Recorded October 3rd, 2024.
A hybrid seminar by Dr Ghaiath MA Hussein (Assistant Professor in Medical Ethics and Law, School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.

This presentation examines how armed conflict reshapes the concept of self, particularly in the Global South. Drawing from his experiences as a medical doctor and his bioethics background, Dr Hussein will discuss the challenges to informed consent and individual autonomy in war.

His journey began at the University of Toronto, where he learned that respect for autonomy and informed consent are vital to ethical practice. These principles informed her advocacy for bioethics in oppressed regions like Sudan.

However, his views changed when she returned to Sudan for research on health ethics in conflict zones. Engaging with those affected by the Darfur war revealed a collective ethos of trust and interdependence, showing that community well-being often outweighs individual autonomy in crises.

In this talk, he will outline her thesis research questions and how his understanding of informed consent shifted from an individualistic model to a trust-based framework. This new paradigm prioritizes mutual support and communal resilience in ethical research practices during prolonged conflicts.

He will conclude by advocating for a trust-based consent model that complements and sometimes replaces traditional informed consent. This approach addresses the unique challenges of armed conflict and empowers individuals through solidarity and collective action, encouraging a reevaluation of ethical engagement with crisis-affected communities to enhance their agency and dignity.

Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/


From Individuality to Solidarity: Reconceptualizing Selfhood in Armed Conflict

Recorded December 5th, 2024.

A hybrid seminar by Dr Lorraine Grimes (Maynooth University) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.

Bio:
Lorraine Grimes is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Applied Social Studies at Maynooth University. Lorraine has a PhD from the National University of Ireland Galway. Her thesis is forthcoming in the form of a monograph with Bloomsbury Academic in 2025 titled ‘Single mothers in Ireland and Britain: Pregnancy, migration and institutionalisation’. Lorraine previously worked with the Digital Repository of Ireland on the Archiving Reproductive Health project which is the subject of this talk. 

Abstract:
Archiving Reproductive Health (ARH) is a Wellcome-funded project coordinated by the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), working to preserve digital material created by grassroots organisations working for reproductive justice in Ireland, especially during the 2018 referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish constitution.
The project was the first in the world to archive Facebook social media posts. A key part of the project was the archiving of  stories posted on a Facebook page called “In Her Shoes”, where people anonymously shared their experiences of being refused abortion care, having to travel or illegally order pills online, and the emotional impact of these experiences. These stories often contained details of traumatic experiences such as sexual assault, obstetric violence and domestic abuse.
This talk will introduce the Archiving Reproductive Health Project and archiving sensitive social media material. We will talk about anonymization procedures, coding/cataloguing and developing a self-care protocol and an ethics protocol for the project.

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Archiving Reproductive Health: Archiving sensitive social media material

Microbes: We can’t see them, but we have no choice but to live with them. Microbes have significant, enduring impacts on human health and remind us to resist the abstraction of crucial forces in our everyday lives. Welcome to a multidisciplinary conversation about microbes, featuring Amber Benezra (Gut Anthro), Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (Microbial Resolution), and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer (American Disgust) in a wide-ranging conversation that opens up possibilities for imagining more equitable approaches to science, visualizing and embodying the microbe, and conceptualizing health at individual, societal, and planetary levels.


Amber Benezra is assistant professor of science and technology studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and is author of Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes, a finalist for the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is assistant professor of media and culture at the University of California, Riverside, and is author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War against Emerging Microbes.

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer is professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic University, and is author of American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within; The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life; Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology; and Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age. 


Praise for the books:
“We learn from microbes—and the messy, fragile, tenacious humans that study them—how much the minute details of mundane life matter. Alternately hopeful and unsettling, Gut Anthro is a book that expertly does what microbes have always done: change how we see, how we collaborate, and who we are.”
—Emily Yates-Doerr, author of The Weight of Obesity

“Gloria Chan-Sook Kim’s visual methodology proposes a clear optic for understanding how global health responses to microbial threats will fail unless we wrestle with the systems that perpetuate the conditions for the next mutant microbe on the horizon.” 
—Stefanie R. Fishel, author of The Microbial State

“American Disgust pushes readers to think beyond individual taste to consider how whiteness shapes what is acceptable or profane and how to grow our capacity for the unfamiliar. It is a refreshing take on a long-debated concept.”
—Ashanté M. Reese, coeditor of Black Food Matters



Books by Amber Benezra, Gloria Chan-Sook Kim, and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer are available from University of Minnesota Press.

It’s a microbe’s world. We just live in it.

Recorded 13th February 2025.

A hybrid seminar by Prof Cathriona Russell (School of Religion, Theology and Peace Studies) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.

Healthcare faces comparable challenges to those of every other sector in society in the context of a changing climate. In relation to ongoing international agreements, healthcare will, for example, have to enact mitigation strategies for net-zero in its contributions to emissions, currently c.4.5% of global GHG emissions.

More significantly however healthcare will need to design strategies for adaptation, aiming at resilience in ongoing provision and effectiveness in securing justice; resilience in the face of more extensive and more frequent temperature and precipitation extremes, sea level rise, changes in land-use and food production; and resilience in social conditions, in housing provision, in providing access to health care, in disease prevention, all while demographies continually shift (age and gender, poverty, and displacement)[1].

The expected continuing increase in intensity and frequency of adverse events will worsen health outcomes and health inequalities, which themselves are drivers of climate change. If healthcare contributes to the ‘good life’ through its impact on health, then a key measure of its effectiveness will be its commitment to building capability e.g. for preventative medicine (A. Sen), and for ‘living with and for each other in just institutions’ (P. Ricoeur).

