This research seminar will be led by Ends of Knowledge collaborator Dr Ally Day (UToledo).

In this discussion, I ask the question: Do institutional structures over time create a slow violence of (humanities) scholarship?

In the first half of this discussion, I provide 3 case studies from my own work in the health humanities (published and in-progress) that allows us to interrogate institutional infrastructures such as U.S.-based health nonprofits, U.S.-based federal funding grants, and University Institutional Research Boards (IRBs). These case studies include a state-wide AIDS healthcare nonprofit, a local low-income health center’s doula (birth assistant) care initiative, and national training programs for birth assistants. All case studies provided challenges for government funding and ethics approval because the projects’ open-ended humanities-based research frameworks challenged the infrastructures built for positivist science.

In the second half of this discussion, I ask how we can subvert, change, or, when necessary, dismantle these infrastructures to create space for enthusiastic and creative health humanities research.

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Ally Day is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Chair of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. Her book The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir and Crip Positionalities (OSU 2021) addresses the complicated interactions between those living with HIV and AIDS Service providers, as well as the neoliberal production and exploitation of narrative within the Medical Industrial Complex. The Political Economy of Stigma was the National Women’s Studies Association 2022 Piepmeier Prize. In addition to co-producing a feature length film about an HIV hospice in Toledo OH, she is also working on second book project about the intersection of disability and birth where she analyzes several sites of pregnancy and disability, from Zika to doula trainings, home birth movements to infertility industries; this project is tentatively titled Grappling with Gestational Ableism: Disability, Pregnancy and Radical Futures.

Banner Photo image by Earl Wilcox on Unsplash.