The 10th Biennial Conference of the Society for Humanities, Social Science, and Medicine
ADVOCACY AND ACCOUNTABILITy: NAVIGATING THE BOUNDARIES OF MODERN MEDICINE
April 13th & 14th, 2024, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The National Conference for Physician-Scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities was founded in 2005 by a group of MD-PhD trainees in medical anthropology. These students imagined the biennial conference as an opportunity to revisit and reinvigorate our mission: to explore how the fields of anthropology, economics, epidemiology, ethics, health policy, history, sociology, and literature can advance the practice and public understanding of medicine.
In the years since, MD-PhD trainees around the country have sustained this spirit of student leadership, organizing iterations of the conference at the University of California-San Francisco, University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Medical School, the University of Michigan, and the University of California-Los Angeles. Please see Our History for a record of our previous meetings.
For our 10th biennial meeting, the conference theme is Advocacy and Accountability: Navigating the Boundaries of Modern Medicine. Our nation is currently reckoning with what some might call a “polycrisis.” A diverse set of emerging issues – including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the criminalization of gender-affirming care, global trauma and displacement, and an increasingly inhospitable climate – is impacting the communities in which we work and live. It is crucial for us to collectively reflect on our unique position as clinician-scholars to address these issues, both in and outside of clinical settings. By bridging disciplinary divides across the social sciences and humanities, we can not only improve our advocacy for patients, but also contend with the role that medicine has played in broader histories of structural violence.
This year, we welcome papers which examine the various systemic issues patients face, analyze programs and policies that aim to address these issues, and/or discuss the steps our professions can take toward their alleviation. We are accepting papers from disciplines across the social sciences and humanities that focus on issues such as gender inequity, LGBTQI+ rights, environmental justice, food insecurity, poverty, structural racism, and structural barriers to care, among others. Throughout the conference, we will further consider how the medical profession has addressed – and contributed to – these issues, and how our scholarship might inform future solutions to them. We also encourage discussion of how we as clinician-scholars might achieve these goals, as we continue to grapple with our unique place in medicine, academia, and society more broadly.
Please email us at info@shssm2024.org with any questions or concerns, and subscribe to our mailing list for important updates! Also, please join the SHSSM Facebook group here.