Paul Klee, A Woman for Gods, 1938.
What new knowledge about humanity can be produced through focused collaboration between humanists and medical experts?
Medical and humanistic understandings of health and well-being have intersected in recent decades, but the category of “the human” continues to be defined and applied in different ways. This project will identify a more holistic understanding of “the human” that is neither primarily medical nor humanistic, generating critically and clinically innovative knowledge.
Between the humanities and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from different perspectives and with different political implications. In recent decades, these disparate fields have built a tentative and growing dialogue. However, truly multidisciplinary research between the two is still rare. This project aims not merely at translating existing theory across humanities and medicine, but rather at co-producing new plural knowledge of the human that transcends epistemological boundaries. As such, The Case of the Human proposes one ambitious project addressing core questions: “What is the human?” and “What does the category of the human do?” Our project is thus to create novel, multidisciplinary, and pluralistic knowledge on the human along three important axes: the human as body, as social, and as subject. We achieve this goal through three key aims, each involving specific outputs: 1) co-developing novel, plural knowledge on the human, through a multidisciplinary research conference series; 2) disseminating new knowledges on the human, through a collaborative case series published in The Lancet; and 3) fostering community reflection and personal engagement on the human, through collective writing on this collaborative process. The project is led by a group of scholars and practitioners in medicine, the humanities, and the humanistic social sciences, in partnership with Janna Palmer, Executive Editor at The Lancet. The Lancet editorial team will review the final submitted essays, and will select content for publication in the journal.
MD-PhD Student in Anthropology
University of Michigan
Zoe Boudart is a rising second year MD-PhD Anthropology student in the University of Michigan's Medical Scientist Training Program. Her research interests include critical medical anthropology, science and technology studies, care, imaginaries, materiality, reproduction, and institutions. Her...
Adult Specialist, Hospital Medicine; Associate Professor of Medicine
University of Chicago
Brian Callender is an adult hospitalist in the section of Hospital Medicine and an Associate Professor of Medicine. An academic hospitalist, Dr. Callender is interested in how the health humanities can improve the patient experience, provider-patient relationships, and our understanding of the...
Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
E. Summerson Carr works between cultural, linguistic, and medical anthropology to study how ideas, logics, norms and values are authorized, enacted, institutionalized, and scaled as expertise. She conducts her fieldwork in the United States, where experts influence most every aspect of...
Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago
Michele Friedner is a medical anthropologist who researches deaf and disabled peoples’ social, moral, and economic experiences in urban areas of India. She is interested in how political economic changes in India create new opportunities and constraints for disabled people in the arenas of...
MD-PhD Student in Medical Anthropology
UCSF and UC Berkeley
Jeremy A. Gottlieb (they/them) is an MD-PhD student in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UC-Berkeley. They study subjectivity, subjectification, and changing conceptions of the human through ethnographic research on deep brain stimulation as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses. They have also...
Chancellor's Professor, Division of Society and Environment, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management
UC Berkeley
Seth M. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician whose work focuses broadly on social hierarchies, health inequalities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted. He is the Chancellor's Professor in the UC Berkeley Division of Society...
Associate Professor of English
University of Chicago
Julie Orlemanski teaches and writes about texts from the late Middle Ages and theoretical and methodological questions in present-day literary studies. What distinguishes medieval thought from our own, and what links it, are of persistent fascination to her. Accordingly, she has longstanding...
Fanny L. Pritzker Professor; Chief, Section of Hospital Medicine; Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy
University of Chicago
David O. Meltzer, PhD'92, MD'93, is Chief of the Section of Hospital Medicine, Director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences, and Chair of the Committee on Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Chicago, where he is Professor in the Department of Medicine, and...
MD-PhD Student in Medical Anthropology
UCSF and UC Berkeley
Theo is an MD-PhD student in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UC Berkeley. He is interested in questions of surveillance capitalism, labor, infrastructure, migration, mental health, and trust. He has performed research on mourning on Reddit.com, conspiracy theorists in England, and mental health...
Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology, School of Global Studies
University of Gothenburg
Mirko Pasquini, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg and affiliated researcher at the Centre for Medical Humanities at Uppsala University. His research interests combine hospital ethnography and primary care in...
Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development; Faculty Chair, Health and Society Minor
University of Chicago
Eugene Raikhel is a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine, and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; suggestion and healing; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia. He is particularly concerned with the circulation of...
Lecturer and Researcher, School of Public Health and Community Medicine
University of Gothenburg
Mayssa Rekhis is a Medical Doctor, who graduated from the University of Tunis el-Manar, Tunisia, and an anthropologist, holding a Ph.D from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences EHESS - Paris, France. She is a researcher, educator, and activist, and works at the intersection of these...
Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Michigan
Scott Stonington is a medical and cultural anthropologist, and an internal medicine physician. His research broadly addresses the globalization of biomedical ethics and expertise. His first project in this area focused on decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where individuals face a...
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This roundtable brings together clinicians and scholars to discuss the theoretical development of social medicine.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This roundtable brings together clinicians and scholars to discuss the theoretical development of social medicine.
