Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 4:30-6:00 PM

HASKELL 101

join

FRANCIS MCKAY

 (Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Anthropology for MAPSS)

to discuss

TELEOLOGICAL AFFECTS:

MORAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF FINAL ENDS

with opening comments by

Sanja Miklin
(PhD Student, Comparative Human Development)

Abstract: The anthropology of morality has, in recent years, highlighted a variety of sine quibus non (virtue, freedom, evil, etc.) that are conceptually needed if anthropologists are to better understand morality. I add to this list the concept of “telos” and offer a phenomenological theory for how it features in the affective life of the ethical subject. Though common in anthropology, “telos” tends to be defined primarily in terms of highly ranked cultural values that provide the normative content subjects aspire to in their ethical striving. This view, however, fails to capture the range of practices involved in making telic judgments. Specifically, it overlooks the fact that people aim not just at high-order cultural values, but also at “final ends,” and that in deliberating about final ends, criteria for evaluating the finality of values is necessary. Summarizing recent work on ethical reasoning in relation to ultimate values (e.g. Robbins and Lambek), and comparing that to my own research on American Buddhists, I argue that such criteria can be found in a range of biocultural emotional experiences I call “teleological affects,” the name I give to a subdomain of moral sentiments through which people appraise the means and ends of life.

Please email Camille (roussel@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Camille Roussel (roussel@uchicago.edu).

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We look forward to seeing you soon!

Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 4:30-6:00 PM

HASKELL 101

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PAULA MARTIN

 (PhD Student, Comparative Human Development)

to discuss

CHANGING OUR BODIES AND

CHANGING OUR SELVES:

BODILY INTERVENTIONS, YOUTH FUTURES AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF GENDER

with opening comments by

Rebecca Ewert
(PhD Student, Sociology)

Abstract: Puberty suppression and other hormonal treatments for gender expansive youth are intensely anticipatory, or built upon the power of a future expected, imagined, and used to guide medical practice (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009). For young people looking to access gender specific medical care, the anticipation of biological development at odds with their sense of gender identity amplifies the sense of urgency in, and the ethical stakes of, receiving biomedical treatments. This paper looks at emergent tensions between the increased utilization of biomedical services targeting gender and the simultaneous rise of ideological commitments to conceptualizing gender as detached from the body. Starting with the experiences of gender expansive youth participating in a social support group in the Midwest, I explore how ideas of gender, body, and self, structure how interventions emerge and are taken up presently, as well as imagined to impact individual and collective futures.

Please email Camille (roussel@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Camille Roussel (roussel@uchicago.edu).

To subscribe to our listserv, visit: https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/subscribe/medicineanditsobjects

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 29, 4:30-6:00 PM

HASKELL 101

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LISA STEVENSON

 (Associate Professor, Anthropology, McGill University)

to discuss

WHAT THERE IS TO FEAR

with opening comments by

CAMILLE ROUSSEL
(PhD Student, Comparative Human Development)

Abstract:

“What there is to fear” is how a taxi driver put it. That is, in different worlds “what there is to fear” shifts. It’s a dark definition of a world—a universe of possible/shared fears. For instance, in Ecuador’s Amazon, snakes are one thing there is to fear, and travelling by canoe to a community three hours down the Bobonaza river, I watched every stick to see if it would turn into a boa. But in metropolitan Quito, among Colombian refugees, other Colombians are what there is to fear: paramilitaries, decommissioned guerillas or extortionists that cross the border to exact a price—in blood, pain or money.  Yet, in therapeutic encounters several refugees I know were told they suffered from persecution anxiety and that the face of the killer they saw across the market stall was most probably just another Ecuadorean face. “Do you think I could forget the face of the man who killed my brother?” a Colombian refugee asks me accusingly. It’s as if the therapist is calling her world, a world, delineated by fear, into question. How does fear work to create and break human kinship–or what Sahlins has called the mutuality of being–and what I am calling a world? How do we understand the communicability of fear and its potential to create unliveable worlds, or worlds where there is very little mutuality of being?  How do we maintain any sense of the mutuality of being in the face of great fear?

