STRUCTURAL COMPETENCY: New Medicine for the Institutional Inequalities that Make Us Sick, Mar. 23, NYU

STRUCTURAL COMPETENCY: New Medicine for the Institutional Inequalities that Make Us Sick

Jonathan Metzl, MD, Ph.D. and Helena Hansen, MD, Ph.D., Organizers http://structuralcompetency.org

Friday, March 23, 2012. Conference 10:00am-5pm, Film Screening 5-6pm. NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square, NY, NY, 10012.

This one-day working conference will assemble multidisciplinary practitioners and theorists to explore a new paradigm, Structural Competency, that proposes that a host of clinical disorders (e.g. hypertension, obesity, smoking, medication “non-compliance,” post-traumatic syndromes, depression, psychosis) must be addressed as the downstream implications of upstream decisions (e.g. food delivery systems, housing discrimination, urban infrastructure failure, biocapitalism, diagnostic codes). Structural competency extends beyond cultural competency to address the pathologies of institutions and policies that alter the behaviors and biologies of individuals.

The meeting is free and provides meals but room is limited. Participants include Ernie Drucker, Mindy Fullilove, Philippe Bourgois, Bruce Link, Jo Phelan, Jack Geiger, Marc Gourevitch, Rayna Rapp, Emily Martin, Faye Ginsburg, Kim Hopper, Dalton Conley, Alondra Nelson and Brad Lewis.