The Medical Humanities Research Institute was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant for an upcoming yearlong series of talks and events on “Reimaging Technologies of Care: Racial Health Equity and Data Justice.” The Sawyer Seminar is also supported by Rice’s BRIDGE Program (Building Research on Inequality and Diversity to Grow Equity) and the Scientia Small Conference Fund.

This series aims to interrupt inequitable healthcare practices by bringing key insights and methodologies of the humanities into the analysis, creation and use of healthcare technologies and health datasets. We will examine the current state of healthcare through multiple disciplinary lenses to ask how we might learn from the past to imagine and create better futures. Through collaborations across the humanities, arts, social sciences, engineering, and computer science, and among academic scholars, healthcare providers, and patient communities, this Sawyer Seminar will develop models for pursuing health equity across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, and other forms of difference. Our team of academic scholars and healthcare providers will collaborate with patient communities to propose new approaches to healthcare that place equity, ethics, and patient experiences at the center of medical innovation.

For more information and the schedule of events, please visit mhri.rice.edu/sawyer.

Image: Computer specialist John Smith arranges and examines cannisters of magnetic tape used in the processing of medical data at the National Library of Medicine (c. 1960). Source: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101648151-img