Year: 2024-2025
Research Team Type: Faculty-led
Organizers: Seth Holmes, Chancellor’s Professor, Medical Anthropology; Jeremy Gottlieb, MD/PhD student, Medical Anthropology; Theo Michaels, MD/PhD student, Medical Anthropology
Between the social sciences and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from varying perspectives and with different political implications. Critical knowledge produced by the social sciences has engendered new terminology, programs, and practices in medicine that elucidate the social inequities in health and health care. While it is clear that the social sciences should be integral to medicine, the social sciences continue to vary in their understandings of “the human” in relation to health. The Case of the Human follows this importance and difference. We ask: “What do the social sciences bring to medicine’s conceptualization of ‘the human’? And how is the category of the human acted on in the sphere of health and health care?”
We answer these questions by generating novel, interdisciplinary, and diverse knowledge on the human along three important axes: the human as body, as social, and as subject. We bring together a community of scholars from across the social sciences in the service of our three key aims, each involving specific outputs: 1) co-developing knowledge on the human, through a multidisciplinary research conference co-sponsored by our UC-Berkeley Social Science Matrix Research Team; 2) disseminating new social scientific knowledges on the human, through a collaborative case series published in The Lancet; and 3) fostering an interdisciplinary community of social scientific scholars engaged in questions of the human, health, and medicine. Our multidisciplinary approach promises to transcend the boundaries separating the different social sciences, as well as the social sciences and health.