Zoe Boudart
Zoe Boudart
MD-PhD Student in Anthropology
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
Adult Specialist, Hospital Medicine; Associate Professor of Medicine
Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and Department of Anthropology
Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Human Development
MD-PhD Student in Medical Anthropology
Chancellor's Professor, Division of Society and Environment, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management
Associate Professor of English
Fanny L. Pritzker Professor; Chief, Section of Hospital Medicine; Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy
MD-PhD Student in Medical Anthropology
Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology, School of Global Studies
Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development; Faculty Chair, Health and Society Minor
Lecturer and Researcher, School of Public Health and Community Medicine
Associate Professor of Anthropology