Historian Catherine Burns will pursue a dialogue between indigenous health cultures and biomedicine as part of the Medical Humanities series onThursday 29 August. This public lecture will take place in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, UCT Hiddingh Campus.
In The bricolage of health and healing in South Africa; Burns will explore the absence of an institutionalised, interdisciplinary relationship between the humanities and medicine, in light of the layered and heavily politicised history of South African Health systems throughout the 20th Century – a legacy which continues in various forms in the present. Drawing on the case study of an indigenous healer who sought a complex and sustained dialogue with biomedicine; this lecture will employ literary analysis, archival research, anthropology and political history in its discussion of South Africa as a unique and fertile site for the exploration of these dynamics. Given its evolving indigenous health cultures and alternative therapeutic systems, which co-exist with biomedical structures, Burns wi ll argue for South Africa as an emergent tri-continental frontier for the study of Medical Humanities.
Catherine Burns is a historian and interdisciplinary researcher educated at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) as well as at John Hopkins and Northwestern Universities in the USA. Her work focuses on sexuality, reproduction and health in an African context. She has published papers on the history and anthropology of health and traditional medicine; medical midwifery and nursing education; state versus missionary and community-based health services; the politics of sexuality and sexual health, and on cultures and histories of gender formation. Burns is co-convenor of the WITS “Body Knowledge” Conference at WITS in September 2013, an editor for the humanities Journal African Studies, and is on the board of the Adler Museum of Me dical History. She is the Principal Investigator for the Project on Sex History (POSH) in Southern Africa.
This event will take place on Thursday 29 August 2013 at 17:30 in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, Old Medical School Building, University of Cape Town (UCT) Hiddingh Campus, Orange Street, Cape Town, and is free. Refreshments will be served from 17:00; no booking is necessary.
Presented by UCT’s Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) and Department of Social Anthropology, this new public lecture series will speak to the growing interdisciplinary field of medical humanities, which includes the social sciences and the arts, in pursuit of intellectual synergies and their application to medical pedagogy and practice. For more information on this series, contact the GIPCA office on 021 480 7156 or fin-gipca@uct.ac.za.
More Info link:: http://www.gipca.uct.ac.za/
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Author: Fiona Gordon from The Famous Idea Trading Co.. Originally distributed by MyPR.co.za.
