 | The Humanities Institute wishes everyone a happy spring! Our April/May newsletter features information on upcoming events, including our May 2018 Health & Humanities Pop-Up Institute! You will also learn about this semester's past events, including our Spring Difficult Dialogues Public Forum, "Stigma and Defamation," and our 2018 Faculty Fellows Symposium, which featured keynote lecturer Alondra Nelson and was the culmination of our Faculty Fellows' two-year inquiry into "Health, Well-Being, Healing." Finally, the Humanities Institute's current research projects in the health humanities has been featured in The Daily Texan and on the website of the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. Continue reading for more details about our spring semester's activities and to learn more about upcoming events! | The Health and Humanities Pop-Up Institute (PUI) will convene scholars affiliated with the University of Texas Humanities Institute and the Dell Medical School to conduct an interdisciplinary exploration of the impact of humanistic approaches to medicine on patients, healthcare professionals, and the public. The PUI will focus on three fields of inquiry: narrative medicine, humanistic approaches to health equity and justice, and community practice. Four distinguished lecturers in the fields of medicine, psychology, and sociology will address these areas. All lectures and the symposium will be free and open to the public. Public lectures will held at noon on various dates throughout the month of May. On May 9, Dr. Vanessa Grubbs, associate professor of medicine in the division of nephrology at the University of California, San Francisco, will present “Are We Still Worlds Apart?: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Kidney Transplantation." On May 16, Dr. James W. Pennebaker, regents centennial professor of liberal arts and executive director of Project 2021 at the University of Texas at Austin, will speak on “Expressive Writing and Health: How Putting Upheavals into Words Can Affect Our Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors.” On May 21, Dr. Annie Brewster, a physician and the founder and executive director of Health Story Collaborative in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will lecture on “Putting Stories to Work: Why and How Sharing Stories Promotes Health." The PUI will conclude on May 30 with a symposium featuring a keynote lecture from Dr. Jonathan Metzl, director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University, on the "Structural Competency, Five Years On: Tracking a New Medical Approach to Stigma and Inequality." The symposium will also feature a community panel featuring humanistic approaches to health care and wellbeing. (More information on this will be found in our May/June newsletter.) To learn more about our 2018 Health and Humanities Pop-Up Institute, please visit our website. To read about our PUI lecture series, please visit our lectures page. The PUI is a collaboration between the Office of the Vice President of Research and the Humanities Institute at UT Austin, with additional support from the College of Liberal Arts, Dell Medical School, and the Department of English. | With discussant Maisha Barrett of SAFE Austin Thursday, May 3, 2018
Terrazas Branch, Austin Public Library, 1005 E. Cesar Chavez St.
Austin, TX 78702
6:30 PM - 8:45 PM Free and open to the public. PRIVATE VIOLENCE explores a simple but deeply disturbing fact of American life: the most dangerous place for a woman in America is her own home. Every day in the US, at least four women are murdered by abusive (and often, ex) partners. The knee-jerk response is to ask: “why doesn’t she just leave?” PRIVATE VIOLENCE shatters the brutality of this logic. Through the eyes of two survivors – Deanna Walters, a mother who seeks justice for the crimes committed against her at the hands of her estranged husband, and Kit Gruelle, an advocate who seeks justice for all women – we bear witness to the complicated and complex realities of intimate partner violence. Their experiences challenge entrenched and misleading assumptions, providing a lens into a world that is largely invisible; a world we have locked behind closed doors with our silence, our laws, and our lack of understanding. Kit’s work immerses us in the lives of several other women as they attempt to leave their abusers, setting them on a collision course with institutions that continuously and systematically fail them, often blaming victims for the violence they hope to flee. The same society that encourages women to seek true love shows them no mercy when that love turns dangerous. As Deanna transforms from victim to survivor, Private Violence begins to shape powerful, new questions that hold the potential to change our society: “Why does he abuse?” “Why do we turn away?” “How do we begin to build a future without domestic violence?” Join us on for a reception at 6:30pm. The screening will begin at 7pm, to be followed by a brief community conversation led by Maisha Barrett, the Training Specialist at SAFE Austin, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending child abuse, sexual assault, and domestic violence. | The Humanities Institute hosted "Stigma and Defamation: A Dialogue," on February 28th. Stigma and Defamation was a follow-up to a previous performance by the The