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Research Project

The Case of the Human: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

2024 – 2025

Paul Klee, A Woman for Gods, 1938.

Key Question

Project Summary

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.

Research Team

Zoe Boudart

Zoe Boudart

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 work ...

Brian Callender

Brian Callender

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 ...

E. Summerson Carr

E. Summerson Carr

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 contemporary ...

Michele Friedner

Michele Friedner

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 ...

Jeremy A. Gottlieb

Jeremy A. Gottlieb

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 ...

Seth Holmes

Seth Holmes

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 and ...

Julie Orlemanski

Julie Orlemanski

Julie Orlemanski

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 ...

David Meltzer

David Meltzer

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 ...

Theodore Michaels

Theodore Michaels

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 ...

Mirko Pasquini

Mirko Pasquini

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 Italy ...

Eugene Raikhel

Eugene Raikhel

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 new ...

Mayssa Rekhis

Mayssa Rekhis

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 ...

Scott Stonington

Scott Stonington

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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