Global Health Humanities Working Group - Consortium of Universities for Global Health

The CUGH Global Health Humanities (GHH) Working Group seeks to explore global health through diverse humanities perspectives: history, literature, personal narrative, philosophy, ethics, creative arts, religious traditions, and cognitive and social sciences, in the effort to illuminate dimensions of human experience hitherto neglected in current global health activities and scholarship. We welcome health professionals and trainees, educators, and global health advocates from around the world to join our efforts. Our activities include: (1) sharing and discussing the emerging literature in GHH; (2) identifying questions, developing projects, and writing articles pertinent to GHH; (3) examining pedagogies for teaching health humanities in different cultures and contexts; (4) participating in conferences on global health and GHH.

If you are interested in joining this group, please contact quentin.eichbaum@vanderbilt.edu

Roster

Quentin Eichbaum – Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Chair)
Charles-Antoine Barbeau – Université de Sherbrooke, CA (Secretary)
David Addiss – The Task Force for Global Health
Wendy Ball – Stellenbosch University, SA
Lori DiPrete Brown – University of Wisconsin
Abidemi Fasanmi – Georgia State University
Elizabeth Grant – Edinburgh University, UK
Jessica Howell – Texas A & M
Kathryn Jacobsen – University of Richmond
Keith Martin – Consortium of Universities for Global Health (Ex-Officio)
Chisomo Kalinga – University of Malawi
Louise Penner – University of Massachusetts
Revathi Ravi – Massachusetts General Hospital/HMS
Lise Saffran – University of Missouri
Kearsley (Karrie) Stewart – Duke University
Caryl Waggett – Allegheny College
Mary White – Wright State University

Members’ Biosketches and Interests

MEMBERS’ BIOSKETCHES AND INTERESTS IN GHH

Quentin Eichbaum (GHH Chair): is a professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology and Professor of Medical Education and Administration at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He is a member of the CUGH Board of Directors and immediate past chair of the CUGH Education Committee. He developed and directs a unique health humanities course for medical students at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine with a focus on meta/neurocognition. He co-chairs the international Health Humanities Consortium (https://healthhumanitiesconsortium.com/) and is a member of the FRAHME Integration Committee of the AAMC. He works with new and established medical schools in Africa (through CONSAMS and AFREhealth).

Current interests: Meta/neurocognition, intercultural empathy, medical and health humanities curricula in low resource settings; ‘decolonizing the mind’ in global health; narrative medicine, narratives of illness in global health; creative writing; visual arts.

Charles-Antoine Barbeau-Meunier (GHH Secretary) is an MD/PhD candidate at Sherbrooke’s University in Quebec, with trainings in communication studies (B.A.), sociology (M.A.) and neuroimaging (PhD, ongoing). An active scholar on empathy, he has modelled empathy in various social, cultural and institutional settings, including healthcare, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Cofounder and president of Bien-être numérique (digital wellbeing), Charles-Antoine regularly provides guidance on the health impacts of social media and digital technology in youth. A firm advocate of climate action, he sits on the board of La planète s’invite en santé and works to promote planetary health at the levels of government and in medical school curricula.

Current interests: Empathy in social, cultural and institutional contexts; health, youth and social media use; climate action and planetary health

Liz Grant is one of the Assistant Principals at the University of Edinburgh, Director of the University of Edinburgh’s Global Health Academy, a Co-Director of the Global Compassion Initiative and the Edinburgh Global Nursing Initiative, and Convener of the University’s Chaplaincy committee. Liz is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. She sits on the Scottish Government NHS Global Citizenship Board, and is on the executive of the World Federation of Academic Institutions for Global Health and a Steering Group member for Health Information for All, Hifa.org. Her research spans planetary health and palliative care in contexts of poverty and conflict – the interconnectedness of human health, environment and systems wisdom of compassion and care in new beginnings and better endings

Current interests: The place of compassion in health, healthcare and planetary health, how compassion drives the SDGs. The intersection of faith and health in global and local agendas and practice

David Addiss – is a public health physician whose work has focused on the prevention and treatment of neglected tropical diseases. He has worked as a general medical practitioner in migrant health, an epidemiologist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a program director at the Task Force for Global Health, where he is currently Director of the Focus Area on Compassion and Ethics (FACE). David completed lay chaplaincy training program at Upaya Zen Center. He is adjunct professor at Emory University.

Current interests: include global health ethics and compassion in global health.