The first part of this paper is an exploration of the way fear constitutes, or not, a world, depending on whether one’s fear are accepted as legitimate. The second part explores the use of theatrical images created collaboratively by Colombian refugees in an attempt to describe a common world.

 Please email Camille (roussel@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper.

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Camille Roussel (roussel@uchicago.edu).

To subscribe to our listserv, visit: https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/subscribe/medicineanditsobjects

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, 4:30-6:00 PM

ROSENWALD 329

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MEGAN CROWLEY-MATOKA

 (Associate Professor, Medical Education/Anthropology, Northwestern University)

to discuss

THE TRAFFIC IN PAIN:

OPIOIDS, EPIDEMICS, AND THE U.S. RESURGENCE OF THE URINE DRUG SCREEN

with opening comments by

ADAM BAIM
(MD/PhD Candidate, CHSS/Pritzker School of Medicine)

Abstract:

Both chronic pain and opioid use have been named crises of epidemic proportion in the contemporary U.S., embodying competing claims about pain as a tragically urgent site of both under and over treatment.  Patient activists, newly-professionalized pain specialists, public health officials, and drug enforcement agents – among others – all wade into the fray, marshaling powerful statistics and heart-breaking stories to claim the moral and political high ground on either side of these debates.  Looming increasingly large in this contentious landscape are reports of rising numbers of overdose deaths involving prescription painkillers, statistics now wielded as a clarion call for change in pain management practice and public policy. One rapid response to that call has been a dramatically stepped-up reliance on a time-worn, rather humble form of surveillance: the urine drug screen (UDS).  This paper seeks to work outward from the embodied experience of a chronic pain patient as he lives this contemporary moment of clinical controversy and the reinvigorated role of the UDS.  Doing so serves an exploratory effort at beginning to map out some of the material and affective exchanges by which pain is rendered simultaneously problematic and profoundly productive as it is put into politically-charged and highly-profitable circulation.

Please email Camille (roussel@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Camille Roussel (roussel@uchicago.edu).

To subscribe to our listserv, visit: https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/subscribe/medicineanditsobjects

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 4:30-6:00 PM

ROSENWALD 329

join

LAUREN JACKSON

 (PhD Student, Department of English, Language and Literature)

to discuss

BLACK VERTIGO:

NAUSEA, APHASIA, AND BODILY NOISE,

197x TO THE PRESENT

with opening comments by

Paula Martin
(PhD Student, Comparative Human Development)

Abstract of the dissertation proposal:

The dissertation proposed, called “Black Vertigo: Nausea, Aphasia, and Bodily Noise, 197x to the present,” will explore the bodily affects of blackness as an interminably circulated and appropriated idiom, which I call “black vertigo.” The first chapter will examine the fate of the black idiom in post-50s-60s (“post-cool”) black cultural spaces. The second proposes more serious way of reading aphasia in African American literature as an affective accompaniment of gendered, racialized trauma that also repairs the gaps left behind in aphasiology’s failure to address racial silences within the field. The third chapter will be on nausea; the fourth, on phatic sound from women/femme artists in rap music. I anticipate using a diverse set of objects and cases across these chapters but focus is unwaveringly in the realm of the culture (how vertigo’s affects manifest in cultural spaces, during process of cultural production, in cultural objects, as aesthetic representation).

Please email Camille (roussel@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Camille Roussel (roussel@uchicago.edu).

To subscribe to our listserv, visit: https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/subscribe/medicineanditsobjects

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 4:30-6:00 PM

ROSENWALD 329

join

ADAM BAIM

 (MD/PhD Candidate, CHSS/Pritzker School of Medicine)

to discuss

THROUGH ANOTHER’S EYES:

EXAMINING VISION IN OPHTHALMOLOGY

with opening comments by

Colin Halverson
(PhD, Linguistic Anthropology)

Abstract:

