Olivia Banner

Scrutinizes dominant models of health and ability, race, and gender and the structure of digital health

The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health Humanities

Communicative Biocapitalism

Thomas R. Cole

Teaching Health Humanities expands our understanding of the burgeoning field of health humanities and of what it aspires to be. The volume's contributors describe their different degree programs, the politics and perspectives that inform their teaching, and methods for incorporating newerdigital and multimodal technologies into teaching practices. Each chapter lays out theories that guide contributors' pedagogy, describes its application to syllabus design, and includes, at the finer level, examples of lesson plans, class exercises, and/or textual analyses. Contributions also focus on pedagogies that integrate critical race, feminist, queer,disability, class, and age studies in courses, with most essays exemplifying intersectional approaches to these axes of difference and oppression. The culminating section includes chapters on teaching with digital technology, as well as descriptions of courses that bridge bioethics and music,medical humanities and podcasts, health humanities filmmaking, and visual arts in end-of-life care. By collecting scholars from a wide array of disciplinary specialties, professional ranks, and institutional affiliations, the volume offers a snapshot of the diverse ways medical/health humanities is practiced today and maps the diverse institutional locations where it is called upon to do work. Itprovides educators across diverse terrains myriad insights that will energize their teaching.

Teaching Health Humanities

Nathan Carlin

Teaching Health Humanities expands our understanding of the burgeoning field of health humanities and of what it aspires to be. The volume's contributors describe their different degree programs, the politics and perspectives that inform their teaching, and methods for incorporating newer digital and multimodal technologies into teaching practices. Each chapter lays out theories that guide contributors' pedagogy, describes its application to syllabus design, and includes, at the finer level, examples of lesson plans, class exercises, and/or textual analyses. Contributions also focus on pedagogies that integrate critical race, feminist, queer, disability, class, and age studies in courses, with most essays exemplifying intersectional approaches to these axes of difference and oppression. The culminating section includes chapters on teaching with digital technology, as well as descriptions of courses that bridge bioethics and music, medical humanities and podcasts, health humanities filmmaking, and visual arts in end-of-life care. By collecting scholars from a wide array of disciplinary specialties, professional ranks, and institutional affiliations, the volume offers a snapshot of the diverse ways medical/health humanities is practiced today and maps the diverse institutional locations where it is called upon to do work. It provides educators across diverse terrains myriad insights that will energize their teaching.

The Precision Medicine Initiative, Apple’s HealthKit, the FitBit—the booming digital health industry asserts that digital networks, tools, and the scientific endeavors they support will usher in a new era of medicine centered around “the voice of the patient.” But whose “voices” do such tools actually solicit? And through what perspective will those voices be heard? Digital health tools are marketed as neutral devices made to help users take responsibility for their health. Yet digital technologies are not neutral; they are developed from an existing set of assumptions about their potential users and contexts for use, and they reflect dominant ideologies of health, dis/ability, gender, and race. Using patient-networking websites, the Quantified Self, and online breast cancer narratives, Communicative Biocapitalism examines the cultural, technological, economic, and rhetorical logics that shape the “voice of the patient” in digital health to identify how cultural understandings and social locations of race, gender, and disability shape whose voices are elicited and how they are interpreted.

Olivia Banner

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