STRUCTURAL COMPETENCY: NEW MEDICINE FOR THE INEQUALITIES THAT MAKE US SICK
Description:
This lecture will provide an update on "structural competency", the recent framework developed between medicine, the social sciences, and patient organizations to understand and respond to health and healthcare in relation to social processes and inequities. Structural competency explores a new clinical politics for understanding and responding to the relationships among racialization and racism, class, and symptom expression. Increasingly, clinicians, scholars and community organizations recognize that oft-invisible social structural processes, biases, inequities, and blind spots shape definitions of health and illness long before doctors or patients enter examination rooms. Structural competency has been developed to train multi-disciplinary health professional teams to perceive and respond to the social forces that cause sickness, disease, as well as health and wellbeing.
Speaker Info:
Seth M. Holmes, PhD, MD, is Chancellor's Professor of Society and Environment and Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He is Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology coordinated between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. A cultural and medical anthropologist and physician, he works on social hierarchies, health inequities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted in the context of transnational im/migration, agro-food systems, and health care. He has received national and international awards from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and geography, including the Margaret Mead Award. In addition to scholarly publications, he has written for popular media such as The Guardian, The Huffington Post and Salon.com and spoken on multiple NPR, PRI, Pacifica Radio and Radio Bilingüe radio programs.
