes based on colloquium talks given here at Hopkins, we speak to Alexandre White about his book Epidemic Orientalism: Race, Capital, and the Governance of Infectious Disease (Stanford University Press, 2023). The launch of this book was presented on February 7, 2023 as part of the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine & Technology's colloquium series. Subscribe to our podcast “For the Medical Record” to be alerted when new episodes drop – you can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
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February 28, 2023
12:00 pm

New “For the Medical Record” Episode Released

A new episode of "For the Medical Record" will be published February 28! Join us in our conversation with Caleb Alexander, MD, MS, and Jason Chernesky, PhD, about the Opioid Industry Documents Archive. Both based at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Alexander is a practicing internist and epidemiologist, and Dr. Chernesky is a historian of medicine and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Opioid Industry Research Postdoctoral Fellow. Taking the OIDA's collection of documents as the starting point, we discuss commercial determinants of health, geographies of empathy across American drug epidemics, what litigation documents can tell us about public health, and writing the “second draft” of the story of the opioid epidemic. Subscribe to our podcast "For the Medical Record" to be alerted when new episodes drop - you can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
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October 21, 2022
Media, Data, & Health / Medicine, Science, & Humanities / Race, Racism, & Health
10:00 am / 6:00 pm

Conference: Achieving Health Equity in a World of Data

For more information and to join us live, or to watch a replay, visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/events/achieving-health-equity-data-conf/
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June 2, 2022
Critical Global Health Studies / Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society

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.
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June 1, 2022
Critical Global Health Studies / Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society

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.
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May 6, 2022
Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society / Media, Data, & Health / Race, Racism, & Health / Reproduction, Health, & Society
9:30 am / 6:00 pm

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/ 

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