Talk on Friday at UC Merced: The Conscription of Political Representatives, with Wendy Salkin
Carolyn Jennings
Informal representation, the phenomenon of speaking or acting on behalf of others though one has not been elected or selected to do so by means of a corporately organized election or selection procedure, plays a crucial role in advancing the interests of groups, particularly marginalized and oppressed groups. Sometimes, those who emerge as informal representatives do so willingly (voluntary representatives). But often, people end up being informal representatives, either in their private lives or in more public political fora, over their own protests (unwilling representatives) or even without their knowledge (unwitting representatives)—that is, they are conscripted. Few theories of informal representation have been advanced and those there are do not accommodate conscripted informal representatives. The account developed here introduces the phenomenon of conscripted informal representation and explains its place in a complete theory of informal representation. Conscripted informal representatives can, just like voluntary counterparts, come to have tremendous power to influence how those for whom they speak or act are regarded by various audiences. Upon attaining such power to influence, conscripted informal representatives, like voluntary counterparts, come to have duties to those they represent—duties that arise despite the representative’s unwittingness or unwillingness. Understanding the phenomenon of conscripted informal representation allows us to get at essential normative questions about informal representation that are otherwise occluded.
Carolyn Jennings
Making the Self Visible to Others: Narrative Medicine in the Clinic and the Prison
Since 2000, the Narrative Medicine movement has developed strategies for improving care in the clinical setting and medical training: stories of illness are used to facilitate enhanced recognition, listening and dialogue among patients, physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, administrators, and others who inhabit the multiple plains of healthcare practice and medical training lifeworlds. Borrowing from Narrative Medicine training, theory and practice, I argue that its innovations in the clinic have value for another site of tension and vulnerability—the prison, jail or detention center, which both encompasses the clinic (prisoners in need of healthcare) and another fraught site: the often dehumanizing carceral encounter among prisoners, guards, lawyers, volunteers, visitors and society at large. U.S. prison officials are travelling the world—Norway, Germany—in search of answers on how to improve methods of incarceration and rehabilitation at home. An important part of the process, I suggest, involves human being-ness, rather than dehumanization, and one route to maintaining or encouraging human being-ness in even the most difficult space is practices of Narrative Medicine. Here, I turn to the ethical dimensions of the intersections between Narrative Medicine and Incarceration. The immediacy of these intersections has local relevance as the University of California, Merced, surrounded by prisons 50 miles in any direction is also the site of a future Medical School intended to address alarming Central Valley health disparities.
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