Die Universität Augsburg eröffnet das zentrale Graduiertenzentrum offiziell mit einer Veranstaltung, die den Beitrag interdisziplinärer Zusammenarbeit zur Lösung globaler Herausforderungen in den Vordergrund stellt.

Gastvortrag von Kirsten Ostherr (Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English,and Director of the Medical Humanities program at Rice University in Houston, USA) zu "Translational Medical Humanities: Connective and Transdisciplinary Scholarship for Global Challenges". An der anschließenden Podiumsdiskussion werden Dr. Alanna Ebigbo (Medizinische Fakultät), Miriam Elia (Fakultät für Angewandte Informatik) und Yijia (Erika) Zhu (Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät) teilnehmen. Die englischsprachige Podiumsdiskussion wird von Deborah Steinborn (Editor-in-Chief, Zeit Germany: Study & Research) moderiert.

Bitte teilen Sie uns per E-Mail an susanne.wiedemann@praesidium.uni-augsburg.de bis zum 10. Juni 2023 mit, ob wir mit Ihrer Teilnahme rechnen dürfen.

In the wake of COVID-19, societies worldwide face deep crises: income inequality, structural racism, threats to democracy, and ecological collapse. Amid these challenges, many healthcare systems are unable to care for their most vulnerable patients, particularly when the medical and public health workforce is still struggling to recover from the existential toll of the global pandemic. These are complex, interconnected, and fundamentally human problems that require radically transdisciplinary approaches. Prof. Ostherr will discuss how the field of medical humanities offers a translational model for scholarship that can address profound social, cultural, and ethical challenges that cannot be solved by science, technology, or quantitative reasoning alone. Through a discussion of the multifaceted sites of convergence at the nexus of health, technology, and human experience, Prof. Ostherr will demonstrate the power of transdisciplinary graduate and postdoctoral training and collaboration to enable researchers to make meaningful and impactful contributions through their scholarship.

Kirsten Ostherr, PhD, MPH is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English, and Director of the Medical Humanities program at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she is a media scholar, health researcher, and technology analyst. She is founder of the Medical Humanities program (2016-present) and the Medical Futures Lab (2012-present), and Chair of the English Department (2020-present). Her research on trust and privacy in digital health ecosystems has been featured in Marketplace Tech on NPR, The Atlantic, STAT, Slate, The Washington Post, Big Data & Society, Catalyst, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. Her writing about the COVID-19 pandemic has been featured in The Washington Post, STAT, Inside Higher Ed, and American Literature. Kirsten is currently leading a digital health humanities project called “Translational Humanities for Public Health” that identifies humanities-based pandemic responses from around the world to document and help others build upon these creative efforts, and her work was recently profiled in The Lancet.

Dr. Ostherr is the author of Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies (Oxford, 2013) and Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Duke, 2005). She is co-editor of a two-part special issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities called, “Race, Health, and Medicine,” editor of Applied Media Studies (Routledge, 2018), and co-editor of Science/Animation, a special issue of the journal Discourse (2016). She is currently writing two books, called The Visual History of Computational Health and Virtual Health.

Dr. Ostherr has extensive experience using human centered design as a technique for patient collaboration in health technology development. She co-created Medicine in the Digital Age on edX, an open, online course that has reached over twenty-five thousand global learners. She has spoken to audiences at the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services, the World Health Organization, the National Library of Medicine, TEDx, the mHealth Summit, Medicine X, the Louisville Innovation Summit, the Bauhaus, and in Germany, Spain, France, England, Sweden, Canada, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.