REGISTER
Please join us on Thursday, April 9th from 12-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine, by Charles Briggs, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.
Professor Briggs will be joined in conversation by Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and Eric Snoey, Department of Emergency Medicine, Alameda Health System at Highland Hospital and Clinical Professor in Emergency Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine. Armando Lara-Millán, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, will moderate.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
About the Book
In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians—John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem—to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts. He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.
Panelists
Charles Briggs is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in Folkloristics and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He is interested in philosophical and ethnographic issues regarding how bodies, media, viruses and bacteria, narratives and songs, and race constantly get mixed up, sometimes fatally. He has engaged these issues by investigating epidemics of cholera and rabies in Venezuela, struggling with relatives, doctors, nurses, healers, and epidemiologists to figure out why so many people die from preventable diseases. His concern with infectiousness spreads from microbes to narratives, to thinking about who produces the stories of H1N1, Ebola, diabetes, etc. that proliferate in traditional and social media, thereby shaping the imaginations of policymakers, clinicians, journalists, and publics.
Elinor Ochs is a Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA. Primary among Professor Ochs’ many research interests is the role of language and culture in life span human development and learning across social groups. Her work with children and their caregivers in Samoa, as well as her collaborative work with anthropologist B. Schieffelin, helped to develop the field of inquiry known as language socialization. Most recently, Professor Ochs has taken on the direction of the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, a Sloan Center on Working Families that examines how members of middle class working families create a home life through culturally and situationally organized social interactions.
Eric Snoey: For the past 35 years, Dr. Snoey has been an Emergency Medicine physician and core faculty at Highland Hospital; a teaching and safety net hospital in Oakland, California. His areas of expertise include cardiovascular emergencies, the application of point-of-care ultrasound and medical education. More recently, Dr. Snoey has begun to focus more on macro-issues and threats to the delivery of emergency healthcare: ER over crowding, the problem of over testing and defensive medicine, budget cuts, predicted work force shortages and the challenges of end-of-life care.
Armando Lara-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar. He is the current chair-elect of the Sociology of Law Section of the ASA, a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and is currently a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Lara-Millán does political economy in sociology. For him that means studying changing markets and their enabling institutions, but in such a way that centers history, culture/knowledge, and politics. He is an ethnographer of well-positioned organizations and a historian of the fields those organizations shape.