Lise Saffran teaches public health storytelling at the University of Missouri. Current co-Chair of the Health Humanities Consortium (HHC), Saffran is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and author of the novel Juno’s Daughters. Her writing on health humanities, storytelling and authenticity in science communication has appeared or is forthcoming in The Lancet, Academic Medicine, Medical Humanities, Scientific American, PLOS One and elsewhere.

Current interests: narrative public health, storytelling, climate change, creative writing

Kearsley A. Stewart, Ph.D., is Professor of the Practice at Duke University with joint appointments in Global Health and Cultural Anthropology. Stewart’s current research interests include research ethics of HIV/AIDS clinical trials in Africa, community-engaged sickle cell disease research in Uganda, global health pedagogy, and global health humanities. She is Co-Director of the Duke Health Humanities Lab and faculty associate with the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine.

Current interests: Arts-based qualitative health research methodologies, remote qualitative health research methods, theatre and performance in ethics education, Humument technique to teach awareness of the social construction of knowledge in global health data

Mary T White, PhD, spent the last twenty-five years teaching medical ethics, humanities, and global health in Ohio including teaching and working with NGOs in Uganda and Ethiopia.

Current interests: include how different cultural perspectives impact understandings of self in society, responses to suffering, and how to integrate human health and environmental health; global palliative care, pandemic ethics, and addictions management in medical education.

Lori DiPrete Brown focuses her scholarship and teaching at UW-Madison on the health and well-being of women and children in highly vulnerable situations around the world. She is the lead author and editor of Foundations for Global Health Practice (Wiley 2018), a text that articulates a broad vision of global health that goes beyond health care systems, to include topics such as human rights, global mental health, water and sanitation, food systems, climate change, urban health and the arts. DiPrete Brown has collaborated with a range of international organizations and has trained over 100 leaders from 17 countries including Chile, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Cameroon, India, Nepal, and Malawi. DiPrete Brown holds degrees from Yale College, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Harvard Divinity School. Her global health engagement informs her writing including fiction, creative non-fiction, and translation of poetry. Her novel, Caminata: A Journey, is based on her Peace Corps Service in Honduras.

Current interests: poetry translation; semiotics of Wellbeing; journaling for healing and growth

Jessica Howell is an associate professor of English and Associate Director of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. At the Glasscock Center, she convenes the Health Humanities Laboratory. Her research supports a global focus in the study of literature and medicine by analyzing the influence of colonial value systems upon medical narrative. Her work in the global health humanities involves a series of public engagement activities, including grant-funded oral history projects. Her books include Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate (Edinburgh UP, 2014) and Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire (Cambridge UP, 2018). Dr. Howell is also currently co-editing, with Dr. Narin Hassan, an accepted special issue of the journal Medical Humanities on the global health humanities.

Current interests: global focus in the study of literature and medicine analyzing the influence of colonial value systems upon medical narrative; public engagement activities, including oral history projects; undergraduate programs in health humanities

Revathi Ravi is a dual board-certified physician in Medicine and Pediatrics, Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Assistant Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has spent over a decade working with global health systems, structural violence, and examining the effects of power differentials through the narratives of patients living with HIV/AIDS in India, Botswana, and Uganda. Her current work examines emotional intelligence and health equity. She also analyzes how human rights, emotional intelligence, and social justice through the lens of power as a super determinant effect health outcomes. She teaches emotional intelligence, human rights and medical humanities in India and the US to medical students and residents.

Current interests: intersection of emotional intelligence, power, human rights, social justice, and health equity; how emotional intelligence can be used to improve health outcomes and deliver on social justice for individuals.

Tommaso Pomerani worked as director of the biggest international medical exchange program (IFMSA), from 2017 to 2018. His work included the development of standardized educational activities on global health, medical ethics and cultural competencies. At the local level, he co-organized and co-facilitated a student-led elective course on global health promoting students’ engagement and the integration between medical schools and the communities they serve.

Current interests: definition of global health humanities, cross-cultural empathy, how to teach global health humanities, medical anthropology and ethnomedicine, decolonization of global health.

Abidemi O. Fasanmi is an advocate, researcher, and a physician by training, with gender, and global health development experience. She has over 15 years of interdisciplinary and multisectoral experience with government, non-governmental, and academia across three continents (Africa, Europe, and North America). She is interested innovative research approaches that lead to transformative solutions such as exploring the synergy between medicine and the humanities particularly among underserved populations.

