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Artful Living Program

Artful Living Program

This project aimed to augment patient care and rethink the definition of “treatment” by hosting and measuring the impact of events that allowed medical patients to experience art in various forms.

Health is not solely defined by the physical conditions that are treated in the doctor’s office or a hospital room. Accordingly, holistic, comprehensive health care must address a myriad of biopsychosocial factors that affect people’s lives and their psychological and social well-being. The University of Chicago’s Comprehensive Care Program (CCP) is designed to provide comprehensive, multifaceted care to complex patients at high risk of hospitalization by allowing them to receive care from a closely-knit team of providers led by a physician who cares for them both in clinic and the hospital. While the CCP’s success is largely the result of strong patient-clinician relationships, and the knowledge, trust, and communication that is promoted by those relationships, patients still have humanistic needs that the current CCP cannot adequately address.

As a result, the CCP aimed to create the Artful Living Program (ALP) in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. ALP will augment the care that CCP patients receive and broaden health care “treatment” to include other factors that contribute to overall health and well-being. Leveraging the robust arts and humanities organizations and events already in existence at the University of Chicago and in the surrounding community, and creating their own participatory arts/humanities based programming, ALP hosted events throughout the year for CCP patients to experience art in its various forms - music, theater, cinema, narrative, visual arts, and the physical arts. With a more inclusive definition of health and health care provision, the research team anticipated that through participation in ALP programming, CCP patients will reap the benefits of the arts and humanities and become more engaged, better connected, and healthier while ultimately experiencing greater fulfillment in their lives.

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

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

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.

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Death: From Philosophy to Medical Practice and the Law 

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. © Damien Hirst & Science Ltd. DACS, London / ARS, NY 2020.

Death: From Philosophy to Medical Practice and the Law 

This project will complete a manuscript about the medical and philosophical aspects of death. The project will also convene an interdisciplinary group of experts to disentangle and potentially reconcile longstanding medical and legal debates about the neurological standard for determining brain death. The research team will be joined by the medical ethicist John Lizza as a Visiting Fellow.

This project continues the work of the Making Progress on Death project by supporting a Visiting Fellowship for John Lizza, who served as the keynote speaker at the earlier project's 2021 conference. During his residency Lizza will continue the work that the research team has been doing with the goal of publishing a book on death and helping to complete a manuscript related to the intersection between medical and philosophical aspects of death. He will be on sabbatical leave from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, where he is a Professor of Philosophy, during Spring Term 2023 (January – May 2023). His fellowship at the Neubauer Collegium will coincide with the time of his sabbatical leave. The research team is also aspiring to distill particular points of disagreement from the presentations at the 2021 conference, with the further goal of reconvening participants for discussion of those issues in early 2023. The aim is to see if the group can work towards or achieve consensus on any points.

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The Diversity of Color: Safeguarding Natural Dye Sources and Practices in Michoacán and Oaxaca

The Diversity of Color: Safeguarding Natural Dye Sources and Practices in Michoacán and Oaxaca

Recent international interest in dyes extracted from plants and insects in Mexico is putting pressure on the local communities that manage these culturally significant natural resources. This project will facilitate local efforts to study the organisms and improve their cultivation, conservation, and ongoing use.

The use of dyes extracted from plants and insects has a complex history in multiple communities in Mexico. Organisms such as indigo plants, cochineal insects, and cempazuchitl are ingredients in artisanal practices, local cuisine, and traditional medicine that in many cases predate Spanish contact. Recent international interest in these natural resources is putting pressure on their management, but scientific and educational opportunities would allow local communities to study these culturally significant organisms and improve their cultivation, conservation, and ongoing use. We propose an interdisciplinary project to collect histories and taxonomies of the organisms used in natural dye production, addressing their identities, their ecologies, their cultural uses, and their manifold significance to colorant makers. Although the colorant uses have been previously documented, many of these studies rely on partial taxonomic classifications, where only the genus of the plant but not the species has been identified. We hypothesize that scientific documentation of the species used will provide new insights into the uses of these organisms and their dyes. A more precise description of the plants and organisms used for dye extraction will also facilitate the communities’ efforts to manage their own resources; their request for a collaboration is what gave rise to this proposal. In addition to a series of workshops, we will publish our findings in a bilingual general audience book and project website, as well as peer-reviewed journals. We will also organize six conferences in Mexico and twin exhibits in Chicago and Oaxaca.

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The Game Changer Chicago Design Lab

The Game Changer Chicago Design Lab

A series of workshops brought Chicago teens to campus to collaborate with faculty, staff, and students on digital stories, trans-media games, and new media art projects designed to improve health.

Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab is an initiative of the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) at the University of Chicago. Co-founded by Drs. Patrick Jagoda (Assistant Professor of English) and Melissa Gilliam (Professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Pediatrics), the GCC Design Lab created workshops in which high school aged youth – recruited primarily from underserved schools on Chicago’s South Side – collaborated with faculty, staff and fellows (undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities and arts) on digital stories, transmedia games and new media art projects. The GCC Design Lab is both a maker-space and a research lab. As a maker-space, we have a strong commitment to developing youth-led products, running game design workshops, and creating games for national and transnational dissemination. As a research lab, we promoted continued work at the intersection of art, narrative, health, and technology with an eye to critical thinking and healthy social and emotional outcomes.

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Health and Human Rights in the Humanities: Building Capacity with Human Rights Principles

Health and Human Rights in the Humanities: Building Capacity with Human Rights Principles

Philosophers and medical practitioners collaborated in search of greater precision on the application of human rights concepts to health and health care.

This project aimed to strengthen and consolidate an emerging program cluster on Health and Human Rights by engaging faculty in the humanities and the Pritzker School of Medicine to address fundamental questions underlying the notion of health as a human right. Many things have been claimed to be a human right, a claim that indicates great moral significance, asserts heightened stakes, and calls for swift and decisive remedy. But which elements of health and health care qualify as a human right? Philosophers and practitioners approach these questions from distinct viewpoints. Through multiple campus discussions and a one-day conference during the 2014-2015 AY, this project sought greater precision on the application of human rights concepts to health and health care, including a philosophically-grounded position on the question of who has the obligation to meet health care human rights.

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The Living Mortal Project

The Living Mortal Project

This project asked: How do humans negotiate mortality? How might a broadly humanistic model for the care of patients in the end of life help doctors prepare for engaging with profound questions of mortality?

The Living Mortal Project was a broad interdisciplinary collaboration intended to engage with the profound questions surrounding death and catalyze substantive change in both scholarly investigation and cultural reception of mortality. Through primary qualitative research on cancer patients’ experiences of mortality; an innovative workshop series that brings together faculty from diverse disciplinary practices – from Medicine, Archaeology, Art History, Philosophy, and many more; and the creation of a new medical school curriculum module, The Living Mortal Project explored the various ways humans negotiate mortality and help prepare future doctors in a broadly humanistic model for the care of patients in the end of life.

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Making Progress on Death: Towards an Updated Normative Framework

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. © Damien Hirst & Science Ltd. DACS, London / ARS, NY 2020.

Making Progress on Death: Towards an Updated Normative Framework

Legal and medical experts and ethicists gathered to re-examine the neurological standard for the declaration of death, which remains a source of debate after 50 years.

Fifty years after its inception, the current position on the Neurological Standard for Declaration of Death (NSDD) is subject to a number of persistent concerns and novel criticisms. There remains considerable public confusion both about the meaning of the term “brain dead” and about its relation to the death of a human being. There is persistent dissent by some clinicians, philosophers, and other critical observers who have never been convinced that “brain death” is, indeed, the death of the human being. There are, as well, pressures against insisting that declaring death, or at least “organ donation eligibility,” requires the irreversible loss of function in the whole brain. And, perhaps most important, there are critics who have published evidence of ongoing integrated bodily activities in some patients meeting the criteria of “whole brain death” and who have claimed that this evidence invalidates the rationale for today’s consensus position. These challenges invite—indeed, necessitate—a reexamination of the neurological standard enshrined in law and medical practice. This research project will undertake such a reexamination.

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Transmedia Story Lab: Impacting the Public Humanities and Public Health through Digital Narratives

Transmedia Story Lab: Impacting the Public Humanities and Public Health through Digital Narratives

This project sought to produce a unique body of knowledge about new media storytelling, exploring the potential for narrative arts to influence broader publics, shape policies, and improve health.

The Transmedia Story Lab project brought together a research team from the Biological Sciences Division, Humanities Division, and School of Social Service Administration to explore ways that narrative arts — especially emergent digital media and transmedia storytelling forms — can influence broader publics, impact policies, and improve health. The Lab, an initiative of the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3), sought to produce a unique body of knowledge about new media storytelling that explores intersections between the arts and sciences, as well as critical making and practice-based research in the humanities. The project also explored transmedia storytelling itself as a qualitative research method that could further the field of public health. Through providing infrastructural support for establishing the Lab, the Neubauer Collegium facilitated the development of new analytic, qualitative, and quantitative research methods for studying the impact of narrative in public health, and enable scholarship that exists at the intersection between the digital humanities and public policy.

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