The Sawyer Seminar on “Reimagining Technologies of Care: Racial Health Equity and Data Justice,” 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 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.
Yearlong activities include an invited speaker series and reading group discussions of case studies on emerging technologies that are reshaping healthcare within clinical settings. Participants include faculty and students from Rice and the Texas Medical Center. Sawyer Seminar Fellows were selected at the undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and medical school levels.
This Fall, we hosted guest lectures from Grace Wickerson (Federation of American Scientists), Andrea Downing, Valencia Robinson, and Ashley Dedmon (The Light Collective), Craig Watkins (University of Texas at Austin), Susannah Fox (author of Rebel Health), and Heidi Larson (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine). Roderic Crooks (University of California, Irvine) will be giving a lecture on April 10. We will host an all-day Research Symposium on March 6 with panel speakers Sabia Abidi (Rice University), Anna Maria Barry-Jester (ProPublica), Torie Bosch (STAT First Opinion), Hugo Campos (Patient Advocate), Rayvon Fouché (Northwestern University), Arbel Griner (Princeton University), Vivian Lam (The Conversation), Kirsten Ostherr (Rice University), Shobita Parthasarathy (University of Michigan), Elizabeth Petrick (Rice University), Rayne Rouce (Baylor College of Medicine), Liz Salmi (Open Notes), Jaipreet Virdi (University of Delaware), Darshali Vyas (Massachusetts General Hospital), S. Craig Watkins (University of Texas at Austin), and Matthew Wettergreen (Rice University).
More information can be found on the Sawyer Seminar website, including upcoming event details, and blog posts of lecture summaries, interviews with guest speakers, and a recording of the panel discussion with The Light Collective (a patient advocacy group).
Photo by Michael Busch