Vision is a central matter of concern for ophthalmologists. In addition to evaluating the vision of patients, ophthalmologists also rely on their own trained vision to examine the eye and its hidden contents. The overarching goal of my dissertation is to investigate how ophthalmologists navigate the challenges of working on vision and with vision, and how they constitute a unique sort of ophthalmological visuality through their work. This first chapter explores the ways ophthalmologists conceptualize and assess the vision of their patients, thereby transforming it into an object of clinical expertise. I review three phases of the clinical encounter where vision is assessed: the patient history, the measurement of acuity, and the refraction (when corrective lens prescriptions are determined). Although these techniques reduce vision to standardized benchmarks, and extract clinical data from the lived experience of the patient, I argue that the overall process of assessing vision turns upon the enactment of more affective and experiential modes of understanding. This duality, where a subtle register of curiosity, empathy, and hope regarding the experience of patients resonates quietly beneath the surface of just-so clinical assessment, makes ophthalmology an especially rich venue for studying intersubjectivity. I also discuss instances where discrepancies arise between the ophthalmologist’s assessment of vision and the patient’s own narration of visual experience, including examples of “functional visual loss,” when a patient’s complaints cannot be verified by the ophthalmologist. I conclude by analyzing how ophthalmology’s ethics of care is built around the protection and restoration of patient vision. Even when patient reports are subordinated to an ophthalmologist’s measurements, such that patients lose epistemic primacy regarding their own vision, they often retain a moral primacy as the individuals whose vision is at stake.

Please email Camille (roussel@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Camille Roussel (roussel@uchicago.edu).

To subscribe to our listserv, visit: https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/subscribe/medicineanditsobjects

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 4:30-6:00 PM

ROSENWALD 329

join

TALIA WEINER

 (PhD Candidate, Comparative Human Development)

to discuss

“I’VE PUT IN MY TIME:”

CAREER TRAJECTORIES AND STRUCTURAL CONTRADICTIONS IN THE HELPIING PROFESSIONS

with opening comments by

Talia Gordon
(PhD Student, Comparative Human Development)

Please email Camille (roussel@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper, available by the end of the week

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Camille Roussel (roussel@uchicago.edu).

To subscribe to our listserv, visit: https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/subscribe/medicineanditsobjects

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 4:30-6:00 PM

ROSENWALD 329

join

AMIR HAMPEL

 (PhD Candidate, Comparative Human Development)

to discuss

EQUAL TEMPERAMENT:

AUTONOMY AND IDENTITY IN CHINESE PUBLIC SPEAKING CLUBS

with opening comments by

Britta Ingebretson
(PhD Candidate, Anthropology and Linguistics)

Abstract: Young professionals in China are eagerly studying what are called communication skills, particularly public speaking. This article reads technologies of self-presentation not as biopolitical or neoliberal schemes, but in the context of tentatively liberal social imaginaries, and as therapeutic scripts for connecting with others in a fragmenting society. Entering Toastmasters public speaking clubs in Beijing, we see psychosocial techniques and institutional forms that aim to anchor people otherwise floating in an undefined urban space. Club members actively seek to be subjectified on stage, to become self-aware under the gaze of an audience of equal peers; however, in addition to engaging in dialectical, individualizing practices of identity formation, members also repurpose their clubs into comprehensive social resources. While club members pursue varied modes of self-definition, they do so in ways that challenge liberal Western understandings of autonomy and identity. We gain a clearer sense of these tensions by listening to Chinese therapists articulate psychologized cultural critiques. While both psychotherapists and members of self-help groups participate in a modernist cultural politics, young adults are not eager to see themselves as oppressed by interdependence, or to regard interpersonal relationships as antagonistic. Young Chinese urbanites are getting on stage because, like their peers elsewhere, they are learning the power and necessity of explicit self-definition in a world of strangers.

[self-help, psychotherapy, subjectivity, identity, China]

Please email Camille (roussel@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Camille Roussel (roussel@uchicago.edu).

