Health & Society Archive (2014-2015)

Mariana Craciun, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Science in Human Culture; Sociology, Northwestern University

Abstract:  Though talk therapists’ role in treating mental illness has been seriously undermined by psychopharmacology, they continue to play an important role in the field of mental health.  This presentation will draw on ethnographic and interview data to compare the knowledge-making practices of psychotherapists working in the psychoanalytic tradition with those adopting cognitive and behavioral approaches.  My goals are twofold.  First, I show that these orientations constitute partially overlapping epistemic cultures, particularly in clinicians’ approach to dealing with emotions, and in their responses to uncertainty and failure.  Contrary to existing opinion, I will propose that such overlaps point to the staying power rather than the obsolescence of psychoanalytic practices and ideas.  Second, I delve into differences between these orientations, and demonstrate that cognitive-behavioral therapists’ adoption of what I call ‘psydevices’ (i.e. writing and measurement exercises),  has facilitated their ascent to prominence in the field of talk therapy.  At stake in these approaches to treatment are thus not only patients’ health, but also these experts’ professional standing, particularly their autonomy and dominance.

• Date(s): Wednesday, 10/15 3:00 PM to Wednesday, 10/15 5:00 PM
• Campus Address: Institute for the Humanities (Lower Level / Stevenson Hall)
• Address: 701 South Morgan
• Location: Chicago, Illinois
• Contact: Linda Vavra
• Email: huminst@uic.edu
• Website: www.huminst.uic.edu
• Phone: (312) 996-6352

Sydney Halpern, UIC Emeritus, Sociology

ABSTRACT:  For over thirty years, 1942 through 1974, American scientists conducted experiments that deliberately infected people with hepatitis.  The aim was to discover basic features of hepatitis pathogens, information necessary for developing preventive and therapeutic measures.  The human subjects included residents of homes for the intellectually impaired, mental patients, conscientious objectors to the military draft, and inmates of prisons and reformatories.  This talk presents major finding from a forthcoming book based on extensive archival research.  It locates the roots of the hepatitis studies—and other hazardous mid-century human experiments–with the rise of federal support of biomedicine for purposes of national defense.  The book clarifies how scientists and their military sponsors justified dangerous medical research, and how they secured public acquiescence and cooperation from managers of institutions housing potential subjects.  It shows that, with the advent of rights movements in the 1960s and early 70s, the biomedical-military elite lost both control over the dominant discourse about human experimentation and access to institutionalized subjects.

• Date(s): Wednesday, 11/19 3:30 PM to Wednesday, 11/19 5:30 PM
• Campus Address: Institute for the Humanities (Lower Level / Stevenson Hall)
• Address: 701 South Morgan
• Location: Chicago, Illinois
• Contact: Linda Vavra
• Email: huminst@uic.edu
• Website: www.huminst.uic.edu
• Phone: (312) 996-6352

This lecture was established to honor Phillip J. Bowman’s contributions to UIC during his tenure as Director of IRRPP and Professor of African American Studies. It features national scholars of race, ethnicity, and public policy who provide timely analysis of issues of critical importance to the field and to communities of color.

Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania
George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell
Alexander Professor of Civil Rights Law

Professor Dorothy Roberts’s pathbreaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, sexuality, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. Professor Roberts is a distinguished Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. Her lecture will focus on the relationship between science, politics, gender, economics and the reproduction of race in contemporary society.

• Date(s): Thursday, 3/12 4:00 PM to Thursday, 3/12 6:00 PM
• Campus Address: Student Center East, Room 302
• Address: 750 S. Halsted Street
• Location: Chicago, Illinois
• Email: irrpp@uic.edu
• Website: www.huminst.uic.edu

Kara Swanson, Law, Northeastern University

Every year, countless Americans supply blood, sperm, and breast milk to “banks” that store these products for later use by strangers in routine medical procedures. These exchanges entail complicated questions. Which body products are donated and which sold? Who gives and who receives? And, in the end, who profits? Kara Swanson will discuss the history of body banks from the nineteenth-century experiments that discovered therapeutic uses for body products to twenty-first-century websites that facilitate a thriving global exchange.

Professor Swanson is an accomplished scholar, legal practitioner and scientist whose chief interests are in intellectual property law, gender and sexuality, the history of science, medicine, and technology and legal history.

• Date(s): Thursday, 4/9 3:00 PM to Thursday, 4/9 5:00 PM
• Campus Address: Institute for the Humanities (Lower Level / Stevenson Hall)
• Address: 701 South Morgan
• Location: Chicago, Illinois
• Contact: Linda Vavra
• Email: huminst@uic.edu
• Website: www.huminst.uic.edu
• Phone: (312) 996-6352