Year: 2024-2025
Research Team Type: Student-led
Organizers: Mark Williams Jr., PhD student, Medical Anthropology
It’s time to start over. Our is world saturated with toxic discourses on what it means to be healthy, what constitutes acceptable forms of care, and how to gain access to it. The interplay between language, health, and biomedicine has significant implications for public health outcomes, community development, and individual growth. Increasingly this has meant that everyday forms of communication, whether mundane or spectacular, have become potent sites of life and death.
The Zones of Incommunicability and Biomedicine Research Team seeks to analyze how linguistic practices and biomedical knowledge come together to shape health behaviors, policies, and forms of care for some populations while constructing others as unworthy of it. We come together as medical anthropologists, linguists, public health researchers, artists, physicians, journalists and scholars in education, disability studies, black studies, and education to shed light on the power dynamics and cultural narratives that undergird the health and biomedical landscape. We track how language and communication within and outside of biomedical contexts influence the political economy of health resources and services, the experience of patients and practitioners, and broader social understandings of health, illness, and well-being. As a team we seek to launch an experimental, collective effort to radically recast old tools and create new ones that tinker with the conceptual building blocks of language, communication, poetics, interaction, narrative, translation, mediatization, health, and medicine, using them as provocations for unlearning and creating a radically decolonial framework.