Bridging East Africa’s Digital Health Divides is a humanities-based lab funded by a three year-long “Research Collaboratives” grant from the Hall Center for the Humanities. The first of its kind at the University of Kansas, this lab offers a new model for research, mentorship, and experiential language learning in the humanities and social sciences. The LAB brings together ten faculty members, eight graduate and undergraduate students, and local field consultants, whose collective expertise spans over ten academic disciplines:
| African & African American Studies | Kiswahili Studies |
| Anthropology | Political Science |
| Geography | Psychology |
| Haitian Studies | Sociology |
| History | Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies |
Our LAB intends to create a research and training structure similar to that in the basic sciences — lab meetings, colloquia, journal clubs, and other activities that provide valuable scholarly dialogue — for research and training in the humanities. Although collaboration is nothing new in the humanities and social sciences, this is the first humanities-based lab at KU to explicitly model itself in this way.
About the Global Medical Humanities
Humanities scholars have long viewed health, illness, and care as culturally, historically, and politically embedded experiences. While biomedicine focuses primarily on the causes, diagnoses, and treatments of disease, the medical humanities focus on the social meanings and relations of power that shape experiences of social and embodied forms of suffering. The cultural meanings that surround illness, violence, and suffering may be studied not only through conversations and individual testimonies, but also through their representations in poetry, literature, visual arts, film, music, archival records, and even architecture. Humanities scholars are able to show how ordinary people, as well as clinicians, public health and development practitioners, and political leaders, all operate with particular sets of explanatory narratives and modes of reasoning that are situated within uneven power relations. A global medical humanities lens highlights the concerns of people often excluded or marginalized from the production of knowledge surrounding medicine, health, and the body.
About Digital Health Divides
To better understand how these power relations impact health and development, scholars have advocated for analyzing embodied and social suffering from multiple perspectives, including the political, economic, and historical conditions that shape how people are born, grow, live, work and age across diverse societies. These analyses have shown that structural inequalities create and perpetuate health disparities, institutionalizing differences in health status among populations. Despite the growing demand for online resources like the Community Tool Box to provide much needed information, these new digital tools do not sufficiently attend to the barriers that limit people’s access, exacerbating what has been called the digital health divide.
These virtual domains, in other words, illuminate the same kinds of issues facing people on the ground; namely, the need for materials in the local language and greater attention to cultural differences and social inequalities. This LAB’s overlapping humanistic and social science approach will allow our work to connect the structural forces that shape communities with the stories of individuals seeking meaning and effecting change through these new digital horizons.
Important Dates
| November 10, 2017 | Student Information Session: Hall Center for the Humanites. 1:30-2:30 pm. |
| November 13, 2017 | FLAS Information Session. Pine Room. Kansas Union. 4:00-5:00 pm |
| November 30, 2017 | FLAS Information Session. English Room. Kansas Union |
| December 10, 2017 | Student ColLAB Application Deadline |
| January, 2018 | Students notified of acceptance to ColLAB |
| Late January, 2018 | Workshop #1. The Community Tool Box: Addressing the Social Determinants of Health |
| February 15, 2018 | FLAS Fellowship Application Deadline |
| March, 2018 | Workshop #2. The Research Process and Proposal Development |
| Late March, 2018 | Undergraduate Research Award Application Deadline |
| March 31, 2018 | Summer African Language Institute. Enrollment Begins |
| April 15, 2018 | Honors Opportunity Award Application Deadline |
| Late April, 2018 | Workshop #3. Fieldwork in East Africa |
| Late May, 2018 | Global Medical Humanities: Curriculum Development Workshop |
| June 6, 2018 | Summer African Language Institute begins |
| August 1-15, 2018 | Tanzania Field School |