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CHCI Medical Humanities Network

Research Projects

All Research

Focus Project: Covid-19 Response

  • Care for the Polis

    Columbia University

    Goal: To bring scholars, designers, curators, and caregivers from across the humanities, medicine and design to share their research and experience on the intersections of health, policy, publics, and the built environment.

  • Community Sabbatical Research Leave Program

    University of Texas Humanities Institute

    Goal: The Community Sabbatical Research Leave Program provides $5,000 grants to help leaders of non-profit organizations in Central Texas carve out the time and intellectual space for deeper reflection, research, and discussion about a question or issue that participants are seeking to resolve for their organization and those it serves; this year’s grants will focus on projects related to Covid-19.

  • Graphic Medicine in the Time of COVID-19

    Creighton University

    Goal: Introduce health sciences students to frameworks of health, care, and illness found in graphic medicine (memoirs) to help them process the implications of the pandemic.

  • Narrative Medicine Blog

    Columbia University

    Goal: To virtually share resources in the humanities, literature & the arts to foster creative and reflective work to nourish individuals, build teams, and reduce social isolation.

  • Plagues, Epidemics, and Culture: Histories of Crisis and Care

    Arizona State University

    Goal: These talks will address how we might draw lessons and envision equitable futures of care for our own local and global communities.

  • Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus

    University of Texas Humanities Institute

    Goal: To circulate and create an archive of poetry that feels timely in the time of coronavirus, no matter when it was written.

  • Project COPE: Chronicling Healthcare Providers' Pandemic Experiences

    University of South Caroline School of Medicine Greenville

    Goal: The objective of this study is to understand the experiences and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on wellness, moral injury, and life experiences of healthcare providers in real time rather than after the event as previous disasters have reported.

  • South Carolina Pandemic Healthcare Ethics Advisory Council

    South Carolina Hospital and Medical Associations

    Goal: To develop recommendations for state institutions regarding the distribution of scarce resources (such as ventilators and medications) during the Covid-19 pandemic.

  • Synapsis Covid-19 Special Issue

    Columbia University

    Goal: Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal has produced a special issue dedicated to the humanistic questions arising from the Covid-19 pandemic.

  • Synapsis Special Issue: Justice-in-Education and Covid-19

    Columbia University

    Goal: For incarcerated and formerly incarcerated scholars to report on their auto-ethnographic experience of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown.

  • Translational Humanities for Public Health

    Rice University

    Goal: To document and disseminate humanities-based responses to COVID-19, to help others benefit from them, and to bring tools for understanding the human experience to communities in need of support during this time of crisis.

Symposia and Lecture Series

  • Black Lives in the Era of Covid-19

    Columbia University Institute for Research in African-American Studies

    Goal: 10-episode podcast series on health inequities during the pandemic

  • Chronic Conditions: Knowing, Seeing & Healing the Body in Global Africa

    University of Kansas

    Goal: To offer novel ways of thinking about the historical, cultural, and structural processes that have given rise to chronic conditions among Africans, African immigrants, and African Americans.

  • Death and Dying in the Medieval World

    University of Tennessee

    Goal: The 2019 Marco Symposium, held at the MARCO Institute for Medieval and Renaissance studies, will consider Death and Dying in Medieval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

  • Explorations in the Medical Humanities

    Columbia University

    Goal: A lecture series and workshop exploring how approaches that emerge from a historiographical or intepretive framework are different from those coming from the physician's black bag.

  • Medical Humanities Seminar

    University of California, Merced

    Goal: We are seeking to introduce, expand, and complicate the meaning of the medical humanities and are excited about the possibilities for collaboration across the San Joaquin Valley in California, nationally, and globally.

  • Mellon-Sawyer "Suffer Well" Lecture Series

    University of California, Irvine

    Goal: The Sawyer Seminar is a yearlong series that will offer lectures, symposia and presentations from invited speakers that explore human suffering in its various forms and to develop future scholarly projects that confront directly the place of suffering in human experience.

  • Narrative Medicine Lunch and Learn (2018-2019)

    Wake Forest University

    Goal: To invite nationally recgnized writers, scholars, and artists engaging with narrative medicine to give readings and conduct capacity-building workshops.