Current interests: Transdisciplinary approaches that address socio- medical issues by identifying local epistemologies within indigenous healing practices; compassion medicine and medical humanities; pedagogies and methodologies based on indigenous knowledge

Brenda K. Wilson, PhD is an Assistant Project Scientist and Lecturer in the Global Health Program at the University of California – San Diego, with trainings in the medical humanities (PhD), natural resources and environmental studies (MA), and human biology (BS). Her research and teaching focuses on health disparities with an emphasis on structural and social factors, lived experiences, and histories of minoritized and/or marginalized populations. She has conducted community-based photo-ethnographies and qualitative research to better understand health and fundamental root causes of inequities among migrant populations around the world, including Haitian migrant farmworkers in the Dominican Republic and Indian farmers and agricultural laborers in the state of Karnataka. Her current research examines the health and geographic trajectories of asylum seekers from around the world and who cross the US-Mexico border.

Current interests: lived experience and storytelling; structural violence and sociopolitical determinants of health; histories of health inequities; climate change & environmental destruction; social justice pedagogies and praxis

Tommaso Pomerani is a medical student in Florence, Italy. He worked as director of the biggest international medical exchange program (IFMSA), from 2017 to 2018, and as a member of the CUGH Trainee Advisory Committee (TAC) from 2019 to 2021. His work included the development of training programs and educational activities on global health, medical ethics and cultural competencies. At the local level, he co-organized and co-facilitated a student-led elective course on global health promoting students’ engagement and the integration between medical schools and the communities they serve.

Current interests: definition of global health humanities and how to teach it, cross-cultural empathy, global mental health and ethnopsychiatry, global capitalism and health, decolonization of global health.

Current Interests and Projects

GHH WORKING GROUP’S CURRENT INTERESTS AND PROJECTS:

1. Defining the scope of global health humanities
2. Intercultural empathy
3. Developing health humanities curricula in low-resource global health settings
4. Story and narrative medicine in global health
5. Narrative structures of illness in global health
6. Medical and health humanities in LMICs/non-Western settings
7. Practical ethics in non-Western moral traditions
8. Decolonizing global health
9. Humanitarian crises and aid

Resources

MEMBERS’ PUBLICATIONS OF INTEREST

Addiss, DG. Mindfulness, compassion, and the foundations of global health ethics. In: Monteiro LM, Compson J, Musten RF, eds., Practitioner’s guide to ethics and mindfulness-based interventions. New York, NY: Springer 2017; 295-322.

Addiss, DG. Spiritual themes and challenges in global health. J Med Humanit 2018; 39:337–348. doi 10.1007/s10912-015-9378-9. https://rdcu.be/4lzv

Addiss DG, Amon JJ. Apology and Unintended harm in global health. Health and Human Rights Journal 2019, 21:19-32.

Addiss DG. Compassion in disasters. Health Progress 2019, November-December: 39-44. https://www.chausa.org/publications/health-progress/article/november-december-2019/compassion-in-disasters

Addiss DG. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. In Rotbart H, ed. Miracles we have seen: America’s leading physicians share stories they can’t forget. Deerfield Beach, Florida: HCI Books 2016; 190-197. https://amzn.com/0757319378

Barbeau-Meunier (2013). « L’empathie peut-elle changer le monde? Des fondements empathiques de l’action sociale et son rôle vis-à-vis de la crise écologique : recherche interdisciplinaire. » Master’s thesis. Montreal (Quebec, Canada), Université du Québec à Montréal, Master’s in Sociology.

DiPrete Lori. Nicaragua: Excerpts from a Journal, Sojourner, January 1988.

DiPrete Brown, L. (2013) Caminata: A Journey. Global Reflections Press.

DiPrete Brown, L. (2018). Foundations for Global Health Practice. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

DiPrete Brown L. Inter-Professional Competences for Global Health: Insights from Educational Frameworks and Experience at UW-Madison. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Volume 42, Issue 4, pp. 32-37, Winter 2014

Eichbaum Q, Reid S, Coly A, Naidu T, Omaswa F. Conceptualizing medical humanities programs in low-resource settings in Africa. Academic Medicine.2019;94(8):1108-1114.

Eichbaum QG, Adams LV, Evert J, Ho M-J, Semali IA, van Schalkwyk SC. Decolonizing Global Health Education: Rethinking Institutional Partnerships and Approaches. Academic Medicine.2020.

Eichbaum Q. The problem with competencies in global health education. Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges.2015;90(4):414-417.

Eichbaum Q. Acquired and Participatory Competencies in Health Professions Education: Definition and Assessment in Global Health. Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges.2017;92(4):468-474.

