The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Department of History at Princeton University are hosting a conference and workshop on “Law, Difference, and Healthcare: Making Sense of Structural Racism in Medico-Legal History.” Our gathering will be held from Thursday to Friday afternoon of June 6—7, 2019. Our keynote speakers will be author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology Deirdre Cooper Owens and author of Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care Dayna Bowen Matthew. Our four panels will engage historiograph(ies), spatialit(ies), legalit(ies) and communit(ies), as well as methodolog(ies).
This workshop shall convene graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty members who employ historical methodologies. We will examine the qualities and conditions that have produced the spaces, laws, and legalities that structure racism in medicine, healthcare, public health, and related social policy. In recent decades, many of these areas have been addressed through studies of the construction of “race” and genomics, specific diseases, clinical medicine, and medical institutions.
Much work remains, however, to historicize the sociological concept of structural racism. Our workshop will remix approaches in the history of medicine and legal history. What does a medico-legal history that accounts for both individual and collective racism in medicine, space, law and its legalities look like? What historiographical interventions are today’s scholarship making? What new methodologies and archives are emerging?
Despite extensive work on structural determinants of health and the history of medical racism, racialized health disparities persist in the United States and globally. We will consider structural dimensions of health that have long been relegated to the margins of the field.
By connecting and comparing different approaches, our workshop will be geared toward solidifying the state of the field via an edited volume composed of original history essays.
For our first meeting June 6–7, 2019, registration is open to the public. We welcome interlocutors and outside observers. Please register here.
Organized by Dr. George Aumoithe of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University.
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