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

November 12, 2024
4:00pm

Levi Symposium on The Value(s) of Disposability in Health Care

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

This year’s Levi Symposium will question these perceived trade-offs, disentangling legitimate evidential and moral reasoning from the inertia of convenience. Convening scholars and practitioners in bioethics, clinical practice, environmental justice, practice innovation, and health policy, we aim to host a multi-disciplinary exploration of how we can elucidate policy pathways that harmonize clinical safety, efficacy, and efficiency with sustainability. For more information and to register: https://bioethics.jhu.edu/disposability
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April 9, 2024
Critical Global Health Studies / Reproduction, Health, & Society
12:00pm – 5:00pm

Find the Midwife Project Launch

Join us as we use documentary film to connect midwifery's past and today's maternal health crisis. You are invited to join us for project launch events on Tuesday, April 9th across two Baltimore campuses. 12pm - Homewood Campus - Clipper Room, Shriver Hall 3pm - East Baltimore Campus - Room N431, School of Nursing, with reception to follow. The events will be offered in a limited hybrid format via zoom webinar - Click here to join the events! No registration is necessary, just click on the link at the time of the events and you'll be able to join us online. You can submit a question via the Q&A function on the zoom webinar. Your questions will be read aloud for the project team to answer as time allows.   Sponsored by The Johns Hopkins Center for Advanced Media Studies, Department of the History of Medicine, and the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine.
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December 3, 2023
Critical Global Health Studies / Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society / Medicine, Science, & Humanities / Race, Racism, & Health
All Day

CFP: New Perspectives in the History of Child Health

**2024 Workshop and Special Issue: Call for Proposals**

Call for paper proposals for an international workshop on child health history hosted at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, on June 21-22, 2024. There is support available for travel and lodging. The workshop is sponsored by: The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the University of Fribourg

In bringing together junior and senior scholars working on issues surrounding children’s health and healthcare, the workshop aims at developing a series of articles for a special issue journal focusing on child health and children’s experiences of health and illness from a historical perspective. Though the field of children’s history has grown over the past thirty years, it deserves more attention from historians of medicine and public health. Therefore, the workshop aims to underscore the importance of child health as a field of research and point to its potential for historical and historiographical interventions in the history of medicine and public health. In addition to historians, we encourage paper proposals from scholars working at the intersections of histories of children’s health, disability studies, non-western areas of study, healthcare disparities, health policy, sociology, anthropology, or other related fields.  We especially encourage submissions from scholars whose work focuses on child health in low- and middle-income non-Western countries. Applicants must be prepared to submit a full working draft of their paper prior to the meeting. The workshop will be led by Jason Chernesky (Johns Hopkins University; jcherne2@jhmi.edu),  Janet Golden (Rutgers University; jgolden@camden.rutgers.edu), and Felix Rietmann (University of Fribourg; felix.rietmann@unifr.ch).

Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and a brief CV here. The deadline for submission is Friday, December 1, 2023. All questions can be addressed to Jason M. Chernesky: jcherne2@jhmi.edu

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September 6, 2023
Arts, Humanities, & Health / Medicine, Science, & Humanities
8:00am – 2:00pm

Visual Histories of Humor and Health: A Virtual Symposium

Register here for this virtual event! Join us for this virtual symposium exploring visual histories of humor and health, organized by Christine Slobogin, Katie Snow, and Laura Cowley in collaboration with Johns Hopkins's Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. These discussions of medically adjacent art will examine the role that visual humor has had and continues to play in healing and healthcare, as well as in experiences of illness, injury, and death. This event aims to enrich interdisciplinary approaches to the medical humanities, humor studies, and histories of visual culture and art. This event will feature ten-minute short-form talks exploring vibrant intersections of humor, visual culture, and the health humanities, each followed by ample time for discussion, questions, and feedback involving all attendees. The speakers showcased are contributors to an upcoming edited volume, but the event is open to all, and we encourage people who are not contributors to join us and get involved. We will schedule regular breaks and aim to accommodate participation across multiple time zones. You are welcome to join late or leave early. Please reach out with any access needs at cslobog1@jh.edu.
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July 14, 2023

New “For the Medical Record” Mini Episode with Zubin Mistry

A new episode of “For the Medical Record” will be published July 14! In one of our mini episodes based on colloquium talks given here at Hopkins, we speak to Zubin Mistry about the paper that he presented at the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine & Technology’s colloquium series titled “The Problem of Monastic Gynecology: Reproduction, Religion and Medicine in Western Europe before 1100.” 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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June 15, 2023

New “For the Medical Record” Mini Episode with Rana Hogarth

A new episode of “For the Medical Record” will be published June 15! In one of our mini episodes based on colloquium talks given here at Hopkins, we speak to Rana Hogarth about the paper that she presented at the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine & Technology’s colloquium series titled “The Science of Skin Color: Miscegenation and the Eugenic Gaze in the Early Twentieth Century.” 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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May 5, 2023
11:00am – 2:00pm

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 recording 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
12:00pm

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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