“Building Healthcare Collectives” centers humanities expertise in research that improves healthcare quality and patient outcomes. Humanities researchers’ participation in these endeavors is crucial, given our skill at inventing creative approaches to capturing and communicating experiences ofhad by those who are disproportionately affected by “failing social and economic networks of support” (Butler, 2006, p. 35). Medical humanities researchers are driven by a “logic of care” (Mol, 2008) that embraces both technological and rhetorical awareness. Care research involves “persistent tinkering in a world full of complex ambivalence and shifting tensions” (Mol, Moser, and Pols, 2010, p. 14), and focuses on questions concerning vulnerable populations. 

Care research continues to grow in the fields of disability studies, literacy studies, rhetorics of health and medicine, narrative medicine, and the design of health technologies. However, this work is rarely implemented in health and medical settings. “Building Healthcare Collectives” connects humanities research with health services, drawing in particular from the Literate Care Model (Koh et al., 2013), a recognized yet rarely executed framework for incorporating health literacy, shared decision-making, and team-based care coordination (including connecting community resources) into clinical practice. The LCM focuses on vulnerable populations, often those managing multiple chronic illnesses (Crook & Peters, 2008) and in need of coordinated, collaborative approaches to care. Inherent in these practices are many of the specializations outlined above. Humanist researchers, then, are needed to implement the LCM as the U.S. healthcare system recognizes the importance of preventive, value-based care.

Humanities scholars urgently need an infrastructure that connects our work to the health sciences; reduces research-related redundancies; and supports collaborative idea generation, sharing, and research design. “Building Healthcare Collectives” will help mitigate current infrastructural constraints for humanities researchers to participate in work outside of the walls of the humanities. Building on existing institutional strengths, “Building Healthcare Collectives’” OSU participants created the Medicine, Narrative, Disability, and Rhetoric ColLABoratory, in which researchers working on health-related social justice projects shared their research. After its inaugural meeting in January 2017, the ColLABoratory provides an agile infrastructure for humanities and health services partnerships “that support more livable worlds” (Reardon et al., 2015, n.p.).

“Building Healthcare Collectives” expands the ColLABoratory into an inter-institutional and interdisciplinary research hub, working with MSU’s Consortium on Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR) and community partners such as Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Michigan to foreground humanities expertise in care. 

 

List of BHC Team members (past and present)

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Supporting organizations (HWW, OSU Discovery themes, MSU Hum. College)

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