Over the next four years, the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia will offer a series of events on the topic of “Evaluation, Value, and Evidence.” This series aims to examine the methods by which various disciplines and field studies describe, measure, assess, articulate, judge, and produce knowledge by different means and for different ends.
Taking “medical humanities” as its subject, the first conference in this series considers some of the investigations and interventions made by those who study illness and health from the perspectives of the arts, humanities, and human sciences. Presentations by medical practitioners, historians, social justice advocates, medical journalists, disability studies and narrative studies scholars will be interspersed with readings by poets and novelists, reports from the field, and a theatrical performance.
Among the questions to be addressed are: What roles do methods like description, measurement, prediction, and interpretation play in the evaluative practices of the interdisciplinarily diverse context known as “medical humanities”? How are diverse values—ethical, clinical, psychological, experimental, political, aesthetic, financial, and so forth---measured and assessed? How do disciplinary investments and methodological differences affect how evidence is produced, evaluated, and valued? How, for example, do healthcare practitioners evaluate health and value human life? How do narrative practices affect medical evaluation? How is the price of a human organ determined—or the worth of efforts to save an individual life? How does “data” gain and lose its evidentiary status as it moves between the various “medical humanities” disciplines? To what material, formal, and social constraints is evidence subject? How do categories of evidence gain authority or fall under suspicion? How do representational forms affect the persuasiveness of evidence—and for which audiences or constituencies? Whose testimony matters? How do new kinds of evidence (DNA, for example) change existing regimes of knowledge?
This Conference is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
April 12, 2013 Friday
8:30am - 9:15am EDT
9:15am - 11:00am EDT
This session will take place in Jerome Greene Annex.
Eileen Gillooly
Executive Director
Heyman Center for the Humanities
Christopher Baswell
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English
Barnard College
Valeria Finucci
Professor of Italian Studies and Theater Studies Romance Studies
Duke University
Gianna Pomata
Professor, Institute of the History of Medicine
The Johns Hopkins University
Rita Charon
Director and Founder, Program in Narrative Medicine
College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University
11:10am - 11:30am EDT
This session will take place in Jerome Greene Annex.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Author
11:30am - 1:00pm EDT
This session will take place in Jerome Greene Annex.
Paul Browde
Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
New York University
Murray Nossel
Founder & Director
Narativ
Ishita Srivastava
Multimedia Producer
Breakthrough
Kathy Boudin
Assistant Professor
Columbia University School of Social Work
Sayantani DasGupta
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and Faculty, Master's Program in Narrative Medicine
Columbia University
Marsha Hurst
Lecturer, Master Program in Narrative Medicine
Columbia University
1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
2:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
This session will take place in Lehman Auditorium, 202 Altschul Hall, Barnard College.
Judith Shulevitz
Author
4:10pm - 5:40pm EDT
This session will take place in Lehman Auditorium, 202 Altschul Hall, Barnard College.
Benjamin Reiss
Professor
Emory University
David Serlin
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
Rachel Adams
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
Elizabeth Emens
Professor of Law
Columbia University
6:00pm - 7:30pm EDT
New Location!: This performance will take place in Davis Auditorium, the Schapiro Center.
Jenny Allen
Writer and Monologist
April 13, 2013 Saturday
8:30am - 9:00am EDT
9:00am - 10:30am EDT
This session will take place in Lehman Auditorium, 202 Altschul Hall, Barnard College.
Uzodinma Iweala
Author/Physician
10:40am - 12:10pm EDT
This session will take place in Lehman Auditorium, 202 Altschul Hall, Barnard College.
Eric J. Cassell
Emeritus Professor of Public Health
Cornell University
Neil Vickers
Reader in English Literature & Medical Humanities
Kings College, London
James Whitehead
Lecturer in Medical Humanities and English
Kings College, London
Brian Hurwitz
D’Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine & the Arts
Kings College London
12:10pm - 1:30pm EDT
1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT
This session will take place in Lehman Auditorium, 202 Altschul Hall, Barnard College.
Jordynn Jack
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Barry Saunders
Associate Professor, Social Medicine
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Terrence Holt
Assistant Professor of Social Medicine and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Geriatric Medicine
University of North Carolina, School of Medicine
Rishi Goyal
Doctor and Scholar
3:00pm - 3:20pm EDT
This session will take place in Lehman Auditorium, 202 Altschul Hall, Barnard College.
Rachel Hadas
Professor of English
Rutgers University
3:30pm - 4:45pm EDT
This session will take place in Lehman Auditorium, 202 Altschul Hall, Barnard College.
Carolyn Halpin-Healy
Executive Director
Arts & Minds
Maura Spiegel
Associate Professor of English
Columbia University
Susan Coppola
Clinical Professor, Division of Occupational Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Cherie Rosemond
Co-Director: The Hubbard Program
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jane Thrailkill
Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alvan A. Ikoku
Assistant Professor
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
5:00pm - 5:30pm EDT
This session will take place in Lehman Auditorium, 202 Altschul Hall, Barnard College.
Joshua Bennett
Poet