Wednesday, April 7, 4-5:30pm, this on-line event requires advance registration

In this talk, Andrea Jain asks what we should make of healthcare industry discourses that describe self-care and self-management commodities and programs as “alternatives” to mainstream medical treatments, as more “holistic” and “patient-centered,” insofar as they consider the interplay of biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors, and as “empowering” the patients by giving them the opportunity to take responsibility and play an active role in the healing process. She suggests that we consider that, rather than a mode through which consumers ignore, escape, or are numbed to the social and structural problems of neoliberal capitalism, many forms of self-care and self-management, like yoga, represent an area of medicine through which protest against the reigning status quo is simultaneously expressed and contained. The self-care “alternative” programs themselves confront some of the greatest problems with the privatization of medicine — most notably, the neglect of the patient as embedded in larger cultures and structures that can disadvantage them — without impunity for those very problems.

RSVP for this event by using this link.

Hosted by OSU Center for the Study of Religion.