Health Humanities Task Force

The Health Humanities Working Seminar: Developing a Comprehensive Mission and Structure for Cross-Disciplinary Instruction at UNC-Chapel Hill

This Carolina Seminar will bring together influential faculty from across the University with the goal of issuing a Provost-level set of recommendations for supporting innovative cross-disciplinary curricula in health humanities at UNC-CH.

Participants:

Note: Although the seminar itself is composed of a task force of roughly 20 faculty members working in areas associated with the health humanities, visitors are welcome to attend.

“Medical humanities” or “health humanities” is thriving at universities across the globe. Health humanities affirms that illness and disability, healing and healthcare, suffering and mortality must be understood not just in biomedical terms but in humanistic ones. When teams from the health professions and the humanities come together, the theory that humanism is central to health becomes practice. UNC has been groundbreaking in this regard. We have one of the oldest Social Medicine departments in the nation, which brings together physicians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, literary scholars, philosophers and historians to make sense of medicine in its contexts. Once controversial, in 2015 these areas of research and instruction are serving a felt need, on the part of students, faculty, clinicians, patients, administrators, policy makers, researchers, and community members. As one practitioner recently put it, “the humanities are a weapon in the fight for better healthcare.”[1]

UNC-Chapel Hill is poised to be an international leader in integrating knowledge from the humanities and liberal arts with research and practice in the health sciences. The elements are all in place: we have departments and divisions ranked among the top in the country,[2] already-established collaborations among a range of faculty on each side of campus,[3] and robust support from administrative leaders for interdisciplinary research and instruction.[4] Jordynn Jack and Jane Thrailkill in the College have just founded the HHIVE Lab (Health and Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Venue for Exploration), one of the first of its kind in the country.[5] Current efforts in the College and the medical campus to transform the way we conceptualize and teach health humanities exemplify the core principle of UNC’s 2011 Academic Plan: to “work as an integrated university to attract, challenge, and inspire students through transformative academic experiences.”[6]

Our goal is to create meaningful relationships with faculty who desire to break educational boundaries and provide a global view of the many efforts and initiatives in health humanities across the campus. For this reason, this Carolina Seminar brings together a working group of key representatives in health humanities from across the University, also reaching out to colleagues at Duke. The purpose is to assess what is already being done and create a framework for a comprehensive set of values and objectives: an overall sense of mission. We want to know what is going on, to determine what is missing, to share best practices, and to locate possibilities for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Our ultimate purpose, then, is to produce a report, to present to the Provost, that

1. Delineates what is already being done to bridge health and humanities at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels
2. Creates a framework for a comprehensive set of objectives
3. Prioritizes these objectives
4. Drafts a mission and vision statement that unites these smaller efforts into a larger educational philosophy and conceptual framework
5. Ultimately begins work on a comprehensive plan to meet the objectives

In sum, this seminar will develop a communicating community of scholars, find synergies across campus, and explore ground for truly innovative teaching at every level of the University. We aspire to create a campus-wide vision for collaboration among the humanities, social sciences, and the health professions. This vision will allow for budding scholars and clinicians from undergrads to postdocs to have experience in cross-disciplinary thinking and collaboration thus unleashing the power of the humanities onto a health care environment often criticized for its mechanistic and dehumanizing approach to suffering and illness.