Join us for the “Wellness, Affective Citizenship, and the Politics of Health” presentation which features University of Arizona faculty from various departments including English, East Asian Studies, Anthropology, Gender and Women’s Studies and History. Beginning with a presentation on China’s government campaign for reducing video game addiction, Hai Ren, Ph.D., exposes one way in which political systems influence health. This will be followed by an analysis by Susan Shaw, Ph.D., on how limited access to care by low-income patients instills both vulnerability and proactive attitudes towards cancer screening.  “Immigration Reform,” presented by Eithne Luibheid, Ph.D., explores the competing issues of immigration reform proposals and the connection with health and immigrant wellness. Lastly, Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, Ph.D., will present “Social Medicine Praxis under Military Dictatorship in Chile” which focusses on a 1970’s coup which caused health care providers to find new ways to practice medicine despite political violence.

• Wellness Aesthetics: Affective and Intellectual Reponses to Video Game Addiction Campaigns in China | Hai Ren

Video game development is a fast growing sector of China's cultural industries. Millions of Chinese youth play online and mobile video games on the daily basis. In recent years, the Chinese government has officially identified video game addiction as a subset of internet addiction that requires medical and educational intervention. Meanwhile, game players have actively responded to official medical and pedagogical discourses through creative projects such as videos, music, games, and mobile apps. The paper examines official media narratives of video game addiction as part of the government's campaign for reducing video game addiction. It also explores the aesthetics of artistic responses by video game players – of both sensible/affective and perceptive aspects of their arts. This project aims at addressing how aesthetics, which concerns both affect (particularly pleasure) and perception of artistic practice, produces wellness as an alternative to official medical and pedagogical treatments of video game addiction.

• Anxious Provocations: Engagements with Cancer Screening by the Medically Underserved | Susan Shaw

Many in public health and cancer control seek to expand utilization of cancer screening technologies by medically underserved populations as a means of reducing cancer health disparities. Presenting findings from ethnographic research at a Massachusetts community health center, this paper explores the way diverse low-income patients experience and respond to the provocations of cancer screening. Many patients we interviewed described a proactive attitude towards engaging with cancer screenings, an orientation which coexisted with increased anxiety and worry which was generally allayed on receiving an “all clear.”  This paper interrogates the screening imperative by focusing on patients’ experiences of anxiety and their understandings of and affective responses to test results. How is the anxiety that accompanies screenings configured by patients’ structural vulnerabilities? I argue that a proactive orientation towards cancer screening reveals patients’ hopeful enactment of biomedical citizenship while exposing them to technologically-mediated risks and vulnerabilities related to their limited access to care. 

• Immigration Reform: Competing Possibilities for Happiness, Health and Wellness | Eithne Luibheid, Ph.D

Happiness is extolled as a route to (and measure of) health and wellness. But in the context of immigration reform proposals, the connections among happiness, health, and wellness prove complex and competing. Congressional immigration reform proposals are mired in debates about whether or not to allow a path to legal status for millions of undocumented people in the U.S. Some resist offering legal status on the grounds that it “rewards law-breaking” and will cause social breakdown, thereby generating unhappiness for everyone. Others argue for allowing legal status on terms that citizens define, which will create convergence between immigrants’ and citizen’ lives that generates happiness for the majority.
Still others suggest that the current legalization suggestions will make it impossible for most immigrants to actually legalize, while deepening the abandonment of many citizens by government. How should immigration reform balance these competing claims about different groups’ possibilities for happiness, which have significant implications for health and wellness? 

• Social Medicine Praxis under Military Dictatorship in Chile: Of Health Care Initiatives, Survival Strategies, and Resistance | Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

This study seeks to illustrate that the 1973 military coup in Chile dismantled a functioning public health system, but that it could not eradicate all health care practices that doctors adopted in previous decades. I start with a brief analysis of the roots of social medicine praxis in the 1930s and 40s - and of the debates over socialized medicine that led to the foundation of the National Health Service in 1952.  The main part of this presentation focuses on the period of military dictatorship and on the regime’s effort to destroy the institutions of the public health system. While military leaders linked both social and socialized medicine to the leftist political system they sought to destroy, their destruction of old institutions could not prevent the independent, often clandestine initiatives by medical doctors whose innovative strategies created a continuity in health care practices in spite of the threat of military violence. Physicians and health care workers treated people in new Centros Integrales de Salud (CIS), and through alternative health teams that adopted medical and psychological treatments to offer both medical care and survival strategies under state terrorism 

Join us for the “Art of Healing” presentation which features University of Arizona experts from various departments such as Psychology, Psychiatry, English and Religious Studies. This panel will offer a range of perspectives on the promise of bridging the work of health sciences and wellness initiatives with the interdisciplinary contributions of Applied and Public Humanities. 

• Opening remarks by Ole Thienhaus: Trained in Evidence Based Medicine (EBM): How Do I Fit in the Art of Healing?

• Opening Remarks by Fenton Johnson: Art of Healing

• Opening Remarks by Mark Gilbert: Humanistic Medicine and Health Care: Definitions, Key Components and Challenges in 2014

 • Opening Remarks by Hester Oberman: Bridging Humanities, Medicine, and Wellness