Care Amid Crisis

What does it mean to practice medicine in a time of political upheaval, environmental crisis, and deepening inequality? This unsettled question anchored the 11th Biennial Conference of the Society for Humanities, Social Sciences, and Medicine, held this April 11 and 12 at UCSF Mission Bay. 

With nearly two hundred attendees, more than eighty speakers, over thirty poster projects, and three keynote addresses, the conference explored how conversations across medicine, anthropology, history, philosophy, and beyond can help us rethink the promises and possibilities of healthcare in today’s precarious world.

Co-hosted by UCSF, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis, students from UCSF’s Medical Scientist Training Program comprised the majority of the conference’s organizing team. These students are pursuing a combined MD-PhD, with their PhD in Medical Anthropology. 

This community grew out of collaborations among figures such as Paul Farmer (founder of Partners In Health), Arthur Kleinman (creator of cultural competency), and Helena Hansen and Jonathan Metzl (creators of structural competency). 

Together, these scholars have illuminated the various ways in which sociocultural factors and systemic inequalities enable or deny people access to healthcare. Bringing together clinician-scholars, the conference drew from this rich history to ask what interdisciplinarity across medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities can offer the current moment.

Dr. Joelle Abi-Rached took the stage as the first keynote to answer this question. The day before this famed physician-scholar left for the conference from Beirut, her home country of Lebanon experienced what Dr. Abi-Rached described as its most intense day of bombing in recent history — 100 attacks in 10 minutes. 

Speaking from this place of urgency, she reflected on what it means to be a clinician and scholar amid war. She challenged the standard of neutrality to which medicine often holds itself. How can medicine strive for a neutral provision of care when clinicians and hospitals themselves become targets of politically motivated wars?

The panels and presentations that followed drew from this sense of urgency. From “Psychiatric Governance and Carceral Spaces” to “Decolonizing Medicine,” presenters examined how harmful policies and structural inequities shape health. In sessions on housing, migration, and street medicine, presenters described caring for patients whose lives are marked by displacement and neglect. 

Far from abstract discussions, these presentations grounded academic scholarship in clinical encounters, ethnographic fieldwork, and lived experience. Again and again, they demonstrated that medicine extends beyond the clinic to encompass communities, policies, cultures, histories, and more.

Saturday evening’s keynote by the Formerly Incarcerated People’s Performance Project shifted the mode of engagement entirely. Through a powerful blend of solo performance and reflection, the project introduced the realities of healthcare within prisons and after. First, Mark McGoldrick, a co-director of the project, addressed the audience. 

An accomplished retired public defender who spent his career in Oakland, McGoldrick reflected on how, throughout his career and with the project, he has faced the challenge of translating marginalized stories to audiences in power. Next, Tony Cyprien, a founding member of the project, movingly described his experiences in prison, where overcrowding led to disease outbreaks, and neglect led to the death of one of his best friends. 

The performance did more than describe these experiences — it made the question of healthcare in prisons alive, bringing the conference's theme into a literal register of the political nature of who gets to tell stories to whom. 

By Sunday, the question of storytelling had come into even sharper focus. Dr. Adeola Oni-Orisan, the conference’s closing keynote speaker and a UCSF alumna, returned directly to the challenge of representation. How, she asked, do we tell other people’s stories without turning them into objects of study? 

Drawing on her work on Black birth across the African diaspora, she reflected on the possibilities of storytelling as not a neutral act but one whose liveliness and creativity most accurately and ethically capture the experiences of disempowered people. 

Stories, Dr. Oni-Orisan suggested, can open up new ways of understanding healthcare, yet only if they are told with attention to the people and contexts from which they come.

In between these keynotes, the conference atmosphere was lively. Physicians who work in refugee camps bordering Western Sahara talked with students organizing Norway’s hosting of Palestinian medical students whose studies have been disrupted. 

Discussions poured out of conference rooms into hallways, continuing long after formal sessions ended.

What tied these diverse presentations together was not a single framework or methodology, but shared values of honoring medicine’s promise to care for those most in need. The questions raised over the weekend — about justice, care, responsibility, and beyond — were not resolved. Rather, they were deepened and made urgent. These are living questions that persist and evolve under ever-changing conditions. 

The conference offered a multidisciplinary space to think creatively about what it might mean to keep asking them, and how we might contribute to more thoughtful, collaborative, and humane ways forward.

This conference could not have occurred without the critical support of the UCSF Medical Scientist Training Program (Aimee Kao and Tiffani Quan), the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (Bonita Dyess, Jeannie Wong, Ian Whitmarsh, Kelly Knight, and Seth Holmes), the Registered Campus Organization team (Kathy Chew), the NIMHD grant for Social Medicine Cases for Health Equity, the American Physician Scientists Association, and thirteen departmental sponsors across UCSF, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley.