Drs. Rebecca Hester & Emily Satterwhite

Team Award: Drs. Rebecca Hester & Emily Satterwhite

Rebecca is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, is the author of a forthcoming book, Embodied Politics: Indigenous Migrant Activism, Neoliberal Citizenship, and Health Promotion in California, focused on the politics of health, biomedicine, the body, and indigeneity. Her investment in teaching extends to curriculum development for the Medicine and Society minor, STS, and the International Initiatives Committee in CLAHS. Emily is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture, is the author of Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 (2011), which won Phi Beta Kappa’s Sturm Award for Faculty Excellence in Research and the Weatherford Award for best non-fiction book about Appalachia. Her investment in teaching extends to scholarship of pedagogy and curriculum development, including co-developing new Pathways minors in Appalachian Cultures and Environments and Healthy Rural Environments. Hester and Satterwhite jointly designed a new course, “Societal Health in Local and Global Contexts,” linking their expertise in Latin America and Appalachia, respectively. Developed with support from the Global Education Office, the course challenges students to reflect upon the ways in which health and wellbeing are influenced by social arrangements, economic systems, and political ideologies.  Diggs Teaching Enhancement Project:  Hester and Satterwhite’s Teaching Enhancement Project is a workshop for faculty in life sciences, social sciences, humanities, engineering, and health, co-led with a key scholar of syndemic vulnerability, that facilitates the adoption of a biosocial approach in classrooms across the university. Social scientific and humanistic studies of bodies generally focus on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of embodiment but fail to consider the body’s physiological response. Scientific and biomedical studies of bodies generally focus on individual diseases in isolation from the history and geography of social policies and inequities. A biosocial approach insists on recognizing the ways in which bodily suffering or well-being affect social conditions as well as the ways social conditions affect bodily suffering or well-being, thereby acknowledging the mutually reinforcing interaction of structural violence with the manifestation of disease. For example, high rates of diabetes in Pima Indian populations are explained by synergistically interacting phenomena including the history of colonialism, genocide, water policy, food insecurity, welfare politics, geography, epigenetics, cultural practices, indigenous medicine, and healthcare access, requiring diagnosis and treatment that are at once political and biological. Incorporating a biosocial lens into the classroom therefore invites students to identify both the biological agents of disease and the social causes of disease as distinct but mutually reinforcing. When students learn to see the ways in which injustice is embodied, they are prompted to think about equity and justice via the question “What social and political arrangements might allow for human flourishing?” If “fixing politics” initially seems a far more daunting prospect than “fixing bodies,” over time students using a biosocial lens find it difficult to imagine healthy bodies and societal health without structural change.