Dear colleagues,
As part of the Center of Innovation and E-health (CieH-UFMCD), in collaboration with the University of Bucharest and the international association Students for Health Humanities, our medical and health humanities team has the pleasure of inviting you to participate in The Public Health Humanities and Imaginative Writing workshopheld by our special lecturer Lise Saffran, who is an Associate Teaching Professor at the College of Health Sciences, University of Missouri, USA.
Public health humanities, as a component of the broader field of health humanities, concerns itself with the way that art, history, philosophy, and related disciplines inform how we think about public health issues, such as Covid19 and climate change, and how we think about ourselves as members of communities. For medical and health professionals, deep engagement with the arts and humanities offers opportunities for us to reflect about how our own histories and perspectives shape the work we do in communities and in policy development and to communicate more effectively with a variety of populations. In this session, creative writer and public health professor Lise Saffran will offer a context for public health humanities within health humanities more broadly. Following those introductory remarks, she will lead participants in a guided exercise in imaginative writing that illustrates the way that artistic practice can be meaningfully incorporated into education and training in the health professions.
Upon completion of this session, participants will:
- Understand the goals and methods of health humanities.
- Articulate the particular focus of public health humanities within the broader field.
- Identify ethical dilemmas in public health storytelling.
- Apply the central health humanities concepts of curiosity, tolerance of ambiguity, humility, and respect within creative exercise.
Lise Saffran, The former Director of the MPH Program at the University of Missouri and most recent Co-Chair of the Health Humanities Consortium, Lise Saffran is a health humanities scholar, a teacher and a creative writer.
Her courses at the University of Missouri, where she is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Public Health, include Storytelling in Public Health and Policy, the undergraduate public health capstone in digital storytelling. She also recently taught creative nonfiction and health humanities modules for the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s (IWP) Telling Our Stories project and for the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at UTHealth Houston. Her research focuses on how narrative enhances science communication and expands ethical public health practice. A graduate of both the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina (now the Gillings School of Global Public Health) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her essays, academic papers and creative work appear in a variety of outlets including The Lancet, Medical Humanities, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Scientific American and elsewhere. She is the author of the novel JUNO’S DAUGHTERS (Penguin/Plume 2011).
This workshop will be moderated at the courtesy of Senior Lecturer Dana Popescu-Spineni, Faculty of Midwifery and Nursing, Department of Social Medicine, ’Carol Davila’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy. For more details, please refer to Prof. Popescu-Spineni’s short bio https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fuoFf1_BodDbMCBJLLMaxoaLh0vf5aJz/view?usp=drive_link.
The content will be exclusively presented in English!
When and Where?
📅 Date: Monday, 20th of November
⏰ Time: 18:00 – 20:00
📌 Place: Conference Room, Center of Innovation and e-Health, 20 Pitar Moș Street, Ground Floor – Bucharest
🔗 Registration: https://forms.gle/ybWoDjmX2geQ16xP7
—The number of participants is limited to 25, and acceptance is tied to the order in which participants register—
📞 Contact info:
Medical Humanities Assistant: Stud. Mounzer Boustani
Telesemiology Assistant: Stud. Andrei Arpinte
Medical Humanities Coordinator: Gabriela Florea, MD, PhDc
Email: medhum@umfcd.ro / Tel: 0725359175
Remember to share this event with friends and colleagues!
#MedicalHealthHumanities
Special remark: We owe this event to the collaboration with Students for Health Humanities (SHH), without whom we would not have had the opportunity to host our distinguished guest lecturer, Prof. Lise Saffran.
*Event organized as part of the CNFIS-FDI-2023-F-0709 project*
