Winter 2026 Critical Medical Humanities Speaker Series (Quarter at Aggie Square)

The Winter 2026 Quarter at Aggie Square: Critical Medical Humanities program critically examines medical, legal, sociocultural, and historical perspectives on healthcare inequity issues. As part of the curriculum, the program hosting a weekly speaker series talk featuring faculty from UC Davis, UC Davis School of Medicine, and UC San Francisco.

The talks are free and open to the public, and will be held both in-person and online via Zoom.

Schedule

• January 12: "Catholic Hospitals: Refuge and Rejection" (by Zoom)

• Speaker: Meaghan O'Keefe, UCD Religion, Culture, and Society

  

  Catholic Hospitals in the United States have never been merely secular providers of care. The mission to help the sick is a religious obligation and Catholic health entities have historically blended scientific medicine with religious practice. This medical and religious mission often sits uneasily with current notions of justice and fairness because Catholic health entities must abide by the Ethical and Religious Directives issued by the American Catholic Bishops. These directives forbid birth control including emergency contraception cases of rape, abortion, most assisted reproductive technologies, trans-affirming care, and mandate some end-of-life care interventions regardless of whether patients are Catholic. At the same time, Catholic Hospitals provide healthcare to immigrant and other marginalized communities who would otherwise have difficulty accessing care. This talk explores the tensions inherent in a system that provides needed care but forcespatients to abide by religious beliefs they may not share.

• January 26: "Transforming the US Demographic Table: Critical Evaluation to Enhance the Trustworthiness of Biomedical Data Science and Equity in Precision Medicine"

• Speaker: Alice Popejoy, UCD Public Health

  

  This talk will critically examine conceptual constructs around U.S. population descriptors and categorical labels used to represent human groupings for stratified data analysis and reporting. The goal is to shift our focus from building trust among marginalized communities to enhance representation in research—toward building trustworthiness of health-related research, data structures and models. Public confidence and trust in biomedical research are crucial to ensure diverse representation in studies that inform the health science knowledge system. Biomedical researchers, data structures, and analytic tools must first be trustworthy to merit this trust. We will explore the impact of different approaches to collecting and [dis]aggregating demographic data, revealing how these decisions influence downstream analyses and results, which are then translated to clinical care, precision medicine and public health, and policy decision-making.

• February 2: "Xicana/x Indigena Futures: Re-rooting through Mesoamerican Traditional Medicines"

• Speaker: Susy Zepeda, UCD Chicana and Chicano Studies

  

  This talk is concerned with Xicana/x peoples, as “disconnected original peoples,” the sabiduría (wisdom) of plant medicine, and decolonial feminist futurities. At its core, this work is articulating Xicana/x peoples’ responsibility to re-member and rights to self-determine through a conscious re-rooting in plant medicines with the intention of walking in balance with the earth and cosmos. Practitioners of Mesoamerican traditional medicine use a variety of modalities and technologies for healing, including plant medicine, limpias (energetic cleansings), sobadas (massage), rooted in prayer and a deep reciprocal relationship with the land. Central in this work is the acknowledgement that body, mind, spirit alignment is necessary to heal traumas or imbalances. Traditional Indigenous knowledge reminds us that healing and health is not only curing and caring for the physical realm – the body. Intergenerational trauma (susto) or imbalance due to a crisis have spiritual implications that must be addressed for healing to occur and full health to be restored. The vision of this queer Xicana Indígena futures root work is to create an explicit site of analysis and praxis to connect again to spiritual roots, traditional medicines, and ceremony that can lead to a path of conocimiento and sanación (healing) of intergenerational traumas for Xicana/x Indígena peoples including detribalized and de-indigenized Chicanx and Latinx communities. This talk asks: what are the responsibilities and connections diasporic Mesoamerican peoples have to sacred plant medicine? Knowing that sanación (healing) arrives from working in collaboration with plants and other technologies, what are the most respectful ways to be in reciprocity with sacred elements? What shapes the pathway of self-determination of Xicana/x peoples who are consciously re-rooting? How do we honor madre tierra, plant medicine, and ancestors?

• February 9: "How Not to Change the World"

• Speaker: Mark Fedyk, UCD School of Medicine

  

  Many healthcare professionals experience symptoms of burnout and distress soon after starting to work.  This talk considers three "coping strategies" that healthcare professionals commonly adopt as ways of restoring a sense of purpose and meaning to their career.  The strategies are: returning to school to do a PhD, attempting to change state or federal healthcare policy, and engaging in "petition politics".  I analyze each of these strategies, and explain why they are unlikely to be effective in addressing the underlying career dissatisfaction.  I conclude by offering no optimistic alternatives.  Aspiring healthcare professional should not expect that they can be a direct cause of constructive changes to the moral configuration of healthcare in America.
   

• February 23: “Hard to Reach”: Dr. Calu Lester, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and Black AIDS
  Activism, 1984-1991

• Speaker: Antoine Johnson, UCD African American and African Studies

  

  In March 1987, Dr. Calu Lester, a Black social psychologist, died from AIDS complications. Two months before passing, he scolded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) for perpetuating AIDS as a “gay white disease,” a misconception that flourished particularly in the Bay Area. His criticisms led to the SFAF being denied a multimillion dollar grant due to its inability to develop resources and programs for people of color. To Dr. Lester, denial in Black communities and the presence of only white faces of HIV/AIDS on magazine covers and network television made it profoundly difficult for activists to get poor and working-class Black people to take the epidemic seriously. This project explores ways in which the AIDS epidemic in the Bay Area became perceived as a “gay white disease,” how organizers like Dr. Lester organized around and against these false reports, and how the SFAF responded to critiques of its limited focus on white gay men.

• March 2: "Racism and Medicine"

• Speaker: Tina Rulli, UCD Philosophy

  

  We will examine the use of the race concept in medicine and the way in which racism itself is a cause of poor health outcomes. We will first discuss what race is: is it real? And if so, is it real in virtue of biological facts or social facts. We will examine the racial differences in health care outcomes in the U.S. and the causes of these disparities. A main point of the talk is to show that racism is encoded in our medical practices and is itself one of the causes of racial disparities in
  health.
   

   

• March 9: "Decoding and Challenging Antifatness in the Health Sciences"

• Speaker: Marquisele Mercedes, UC San Francisco President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

  

  Health scientific domains (e.g., public health, medicine) engage with issues of oppression more than ever. From the Centers for Disease Control declaring racism “a public health crisis” (2021) to the American Medical Association’s acknowledgement of the Body Mass Index’s racial exclusion (2023), health actors have made several efforts in recent years to respond to matters of social injustice. However, these actors’ ideas about how oppression can or should be addressed in health scientific domains are limited and specific. Additionally, their ideas often depart significantly from the ways in which anti-oppression activists and movements understand the same problems and what it means to solve them. In this talk, Marquisele Mercedes will present analysis from a larger project on stigma research in the health sciences to demonstrate how health scientific actors and fat activists have two very different conceptions of the same problem: antifatness. In exploring some of the consequences of this disconnect, they will also discuss their firsthand experience doing fat political education, as well as their years of working with clinicians and public health professionals to promote weight inclusive health care and research.