To subscribe to our listserv, visit: https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/subscribe/medicineanditsobjects

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 4:30-6:00PM

ROSENWALD 329

join

KATIE GIBSON

 (PhD Student, SSA)

to discuss

DEFINING USE AND ABUSE IN THE DEBATE ABOUT PSYCHOTROPIC DRUGS IN THE ILLINOIS CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM

with opening comments by

Julian Thompson
(PhD Candidate, SSA)

Abstract of the Dissertation Proposal: This ethnographic study will examine the role psychotropic drugs play in shaping bureaucratic practice in a time in which rates of drug use are at once treated as a measure of an organization’s capacity (or incapacity) to care for clients and as an institutionally legitimized form of therapeutic intervention. Children in foster care are prescribed psychotropic drugs at a rate three to five times higher than their non-foster peers on Medicaid, and they are also significantly more likely to be prescribed three or more drugs simultaneously. While this is widely considered problematic, the issue of the child welfare system’s drug dependence has been articulated in various terms, with scholars and advocates alternating between cultural, neurological and bureaucratic formulations of both the problem and its solutions. Some posit that drugs are used too frequently due to a cultural assumption that fixes should be quick, while others believe such poorly researched “fixes” endanger children and don’t necessarily improve their behavioral or mental health. Many see the issue as one of poor systemic integration, asserting that managing psychotropic drug use requires better communication of expertise between various actors involved in case management. In all accounts, however, drugs are treated as objects upon which professionals act rather than actors in their own right. To complement and complicate this perspective, this study will produce (1) a historical discourse analysis of the roles and relationships psychotropic drugs have generated between child welfare and other systems, (2) an ethnographic account of the social life of drugs in child welfare as it relates to professional practices and (3) a “dialogue” between the various actors involved in the debate about the proper uses of psychotropic drugs.

Please email Camille (roussel@uchicago.edu) for a copy of the paper.

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Camille Roussel (roussel@uchicago.edu).

To subscribe to our listserv, visit: https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/subscribe/medicineanditsobjects

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Medicine and Its Objects presents…

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 4:30-6:00PM

ROSENWALD 329

join

DAVID MELTZER

 (Medicine and Economics)

to discuss

THE COMPREHENSIVE CARE, COMMUNITY AND CULTURE PROGRAM (C4P)

with opening comments by

Angelica Velazquillo Franco
(PhD Student, SSA)

Abstract: High health care costs and poor health outcomes in the US are concentrated in a small fraction of the population, many of whom have a history of recent hospitalization, and a disproportionate fraction of who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. The Comprehensive Care Physician (CCP) Program we have developed seeks to address the needs of this population by providing patients with the ability to receive care from the same physician in the inpatient and outpatient setting so that they can benefit from the advantages of continuity in the doctor patient relationship. Since 2012, we have developed and tested this model at the University of Chicago in a randomized controlled trial funded by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, in which we have enrolled over 1,800 patients, of whom ~90% are African American, with a median income of ~$20,000 per year, and 1-year mortality rate of 15-20%. The results to date are striking with respe ct to patient experience, outcomes, and resource utilization. We think the efficacy of this model comes from the deep connection that our CCP doctors and teams develop with patients, understanding them as individuals and recognizing and beginning to address the deeper social determinants of their health.

Nevertheless, even as we have pushed the boundaries of traditional health care, for example, by great efforts from clinic staff to connect with patients and by establishing a home care program, we have seen the limits of traditional health care. Many of CCP patients still do not engage fully in care; 1/3 attend <2 clinic visits in the year after enrollment or miss more than 1/2 of scheduled visits. These patients who do not engage in the program cost  more per year and have worse outcomes than patients who do engage, with differences that grow over time. Thus, there may be great potential for savings and improved outcomes if we can learn how to better engage and serve these patients. Talking to patients in clinic, on the phone, visiting them in their homes and communities with the people in their lives, and discussing their needs with them more formally in focus groups, we have come to believe that to better serve them we need a greater presence in their daily lives to address challenges of life made more difficult by poverty, and to provide emotional, social, and spiritual support. Our proposed Comprehensive Care, Community and Culture Program (C4P) will build on the success of our CCP Program to address social determinants of health and better engage patients at high risk of hospitalization. We will provide C4P patients access to community health workers (CHWs) and to cultural and educational opportunities to help them solve critical challenges of daily life, and provide emotional, social, and spiritual support that can ameliorate social isolation to promote health and well-being.