Health Humanities Initiative
A continual engagement between the humanities and STEM fields is essential to address contemporary health issues and the practices of medicine. Yet these realms often remain separate both on university campuses and in healthcare institutions.
At ASU, Health Humanities works to transcend these disciplinary and institutional boundaries by bringing academics, clinicians, caregivers and students together to address grand social challenges in areas of health and healthcare and to explore strategies for promoting, sustaining and reimagining health and resilience in individuals and communities.
Goals
- To inquire what historical forces have shaped the structures and institutions of US healthcare today.
- To ask how our understanding and delivery of healthcare impacts the quality and kind of care we receive.
- To explore how the stories we tell about health and healthcare shape outcomes.
- To pursue, through collaboration with healthcare organizations, innovative solutions to the complex, shifting challenges of health and healthcare in the world today.
Plagues, Epidemics and Culture: Histories of Crisis and Care
Engaging with scholars focused on the histories and representations of epidemics, this series explores what can be learned from historical changes in the cultures of care that arose from those crises. Speakers also address how histories of bias, racism and colonialism are intimately bound up in the history of epidemics.