[1] IPCC, 2023 Summary for Policy Makers, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

Resilience and Equity: Healthcare in a Changing Climate

In this episode conference director Matthew Biberman talks with acclaimed war journalist and poet Tom Sleigh about Israel and making sense of the region while the 10/7 war rages on.  Sleigh's most recent essay collection is The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees. His mid-career turn to war journalism has garnered Sleigh a new audience while making him one America’s essential poets for understanding our world today. He is also a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College. Our conversation includes discussion of Tom's forthcoming New and Selected Poems featuring the memorable long poem "Widows" as well as his memoir Rosie (about assisting his mother with her suicide).


Season 4, Episode 1: Tom Sleigh

In his 1988 semiautobiographical novel "The Beautiful Room Is Empty," author Edmund White relates his experiences on the night of June 28, 1969, as he and others passed by the Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar: “I suppose the police expected us to run away into the night, as we’d always done before, but we stood across the street on the sidewalk of the small triangular park. … Everyone booed the cops, just as though they were committing a shameful act. We kept exchanging peripheral glances, excited and afraid.”

The uprising that White witnessed is described by the Library of Congress as a “tipping point” for the gay liberation movement in the United States. One year later, the first Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – the beginning of an annual June tradition of events commemorating Stonewall and the continuation of prior decades of activism and demonstrations for equal rights for LGBTQ+ people.

White, the author of over 30 books of fiction and nonfiction and hundreds of essays and articles, died on June 3, 2025. He’s called a “towering figure in American literature” who is “most justly known as one of the singular lights of gay letters” by Jonathan Alexander, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of English and informatics who’s been named the next chair of the campus’s nationally ranked Department of English.

In this wide-ranging episode of The UC Irvine Podcast, Alexander reflects on both White and Pride. He also describes how he thinks about fear in the face of uncertainty, his vision for the future of the UC Irvine English department, and what he’s learning through his current research on how the craft of writing affects University of California graduates.

“Shadowing,” the music for this episode, was provided by Corbyn Kites, via the audio library in YouTube Studio.

On writing, a pioneer writer, Pride and maintaining one's courage

Two AI Bots discuss the David Boles article about The Arts and Critics published online at BolesBlogs.com 

The Enemy of the Arts is the Humanities

Dr. Tamara D. Hill is not only a versatile scholar but her exteensive body of work spans various publications.
In Merge Literary Magazine she authored the insightful piece "What Black Girl Advocacy on 'The Chi' Looks Like."  he also penned a three-part series on the influence and impact of rap artists Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Nicki Minaj in the music industry. The series culminated with her article , "Megan Thee Stallion-Her Name and Persona is an Open Love Letter  to Women and Southern Swag Belles."
She's back continuing her discussion on Black Women their music and impact on Pop Culture.

Dr. Tamara D.  Hill: Black Women in Music Flex in Defining Pop Culture

This episode addresses the elephant slouching on its phone in the corner of many literature classrooms. Mary Isbell (University of New Haven) describes her search for a solution to the student reading crisis, incorporating conversations recorded as she was writing Searching for Wonder: Teaching Literature with Student-Selected Texts. These conversations reveal the many reasons faculty may be hesitant to set aside their carefully curated reading lists. With her guests, Isbell explores the history of literature instruction, the firm hold of close reading on the teaching of literature, the role of scholarly expertise in the humanities classroom, and the challenge of assessing process in literature courses. Production support by Stefan Schöberlein (Texas A&M University-Central Texas). Transcript available at bit.ly/S0902Transcript. To read the conclusion of Isbell's book Searching For Wonder, visit bit.ly/S09E02Resources.

S09 E02 | How Do We Teach Literature When Students Won’t Read What We Assign?

Roy Scranton returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, recently published by Stanford University Press.

Scranton describes our moment as an impasse. We struggle to narrativize and imagine our path through. The vision of our collective horizons is muddied by the sheer unknowability of what the near and distant future holds. Narratives of progress have brought us to this confluence of crises as complex global systems collapse and shift under the weight of material limits on a hotter, more chaotic world.

// Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/roy-scranton-2

// Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness 

// Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

390 / Impasse / Roy Scranton

The LCLC Podcast features candid conversation about and among practitioners and enthusiasts of literature and culture. 

Since its inception in 1973, the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture draws many important thinkers and writers to its annual gathering (including Jennifer Egan, Ben Lerner, and Rachel Kushner).  Director Matthew Biberman invites friends and LCLC participants to weigh in on particularly pressing concerns including the place and the role of the humanities today.  Past guests include Tom Sleigh, Jane Gallop, and Stanley Fish.

Opened in 2010, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute is dedicated to advancing Trinity College Dublin’s rich tradition of research excellence in the Arts and Humanities, on an individual, collaborative and inter-disciplinary basis.

Author, Public Speaker, Radio Host of Collections by Michelle Brown Blog Radio

The C19 Podcast is a production by scholars from across the world exploring the past, present, and future through an examination of the United States in the long nineteenth century.

The official podcast of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

A podcast about transitions, death, the ruptures of life in between.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced three Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit www.uci.edu.

David Boles, branded from the braided prairie, is a NYC writer, publisher, teacher, lyricist, musician. Cats: https://BolesBrits.com Live music stream: https://Boles.radio Uncanny: https://Boles.ai Live video stream https://Boles.tv Music: https://Boles.co/music 11Labs AI Voice: https://Boles.co/11

New tracks tagged #Humanities