Eichbaum Q. Collaboration and teamwork in the health professions: rethinking the role of conflict. Academic Medicine.2018;93(4):574-580.

Fasanmi, A. (2018). “Bio-Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa: Re-Examining Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission Strategies for hiv”. In Erotic Subjects and Outlaws. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Rodopi. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004392298_009

Fasanmi A., Ayivor S. (2019) Widows, Widowhood, and Society in Africa. In: Yacob-Haliso O., Falola T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77030-7_33-1

Futoransky, “Luisa, Juana de Arco, El Portal, Joan of Arc, The Gateway.” (Living Poetry: Women in Translation Collective, Trans.). First Published on Poetry International, 2020.

Howell, J. Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate (Edinburgh UP, 2014)

Howell, J. Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Howell, J Nurse Going Native: Language and Identity in the Colonial Context.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51.1: 165-81“Nursing Empire: Travel Letters from Africa and the Caribbean.” Studies in Travel Writing 17.1, 62-77

Howell, J Mrs. Seacole Prescribes Hybridity: Constitutional and Maternal Rhetoric in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38,107-25

Pham TV, Stewart KA,and JP Gagliardi. Humanistic Stories About the Workplace and Resident Wellness: A Missing Connection. Academic Psychiatry, 2020 (), 1-4.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40596-020-01277-y

Saffran, L. (2020). The world behind the world: art and the climate emergency. The Lancet, 395(10219), 182-183.

Saffran, L. Fiction writing to build empathy and self-awareness in public health practice. In Craig Klugman and Erin Lamb (Eds), Research methods in health humanities (pp 268-284). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2019

Saffran, L. (2017). Emotional life: Exploring contradictions in health behavior through creative writing in public health education. Academic Medicine, 92(9), 1234-1235. https://doi:10.1097/ACM.0000000000001827

Saffran, L. (2017, February 23). The essential role of storytelling in the search for truth. [Blog Post]. Scientific American Guest Blog. Retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-essential-role-of-storytelling-in-the-search-for-truth/

Saffran, L. (2014). ‘Only connect’: The case for public health humanities. Medical humanities, 40(2), 105-110. https://doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010502

Stewart, KA. Transforming Undergraduate Global Health Education Through a Humanities-Focused Curriculum. Pedagogy in Health Promotion. 6(1):9-13, 2020. Special theme issue, Pedagogy for Global Health and Health Promotion. Guest editor: Ashti Doobay-Persaud. https://doi.org/10.1177/2373379919900534

Stewart, K. and K Swain. Global Health Humanities: Defining an Emerging Field.The Lancet [London, England]388(Nov 26):2586-87. [In: Perspectives: The Art of Medicine] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)32229-2/fulltext?elsca1=etoc; PubMed PMID: 28452322;DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(16)32229-2

Stewart K, Ingold R, de Bruyn M, and KK Swain. Art as Disruption in Global Health Humanities: The Humument Technique, a Sexual and Reproductive Health Archive, and Developing Flexible Student Thinking. In Banner O., N. Carlin, and T.R. Cole (eds.), Teaching Health Humanities, pp319-337, 2019. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/101725331 PDF Here

Stewart K, Loiseau N, Odendahl-James J, Rainer C, and E Alexopoulos. Theatre as a Transformative Learning Experience for US-Based Students of Global Health Ethics. Critical Stages 17:1-16, 2018. Special Issue: Medicine And/In Theatre. http://www.critical-stages.org/17/theatre-as-a-transformative-learning-experience-for-us-based-students-of-global-health-ethics/

St-Pierre Alain, Roy, Barbeau-Meunier et al. (2019). « Le climat s’invite dans nos urgences: Les impacts sur la santé des changements climatiques ». Brief, Fédération médicale étudiante du Québec. March 25 2019.

Ward E, Gillies JCM, Armstrong D, Grant M, Elder A, Burton J, et al. Cultivating compassionate care: why does it matter and what can we do to promote it? Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. 2018;48:71-7.

White MT, Satterfield CA, Blackard JT (2017) Essential competencies in global health research for medical trainees: A narrative review. Medical Teacher 39(9):945-953.

White MT and Evert JE (2014) Developing Ethical Awareness in Global Health: Four Cases for Medical Educators. Developing World Bioethics. 14(3): 111-116.

White MT and Worku N (2013) Administrative Needs of Academic Partnerships at One Ethiopian University: A Pilot Study. Ethiopian Medical Journal. 51(3): 203-7.

White MT (2007) A Right to Benefit from International Research: A New Approach to Capacity Building. Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance 14:73-92.