Sunday, November 11, 2018
1601 Trinity Avenue
Dell Medical School
Austin, TX 78712

6:00 PM: Tour of the Ann Hamilton Exhibit
7:00-8:30 PM: Performances from Central Texas Storytellers

Landmarks, Austin's Backyard Story Night, Dell Medical School, and the Humanities Institute are partnering to present an evening of stories centered around the theme, "Healing Touch". This event celebrates the human exchanges present in both public art and healthcare and the important roles they play in the Austin community, with stories illustrating this theme told from various perspectives, within and outside of the medical field.

Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin, commissioned artist Ann Hamilton to create a series of photographs that illustrate touch, something we typically feel rather than see. The project is framed around the idea that human touch is the most essential means of contact and a fundamental expression of physical and emotional care. The larger-than-life enamel panels are installed in the new buildings at the Dell Medical School and will serve as a backdrop for the evening of stories. For more information about Hamilton's work, visit the project's website.

The event is free and open to the public. Doors will open at 6:00pm for tours of the works of art in the Health Discovery Building and Health Transformation Building.

Stories will begin at 7:00pm outside of the Health Transformation Building (1601 Trinity Street); please dress accordingly. Limited seating is provided, but guests are encouraged to bring chairs and blankets; no outside alcoholic drinks permitted.

Popcorn, cider, and hot chocolate will be provided; café sandwiches and a cash bar are available for purchase.

Parking is available next door in the Health Center Garage.

Monday, December 3, 2018
The University of Texas Club
4:00-5:30 PM: Seminar and Dialogue

The Health and Humanities Research Seminar is a monthly series in partnership with Dell Medical School intended to engage scholars and practitioners across the health and humanities disciplines in research-oriented dialogue. The seminars feature presentations from speakers, followed by a group discussion and casual conversation.

On December 3, Courtney Donovan, Ph.D will speak on "Digital Health, Health Humanities, and Barriers to Care: Integrating Arts, Humanities, and Technology to Understand Health Disparities." Dr. Donovan is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography & Environment at San Francisco State University. Her visit is sponsored by “Communities of Care,” a digital humanities project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the Sterling Clark Holloway Centennial Lectureship.

Dr. Donovan's research sits at the intersection of health geography, health humanities, and the social determinants of health. She explores the ways in which the arts and the humanities convey diverse geographic aspects of health and health care, including embodiment, place, and space. She is the co-editor of Writing Intimacy into Feminist Geographies and has more recently written on the social justice applications of graphic narratives of trauma and on the ways in which a geographic perspective contributes to engaged medical-health humanities scholarship and practice. Dr. Donovan is also engaged in the digital health community in the Bay Area and currently focusing on ways to integrate health humanities with digital health applications. She was recently selected to participate in a digital health pre-accelerator (Project Zygote) and received a Truth fellowship from the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, to further work on a multimedia web platform, StoryBridge. StoryBridge emphasizes creative submissions by patients, health professionals, and community members to explore and address health disparities in the Bay Area.

Seats for the seminar are limited and available by advanced reservation. For more information, please contact Dr. Phillip Barrish at pbarrish@austin.utexas.edu.

While Drs. Jones’ and Brown’s experience and background differ, they both highlighted issues related to health equity and the tools that the humanities can bring to lending a voice to the underrepresented to reduce disparities.

Dr. Jones contextualized the idea that adolescents and young adults (AYAs) require unique physical and emotional support in order to develop their personalities and resilience while dealing with their diagnosis. The mental state in which AYAs are coping with this disease is quite malleable and fragile due to the critical period in their lives in which they are having to endure treatment. As a result, Dr. Jones is pushing forward the care of these patients by redesigning the infrastructure of their treatment. Dr. Jones suggests that resources be put in place for AYAs that provide them with an emotional support system, including family, treatment staff, friends, and community in order to aid in their search for meaning and engage them to fulfill their full growth potential while honoring their loss. By the end of this year, there will be a completed virtual AYA clinic at Dell Medical School that creates a unique physical space and tailored programs for those in this age group.

Dr. Brown’s presentation assessed the social and political necessity for psychiatric advanced directives and their implications for both the patient and the patient’s family – particularly those deemed “mentally incapacitated.” A psychiatric advanced directive is a legal document that one creates to answer the question of what one wants and does not want done medically should he/she become mentally incapacitated. Though there are a multitude of benefits to having this document, the serious nature of the situation in which this directive would be needed can put emotional strains on all those involved and cause complications for the medical administration in charge of the patient’s care. Dr. Brown stressed the importance of psychiatric advanced directives throughout her presentation and is looking to conduct a future qualitative study on healthcare providers’ experiences with psychiatric advanced directives in order to explore ways in which their implementation can be improved.

The Humanities Institute’s lecture series continued in November with Jewel Mullen, M.D., MPH, the Associate Dean for Health Equity and Associate Professor in the departments of Population Health and Internal Medicine at the Dell Medical School, who presented her talk, “You Can’t Fill a Vessel at an Empty Well: Cultivating Empathy to Achieve Health Equity,” on November 5th. Next month’s presentation with Courtney Donovan, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography & Environment at San Francisco State University, will focus on the "Digital Health, Health Humanities, and Barriers to Care: Integrating Arts, Humanities, and Technology to Understand Health Disparities."

Militarization, “Superior Violence,” and U.S. Law Enforcement in Do Not Resist

by Ricky Schear, HI Graduate Research Assistant

Early on in the community discussion of the Controversy and Conversation screening of Craig Atkinson’s documentary, Do Not Resist, Gabriel Solis, Executive Director of the Texas After Violence Project, asked our group two questions central to the film’s exploration of police violence and militarization and the ongoing national discourse regarding incidents and victims of police violence and the protests they inspire: What is the role of police? What should policing mean? Having watched Atkinson’s stirring footage of the conflict between protestors and heavily armed and armored police during the Ferguson, MO protest of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, police training exercises and seminars, and SWAT “no-knock” warrant searches, the community members gathered at the Terrazas Branch of the Austin Public Library had just been presented a disturbing albeit limited sense of the role that police actually do play in contemporary American society. While our group did not (and perhaps could not hope to) arrive at a single, clear answer to Mr. Solis’s questions, many participants’ comments indicated that, regardless of what policing should mean, it should not mean what it does in the U.S. today.

Where public discourse regarding policing in the U.S. has recently tended to focus on the injustice of officers’ acts of violence against unarmed people of color and the U.S. justice system’s response (or lack of response) to those officers’ acts of violence, Do Not Resist seeks to shed light on the training, ideology, and equipment that inform and enable police violence. Perhaps the film’s central thrust is its exploration of the growing militarization of U.S. police (which is clearly on display in the footage of the Ferguson protests) through access to military grade equipment including firearms, assault vehicles, and surveillance technology. Atkinson examines the U.S. government’s 1033 program, which allows the Department of Defense to make the unreasonable amount of underused and excess military equipment (including a wide variety of non-combat equipment) being housed in large DoD storage facilities available to local law enforcement. Atkinson shows that equipment made to wage war, such as the MRAP, a large armored vehicle, and M16 assault rifles, has become both more available and, in the eyes of some law enforcement personnel, more necessary than ever to effectively subdue and/or eliminate violent civilians with increasingly lethal weapons.

The importance and escalation of violence in U.S. policing implied by this militarization is verbalized during a law enforcement training seminar led by David Grossman, a retired military officer.