HIVES 2024: Disability and Medical Humanities
HIVES is excited to announce our fall lineup of events! This academic year, we are engaging the intersections of disability and the medical humanities. In Medical Humanities: An Introduction, editors Thomas Cole, Nathan Carlin, and Robert Carson note one of the critical schisms between the humanities, a deeply embodied set of experiences and creative expressions, and the field of medicine, tasked with the care of the creating experiencing self: “During the last fifty years, health care professionals have struggled with dehumanizing tendencies created by the unprecedented success of modern medicine and the commercialization of the health care system” (15). The practitioners HIVES has invited are deeply knowledgeable about navigating the healthcare system and engaging with others who have similarly done so. In their conversations, motion-picture performances, and workshops, they will steward participants through critical conversations and present them with provocations to re/consider how the holistic embodied self can engage with the compartmentalization common to contemporary medical practices.
The Association of American Medical Colleges advocates for deeper integration of medicine and the humanities, emphasizing that “by integrating arts and humanities throughout medical education, trainees and physicians can learn to be better observers and interpreters; and build empathy, communication and teamwork skills, and more.” HIVES’ fall programming draws on the arts to question our relationships to animal testing, medical trust, and the history of the freak show.
Fall 2024 Events:
Love, Simeon: Crosscutting Viral Vectors Between Covid and HIV
Thursday, October 10
3.00 p.m. Snyder-Phillips Room C203
Love, Simeon is a motion-picture experience and imagined cinema workshop that cross-cuts between HIV and COVID to examine the nature of spillover events. These are zoonotic viral vectors that entangle human and non-human actors in the messy webs of the medical-industrial complex. Rhesus macaques emerge as the receptacles of our hopes and futures in the face of these devastating illnesses. In this workshop, we turn our attention to the hopes and futures of these simians who labor for our lives in the shadows.
Freaking Out
Thursday, November 7
1.00 p.m. Wells C607
HIVES Co-Founder Michael Stokes and Dr. Ante Ursic will have a conversation about the legacies of the freak show in contemporary circus and science fiction.
Practices of care and togethering
Friday, November 22
12:00 p.m. Wells C 6th Floor Graduate Lounge
Dr. Caro Novella will lead an experimental space that interrogates questions of trust and knowledge in clinical settings. What does it feel like to co-create (health)care relations, together?
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