Doing Diversity in Health(care), Doing Race?
As part of the Critical Approaches to Race Seminar Series, we are honored to welcome Dr. Alana Helberg-Proctor, Assistant Professor in the Health, Care and the Body programme group at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Anthropology.
Inclusion and diversity are currently 'hot' topics in health research, care, and policy in Europe. In recent years there have been calls at national and EU levels for healthcare professionals, health researchers, and policymakers in Europe to attend to diversity and inclusion. Bias and inequality in health and healthcare are produced by the exclusion of diversity, but bias is also produced by the inclusion of racist and stereotypical thinking in medicine and healthcare.
While inclusion and diversity are indeed crucial topics in healthcare and medical education, operationalizing diversity around ethnicity and population differences is a difficult task with many pitfalls and complications. During this lecture Helberg-Proctor will discuss how scientific knowledge and facts about ethnicity and race related to health are utilized and produced in the Netherlands and beyond. Helberg-Proctor will also discuss how these modes of scientific knowledge production are deeply and problematically intertwined with society and politics.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Alana Helberg-Proctor is an Assistant Professor in the Health, Care and the Body programme group at the UvA Department of Anthropology. In her work, she focuses on diversity and inequality in healthcare and medical science. She investigates how 'race' and 'ethnicity' appear in biomedical research, health policy, and healthcare in the Netherlands and Europe. More specifically, she explores how scientific and technological practices in care and medicine are intertwined with society, politics, cultural values, and context. In 2021 she was awarded the Marie Curie Sklodowska research grant (2021-2022).
If you want to join this seminar, please send us an email at birmm@vub.be