Please join us via zoom for a 2-day forum titled Cultural Health: A Forum on Folk Medical Systems. Held in conjunction with the 2021 annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Harrisburg, PA, this forum showcases the interaction of culture and health. Bringing insights from folklore studies to the practice of medicine and public health, the keynote lecture and roundtable discussion touch on the role of folklore and ethnology in patient care, perceptions of risk, misinformation, community narratives and traditions about health and illness. This forum is supported by the Humanities Institute at Penn State, the Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine and the School of Humanities at Penn State Harrisburg.  ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Charles L. Briggs

Keynote Lecture: “In Defense of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, Sort of: How the Broader Ecology of Laypersons’ Narratives Can Help Medicine”

Dr. Charles L. Briggs, Ph.D. (University of California, Berkeley)

Tuesday, October 19, 2021, 7-8:30 PM (Eastern Time), Zoom

Description: One of the greatest concerns for public health authorities in developing COVID-19 mitigation policies has been a global avalanche of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which are seen as major threats to public acceptance of mitigation measures and vaccination. This lecture examines how concern with misinformation can thwart appreciation of the broad and heterogeneous parameters of lay efforts to produce knowledge about the disease and its effects. During this period, large burdens of care have fallen to laypersons, including for isolation, quarantine, and home care for “mild cases,” even as a tricky virus has thwarted clinicians’ and epidemiologists’ efforts to provide linear timelines or stability and certainty in predicting SARS-CoV-2’s trajectories. The argument is presented that health professionals have much to gain by learning to appreciate not only patient narratives emerging in clinical encounters but the broader ecology of laypersons’ collective contributions to the complexities of care and prevention. In short, accepting laypersons as partners in COVID-19 knowledge production has much to offer in confronting the deep health inequities highlighted by the pandemic, addressing the challenges to health professionals and patients that continue to unfold, and finding ways to minimize chances of future cataclysmic pandemics.

Speaker: Charles L. Briggs is Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor of Folklore and Anthropology, Co-chair of Center for Social Medicine, and Co-Director of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the current President of the Society for Medical Anthropology. As a folklorist and medical anthropologist, Briggs studies narrative, health, violence, indigenous communities and the state. He is author of numerous books, including Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare (with Clara Mantini-Briggs, University of California Press, 2002); Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life (with Daniel Hallin, Routledge, 2016); and Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice (with Clara Mantini-Briggs, Duke University Press, 2016).

This event is free. While it is intended especially for medical and public health professionals, scholars, students, and others are welcome to attend. Attendees can register for the keynote lecture by emailing dtomazin@pennstatehealth.psu.edu by Oct. 16, 2021.

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Wednesday, October 20, 2021, 12-1:30 PM (Eastern Time), Zoom

Roundtable Discussion: “Understanding Folklore and Medicine: How Knowledge of Medical Legends, Belief, and Folk Healing Systems Can Improve the Study of Health, Public Outreach, and the Treatment of Patients”

An Online Event for Medical and Public Health Professionals

Description: “Vaccine hesitancy” or the choice to decline a vaccine has come to the forefront of public discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic since the major rollout of Covid vaccines in early 2021. “Misinformation spreads faster than the virus” one BBC report proclaimed (June 26, 2021); “tracking COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in real-time and engaging with social media to disseminate correct information could help safeguard the public against misinformation,” concluded a recent study published in PLOS One (Islam et. al 2021). Yet folklorists, or scholars who study traditional or informal cultures, have long studied the relationship between storytelling, rumor, folk belief, and folk medical practices that contribute to these kinds of disconnects between medical and public health professionals and the public at-large. Folklorists have explored culturally specific notions of health, the body, and disease, the vernacular perception of disease risk, and the stories people tell about their experiences with medical personnel and governmental entities, all of which might inform choices about when and how to seek treatment or prevention for illness.

This roundtable discussion for medical and public health professionals, led by a panel of distinguished scholars of folk medicine, will provide an opportunity to discuss and understand how a working knowledge of folk culture can support and enhance the study of disease and health and the treatment of patients.

Andrea Kitta

Moderators:   

Andera Kitta (Chair), Professor of English at East Carolina University, is a folklorist with specialties in medicine, belief, and the supernatural. She is author of Vaccinations and Public Concern in History: Legend, Rumor, and Risk Perception (Routledge, 2011) and The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press, 2019), which won the AFS Chicago Folklore Prize in 2020, among many other works.

 

Anika Wilson

Anika Wilson is an Associate Professor in the Department African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She earned her doctorate in Folklore and Folklife Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and specializes in the gender, narrative, and spirituality in southern Africa. Her book Folklore, Gender, and AIDS in Malawi: No Secret Under the Sun (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) was awarded the Elli Kongas Maranda Award for feminist scholarship in folklore in 2014.

Jennifer Spitulnik

 

Jennifer Spitulnik is a folklorist who served as the point person for COVID vaccine equity, access, and outreach during her time as a COVID Public Health Educator at Columbia/Boone County Public Health and Human Services in Missouri. She earned her PhD in English at University of Missouri and is currently an eLearning Specialist at Veterans United.

Sheila Bock

 

Sheila Bock is Associate Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her research applies narrative and performance models of analysis to examine how people make sense of their own and others’ experiences with health and illness, particularly in contexts of stigma.

 

This event is free, but has a limited registration. It is especially intended for medical and public health professionals. To register: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrcu2oqDIpGNWnwD50MFc5mgcY3Qn-3xIo

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Continuing education credits available for both events for Penn State Health and College of Medicine employees only. Information for obtaining CE credits will be made available to registrants. Registration is required for both events.

For more information, email Anthony Bak Buccitelli at abb20@psu.edu  or visit the Penn State College of Medicine, Department of Humanities website.