Global Scholars Seminar
By introducing students to undergraduate research, providing them with opportunities to learn more about study and research abroad, and helping them think about ways they might integrate international into their post-graduate lives, the seminar serves as the foundation for the Global Scholars program.
Chronic Conditions: Knowing, Seeing & Healing the Body in Global Africa
The goal of the 2019 Global Scholars Seminar is to consider new ways of thinking about the historical, cultural, and structural processes that have given rise to chronic illnesses among Africans, African immigrants, and African Americans. Global scholars will address critical questions about how anti-black racism and symbolic violence have combined with structural inequalities to predispose minoritized populations to particular conditions. Through a focus on communities that share African roots, seminar participants will trace how legacies of slavery, colonialism, and segregation have rendered black bodies particularly vulnerable to misapprehension, oppression, and exploitation in medicine.
Time/Place: 3:30-6:00 pm on Thursdays ♦ 307 Spencer Museum of Art
Dr. Kathryn Rhine
Associate Professor in Anthropology
co-Director of the East Africa’s Digital Health Divides Lab
Dr. Rhine studies the relationship between culture and health in Sub-Saharan Africa. With over 14 years of fieldwork experience in Nigeria, she focuses on how medical technologies transform the ways individuals think about themselves and experience their bodies and social relationships. Dr. Rhine serves as the co-Director of the East Africa’s Digital Health Divides Lab. The first of its kind at the University of Kansas, this Lab offers a new model for research, mentorship, and experiential language learning in the humanities and social sciences. She was recently awarded an NEH Humanities Connections grant for a curriculum development project entitled “Global Medical Humanities: Bridging Digital Divides in Healthcare” and was nominated by the Mellon Foundation for a 2019-2020 Sawyer Seminar titled, "Chronic Conditions: Knowing, Seeing & Healing the Body in Global Africa."
