CANCELED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE- This Thursday Lisa Lowe, " A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities and The Intimacies of Four Continents
M. Hilaire
THURSDAY, MARCH 22
6:00 pm
LISA LOWE, "A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities and the Intimacies of Four Continents"
Comparative Literature, UC San Diego
This lecture revisits Marx’s fetishism of commodities and nineteenth-century liberal policies of “free trade” in relation to products (like tea, sugar, cottons, and opium) that expressed the colonial and imperial relations between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Lisa Lowe studied European intellectual history at Stanford, and French literature and critical theory at UC Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching interests are French, British, and U.S. literatures, and the topic of Asian migration within European and American modernities. She has published books on orientalism, immigration, and culture within globalization. In 2011-2012, she will be a UC President's Faculty Research Fellow; in the fall, she will be at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and in the winter and spring, at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
FRIDAY, MARCH 23
10:30 AM - 5:00 PM
STRUCTURAL COMPETENCY: NEW MEDICINE FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL INEQUALITIES THAT MAKE US SICK
Visit http://structuralcompetency.org/ for more information, speakers, and to RSVP.
This one-day working conference explores a new politics for
understanding the relationships among race, class, and symptom
expression. In clinical settings, such relationships often fall under the rubric
of “cultural competency,” an approach that emphasizes recognition of the
divergent sociocultural backgrounds of patients and doctors, and the
cultural aspects of patients’ illnesses. Increasingly, however, scholars and activists recognize that
oft-invisible structural level determinates, biases, inequities, and
blind spots shape definitions of health and illness long before doctors
or patients enter examination rooms. This evolving literature suggests
that conditions that appear from a biomedical framework to result from
actions or attitudes of culturally distinct groups need also be
understood as resulting from the pathologies of social systems. And,
that locating race-based symptoms on the bodies of marginalized persons
risks turning a blind eye to the racialized economies in which
marginalized and mainstreamed bodies live, work, and attempt to survive. he interdisciplinary scholars assembled for this working conference
will debate how biomedicine might more directly engage with structural
forces even as it works to better understand and treat particular
persons. Its central argument is that a host of issues defined in the
clinical arena as “symptoms” (depression, hypertension, obesity,
smoking, medication “non-compliance,” trauma, psychosis) need to be more
fully addressed as the downstream implications of a number of upstream
decisions (food delivery systems, zoning laws, urban
infrastructure/infrastructure failure, medicalization, diagnostic codes)
if they are to be effectively addressed in clinical and cultural
domains. And, that increasing scientific awareness of the ways in which
structural pressures produce symptoms in individual patients—through
cortisol levels or epigenetic mechanisms, for instance—needs to be
better coupled with medical models for structural change. Structural competency converses with past models, from structuralism
to structural racism, to demonstrate how institutional, political, and
economic forces generating stigma are invisible to actors on the
ground. But it does so with the ultimate aim of developing new
platforms, practices, and agendas that address health issues in the
present day; a time when structural-level disparities become more unjust
at the same time that the agents producing them become more evanescent.
Visit http://sca.as.nyu.edu/page/sca.general.newsevents to view our online Event Calendar!
Visit this group at: http://groups.google.com/group/sca-eventscalendar?hl=en