Health historians are facing important challenges in the current higher education climate. While our courses add significant value to undergraduate, graduate, and professional education, their very premises are under assault from attacks on classroom speech and curricular content. An unprecedented termination of federal support for science and humanities research and education has created a resource crisis for public and private institutions alike, with direct and indirect effects for the health humanities. Histories of the health sciences link diverse spaces in the university: the undergraduate classroom, graduate programs, and professional training in nursing, public health, and medical schools. Yet in an atmosphere of retrenchment, the structures by which we collectively bridge these different parts of campus are themselves under threat.
This roundtable offers an opportunity to reflect upon these challenges and to develop strategies for facing them. It shares the perspectives of program directors in a range of settings—private and public, schools of health sciences and arts and sciences—to address scholarly vulnerabilities and tactics for resilience in the face of shrinking resources, new pedagogical threats, and collapsing support for inquiry into some of the principal axes of health humanities research, including (but not limited to) health disparities research. We seek to engage with an audience of peers to share concerns and learn about the experiences of health historians at all levels—graduate, professional, tenure-track, contingent—as a means of fostering scholarly community and building strength during a moment of exceptional precarity.
Chair email:
[email protected]Learning Outcomes- Participants will learn about significant challenges facing medical humanities programs in a range of settings.
- Participants will develop critical thinking skills in the areas of pedagogy, humanities research, and program administration.
- Participants will be able to strategize about ways to build resilience in the face of adversity.
