Global Health Humanities Speakers

Rachel Pearson, PhD, MD

Rachel Pearson holds an MD from the University of Texas Medical Branch and a PhD from the Institute for the Medical Humanities. She is currently training as a pediatrician in the Integrated Research Pathway at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Dr. Pearson writes on issues in medicine and the humanities for publications including The Guardian, The Daily Beast, and Texas Monthly, and has discussed issues of child health and immigration on MSNBC’s The Chris Hayes Show, Public Radio International’s The World and dozens of NPR affiliates.  Her book No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine was a 2017 New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She is currently researching narratives of child death in an effort to address the cultural silence surrounding the deaths of children and to empower physicians and community members to serve as interlocutors for grieving parents.

Micro-Resistance in Primary Care: Toward a Radical Welcome

Medical spaces have been critiqued as sites of surveillance, where particular bodies are monitored and “normalized” towards ideals defined within medicine itself. In pediatrics, medical surveillance often plays out as surveillance of mothering and fathering. The implied threat of a call to Child Protective Services if a mother or father is found inadequate instills a fundamental mistrust between pediatricians and parents—particularly families of color, immigrants, and refugees, whose parenting practices may be different from those which physicians deem “healthy” and “normal.” This talk proposes that providers can resist the role of “parenting cop” and can help cultivate strong parent-child relationships by taking a position of wondering instead of surveillance. Strong parent-child relationships may protect children from the toxic stress of adverse childhood experiences, and a radical welcome from primary care physicians can invite meaningful resistance, transformation, and love into medical space.

Hani Serag, MD, MPH

Hani Serag, MD, MPH is health system research fellow with the UTMB Collaborative Center for Global Health and adjunct assistant professor in the UTMB Department of Pediatrics. Dr. Serag is a physician and public health researcher. He worked as a primary care physician in poor urban settings in Cairo, Egypt for several years. Since 1994, He served as a public health researcher for an Egyptian civil society organization, the Association for Health and Environmental Development, and then as the director of health systems and policy program. In mid-2006, he was assigned as the global coordinator of the People’s Health Movement (PHM). Throughout the last 20 years, Dr. Serag participated in designing and setting methodologies for several qualitative and qualitative research projects, including surveys at national levels and comparative studies across countries. He has been involved in a wide range of educational and training activities in the fields of public health and global health. Dr. Serag assisted the planning, development, and teaching of more than 30 training courses focused on health system research at both national and global levels for public health practitioners, especially from the non-profit sector.

On the 40th Anniversary of the Declaration of Alma Ata: Unmet or denied commitment ‘Health for All’?

The talk will discuss milestones of developments towards the achievement of the right to health. I will focus on the certain milestones including the constitution of World Health Organization and the definition of health 1948; the Declaration of Alma Ata and the slogan of  health for all 1978; the structural adjustment programs and health sector reform 1990s; the global health initiatives and international assistance 2000s; the Millennium Development Goals 2000; and the Sustainable Development Goals 2016. The presentation will offer a political economy analysis for each of these milestones and discuss associated successes and failures.

Duane Windsor, PhD

Duane Windsor (PhD, Harvard University; BA, Rice University) is the Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Management in the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. He joined the Rice faculty in 1977. His research and teaching focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR), business ethics, stakeholder theory, and sustainable development issues. He has published various academic papers in journals and books. He served eight years (January 2007 – December 2014) as editor (in chief) of the academic journal BUSINESS & SOCIETY, for which he is currently consulting editor, sponsored by the International Association for Business and Society (IABS) and published by Sage. He is presently an associate editor on a planned seven-volume ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BUSINESS ETHICS AND SOCIETY (2nd edition), to be published by Sage.

Universal Ethics and National Values

A health delivery entity may be both a business and a set of professions, and operate across “cultures”.  A question affecting business and professional ethics is the relationship between universal ethics (abstract principles and theories of right and wrong) and “national values” (which may not conform to universal principles).  Two competing perspectives come into conflict, as in a business ethics classroom discussion of corruption and lobbying.  One perspective is that everyone has a duty or responsibility to adhere to universal ethics.  The other perspective can be stated positively in terms of a right of respect due to national values, or at least recognition of practical conditions.   One proposed solution is that some issues are global, and other issues are national.  Business ethics concerns moral choices in a business (profit) decision.  Professional ethics concerns moral choices in a professional (client) decision: academic, accounting, dental, engineering, legal, and medical professions are examples.

Moderator: Jason Glenn, PhD

Dr. Jason E. Glenn’s areas of research specialty include health inequities, mass incarceration, the history of drug policy in the U.S., and the ethics and history of human subject research.  He received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1996, and his M.A. and his Ph.D. in the history of science and medicine from Harvard University in 2001 and 2005, respectively.  He spent 10 years at UTMB as the James Wade Rockwell Distinguished Professor in Medical History within the Institute for the Medical Humanities; a member of the Center for Addiction Research and a Senior Fellow at the Center to Eliminate Health Disparities.  Dr. Glenn is also director of Sobriety High, Inc., a nonprofit organization providing community re-entry services for persons with a history of substance abuse who are returning to Galveston from prison.  As director of Sobriety High, Dr. Glenn is also a co-founder of the Galveston County Restorative Justice Community Partnership and the Galveston County Hope Drug Court.  His current research investigates abusive policing practices as a structural determinant of ill health in so affected communities.