Lecture Information:

Time: May 14, 2024 (Tuesday) 10:00-12:00

Venue： Room 716, Yifu Teaching Building

Speaker:  Professor Ronald Schleifer (University of Oklahoma)

Moderator: Associate Professor Qiao Yuling (School of Health Humanities, Peking University)

Lecture Title:  The Interdisciplinary Work of the Health Humanities: Translating Languages and Translating Disciplines in the Clinic

Abstract:

This presentation brings a close look at the ways that parallels of cross-cultural and linguistic translations between Chinese and English can help us understand the benefits, insights, and hazards of the cross-disciplinary work of the health humanities. The presentation deploys translation theory to examine the ways different disciplinary frameworks of understanding – that of the strict formulas of mathematical sciences, such as physics and biochemistry, the statistical representations of social sciences, such as sociology and epidemiology, and the semantic formalism of philology and the health humanities – can be “translated” into one another in the work of clinical medicine. The presentation begins with an examination of the novelist Ursula LeGuin meditating on the possibility of “translation from a language that doesn’t yet exist” in order to analyze the ways in which the relatively new “discipline” of health humanities (which is just beginning to exist) can bring together different disciplinary strategies of understanding to promote effective, efficient, and fulfilling work in healthcare. To this end, it examines how the focused understandings of different disciplines can contribute to the health, well-being, and comfort of patients. It accomplishes this by examining three “modes of unhealth”:“disease,” which is some deviation from a fixed biological norm; “sickness,” which is a social “public” understanding of a condition; and “illness,” which is the patient’s experience of ill health.  These different “translations” of ill health can complement and strengthen one another in the work of healthcare.