  • Narrative Medicine: The Story, Health, and Healing Initiative

    Wake Forest University

    Goal: To present a broad look at narrative medicine, including narrative in clinical practice, curriculum and teaching, and honing practices of litsening, observation, and storytelling.

  • Producing a Worthy Illness: Personal Crowdfunding Amidst Financial Crisis

    University of Washington

    Goal: This collaboration studio grant examines health-related fundraising through crowdsourcing websites from the perspectives of public health, medical anthropology, and media and communication studies.

  • Stanford Seminar with Allan Brandt

    University of Miami

    Goal: Offer public and accessible lecture on the medical humanities and promote the understanding of medicine as a humanist profession.

Focus Project: Aging

  • Age and the Body

    University of the Witwatersrand, Wiser

    Goal: Exploring attitudes toward aging and researching a range of medical responses to the facts of aging and death, by collecting narratives from the elderly that record and reflect on 20th century sexual practices, organ and transplant histories, chronic illness, neuro states, and pathographies, all the while including ordinary South Africans and analyses of two notable South Africans—Christiaan Barnard and Nelson Mandela.

  • Aging and its Tropes

    Columbia University

    Goal: The Columbia University project on aging “Aging and its Tropes” focuses on the study of “aging” as a concern brought together at the interface of elderly experience, care, and questions of social justice, as it brings together the medical and the carceral. Our research and discursive sites comprise both “complete and total institutions” and non-institutional settings: the hospital, the prison, the arts, the street.

  • Border Crossing, Piloting, Aging

    Chinese University of Hong Kong

    Goal: Questioning the received notion of Chinese culture as particularly reverent toward the elderly through a rigorous examination of the historical record, while studying how attitudes and behavior toward the elderly have changed over the past fifty years.

  • Culture and the Reproduction of Myths About Aging

    King's College London

    Goal: Surveying the extent to which recent memoirs concerned with old age contest Western stereotypes and how far they reinforce them. How can social innovation help redress institutionally ingrained patterns? And how might Western society use memoir more effectively to engage with the realities of old age?

  • Falls Narrative Study

    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Goal: Examine how older adults narrate falls by collecting and analyzing narratives about falls written by older adults.

  • Medical Humanities: Diverse Inquiries

    Dartmouth College

    Goal: To emphasize collaborations between the liberal arts, medical education, and clinical care.

Research Collaborations

  • Creative Health Collaborations

    Arizona State University

    Goal: Creative Health Collaborations is a hub at ASU that will develop and foster transdisciplinary, integrated appraoches to health. Partners: Mayo Clinic in Arizona, King's College and the University of New South Wales (PLuS Alliance), and Dublin City University.

  • Critical Medical Humanities: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Medicine

    Colby College

    Goal: This project creates opportunities for Colby faculty to publicly lead in the field of critical medical humanities and supports their efforts to promote both scientific advancement and racial justice through their research and teaching.

  • Evolution of Child Health Interventions in Tanzania

    University of Dar es Salaam

    Goal: To examine the evolution of public health interventions which households, communities, states and Christian Missions devised to improve the welfare and survival of children in Tanzania from the late pre-colonial period in the 1850s to 2010.

  • Health Humanities Initiative

    Arizona State University

    Goal: Developing research capacity, bringing humanities programming to the clinic, and training residents in focused humanities electives. Collaborators: Center for Huamnities in Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Arizona.

  • Health Humanities Laboratory

    Texas A&M University

    Goal: The Health Humanities Laboratory examines emerging debates in the cross-disciplinary field of Health Humanities.

  • Health and Medical Humanities Initiatives at the University of Texas-Austin

    University of Texas at Austin

    Goal: To develop a variety of medical and health humanities programming at our University, with the long-range goal of establishing a health and humanities center under the aegis of the UT-Humanities Institute in collaboration with Dell Medical School.

  • Living Assessments

    University of Kent

    Goal: Understanding the experiences and impact of health and social care assessments on children and families in the UK

  • Medicine, Race, Democracy Lab

    Rice University

    Goal: We engage with neighborhood institutions like community centers, churches, temples, charities, and schools that house clinics and offer services to patients seeking care beyond the Texas Medical Center.

  • Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities

    Columbia University

    Goal: Online journal in medical and health humanities, co-edited by Dr. Arden Hegele and Dr. Rishi Goyal. Visit us at medicalhealthhumanities.com

  • The Past, Present and Future of US Global Health Partnerships in Africa

    University of Washington

    Goal: This projet connects diverse faculty and international speakers to examine "partnership" as a programmatic priority and affective ideal in global health initiatives between the United States and African countries, and beyond. Details: simpsoncenter.org/mat

  • The Transformative Potential of Disaster: Ethics of Care in Puerto Rico after Maria

    Kalamazoo College

    Goal: Did health care workers’ experiences during and after Hurricane Maria transform their ethics of care?

  • Transitions: Living and Dying Well

    University of Tennessee

    Goal: To teach students about the meaning of death and the dead for the living, over time and across cultures; about the significance to human communities (past and present) of care; and about the often invisible emotional and psychological labor that care entails.

  • colLAB: Bridging East Africa's Digital Health Divides

    University of Kansas

    Goal: This humanities-based lab explores how virtual resources are transforming the ways East Africans experience health, global connections, and socila change. Partners include Community Tool Box and Mufindi Orphans.

Curriculum Development

  • Cross-Disciplinary Minor in Disability Studies

    James Madison University

    Goal: To engage students in an examination of the many ways disability is defined and constructed.

  • Cross-Disciplinary Minor in Medical Humanities

    James Madison University

    Goal: To provide students with a humanistic and social study of illness, health and the body, by examining how individuals and institutions articulate and disseminate conceptions of the body, including constituent issues such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender.

  • Directory of Health Humanities Graduate Programs

    University of Texas Humanities Institute

    Goal: To provide a comprehensive directory of programs in the United States that offer post-baccalaureate degrees (masters or doctoral) or graduate certificates in the Health/Medical Humanities, including Bioethics.

  • Health Humanities Laboratory

    Texas A&M University

    Goal: The Health Humanities Laboratory examines emerging debates in the cross-disciplinary field of Health Humanities.

  • Health Humanities Undergraduate Pathway Program (B.S.)

    D'Youville University

    Goal: To describe the launch of an undergraduate degree program in Health Humanities in 2020.

  • Health, Humanities, and Society Minor

    Northeastern University

    Goal: To teach students to think capaciously and creatively about health using the rigorous, precise, and flexible skills and competencies trained by the social sciences and the humanities.

  • Health, Languages, & Humanities in the World Certificate

    University of Kansas

    Goal: To provide students the knowledge and skill to innovate in the multidisciplinary fields of global health and medicine.

  • Humanities in Medicine (HuMed)

    University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine

    Goal: The development of a humanities curricular track.

  • Medical Humanities Committee

    University of Miami

    Goal: Explore ways to more intentionally incorporate the humanities into medical students’ coursework and co-curricular experiences.

  • Medical Humanities Field School

    University of Dar es Salaam

    Goal: To develop a collaborative field school for University of Dar es Salaam and University of Kansas students.

  • Medical Humanities Minor

    Miami University

    Goal: To establish an undergraduate minor in medical humanities.

  • Medicine, Literature and Society Major Track

    Columbia University

    Goal: To explore the biological, social, economic and cultural dimensions of health and medicine in a global and multilingual framework.

  • Medicine, Meditation, Narration

    University of Bordeaux, College of Health Sciences

    Goal: A new course, “Medicine, meditation, narration” has just been addressed in Bordeaux University to the fourth-year medical students to give them a chance to discover practices that can improve their abilities of attention, of listening and their empathy: they have been taught principles and practices of the mindfulness-based stress reduction program, and narrative practices.

  • Religious Studies for Health Professionals

    University of Arizona

    Goal: To teach future health professionals how diverse religious commitments impact experiences and understandings of health, healthcare, and the healing process.

  • Summer in Italy: Medicine and Science through Art and Literature

    Arizona State University

    Goal: Summer abroad program taught by faculty in Health Sciences and English.

  • Undergraduate Certificate

    Arizona State University

    Goal: Undergraduate Certificate in Interdisciplinary Health Humanities, housed in Department of English.

Summer Institutes

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