Defamation Experience, a nationally touring interactive theatre program using a courtroom case where the audience was the jury, which was hosted by the UT Division of Student Affairs on February 21st. The public forum was hosted by Dr. Pauline Strong, Director of HI, as she held a community discussion on various forms of social stigma. The forum was attended by undergraduate and graduate students, family members, and representatives from the UT Division of Student Affairs. Participants discussed experiences of stigmatization in their lives in small groups, which then led in to a dialogue among all participants about the effect of stigmatization and how to counteract it. | The 2018 Faculty Fellows Symposium, "Health, Well-Being, and Healing," was hosted by the Humanities Institute on February 2nd. The symposium featured panels of HI 2016-18 Faculty Fellows who discussed various topics related to the medical humanities. The day opened with a panel on "Race, Ethnicity, and Health Disparities," followed by panels on topics including, "Technology, Political Economy, and Health," "Mental Health and Disability," "Religion, Spirituality, and Healing," and "Aesthetics and the Healing Arts." The day concluded with a reading of Lisa B. Thompson's new play The Mamalogues: Parenting While Black and Middle Class in the Age of Anxiety. The symposium featured a keynote lecture from Dr. Alondra Nelson, President of the Social Science Research Council and Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Before a large, highly engaged audience, Dr. Nelson discussed her recent research on "The Social Life of DNA." Our 2018 Faculty Fellows Symposium and keynote lecture was the culmination of our 2016-2018 Faculty Fellows Seminar in "Health, Well-Being, Healing," as well as the first event to launch our 2018 Health & Humanities Pop-Up Institute. | The National Endowment for the Humanities, NEH, awarded the UT Humanities Institute with a grant at the beginning of the year to conduct research and document the health struggles of Central Texas. The multimedia project, titled "Communities of Care: Documenting Voices of Healing and Endurance,” shows how individuals cope with illness and take a deeper look at the region's level of access to health care. Program coordinator Clare Callahan, one of the project’s leaders, commented on why Central Texas was chosen as the focus of the project. “We chose to focus on narratives of human health in underserved Central Texas communities because, as reflected in regional statistics, many of these communities lack access to adequate health care,” Callahan said. “With this project, we want to advocate for more inclusive and comprehensive health care, identify existing barriers to creating a more caring society and learn how vulnerable communities are already advocating for themselves and rethinking health care.” | “This is really a concentrated effort to learn to speak each other’s languages,” Pauline Strong tells me. Strong is a professor of anthropology and women’s and gender studies. She and 14 other UT Austin researchers — from medicine and social work to architecture, history, sociology, and more — have spent the past year preparing to launch the Health & Humanities Pop-Up Institute this May. “The health humanities, as it’s often called, is by definition an interdisciplinary endeavor,” explains Professor Phillip Barrish, whose work explores how medicine and healthcare systems are represented in American fiction. “What most excites me about the upcoming Pop-Up Institute is the opportunity to connect with an even more diverse group of faculty members.” It is diverse: Half of the pop-up’s participants are from Dell Medical School, and the rest come from eight other schools or colleges on campus. Their goal is to foster strong working relationships among the different disciplines and clinicians, and that begins by understanding how each group thinks and talks about health. | Applications are being accepted for the Humanities Institute's 2018-2020 Faculty Fellows program on the theme "Narrative Across the Disciplines." Over the past few decades a number of academic and professional fields, both within and outside the traditional humanities, have come to recognize the central role that narrative—stories and storytelling, broadly conceived—plays in their respective areas of research and practice. Such fields include, in addition to the traditional humanities, medicine, law, cognitive science, sociology, communication, and economics. At the same time, scholars in disciplines such as literature, history, and cultural anthropology continue to develop nuanced approaches to exploring both the inner workings and the social functions of stories in multiple contexts. The Humanities Institute believes that now is a good moment to take fresh stock of what has been called the “Narrative Turn.” What forms of inquiry and insight does a focus on narrative make available, and what additional possibilities remain to be explored? Conversely, what facets of the world, including perhaps the non-human, might be occluded by approaches that privilege narrative? How have new technologies affected the structure, performance, and reception of narrative? | For more information on the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, or to contact us, please visit us at humanitiesinstitute.utexas.edu. | | |
