The Promises and Pitfalls of Social Scientific Instruction in U.S. Medical Schools – Lauren D. Olsen
Posted: 5/14/2026 (CSDE Seminar Series)
We look forward to welcoming Lauren D. Olsen from Temple University on Friday, May 22 from 12:30 – 1:30 PM, in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom (Register Here). This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative and the UW Medicine Department of Bioethics and Humanities. Follow this link to sign up for a 1:1 meeting with Dr. Olsen during their visit on May 22.
Medical schools have increasingly incorporated the humanities and social sciences into their teaching, seeking to make future physicians more empathetic and more concerned with equity. In practice, however, these good intentions have not translated into critical consciousness. Humanities and social sciences education has often not only failed to deliver on its promise but even entrenched the inequalities that the medical profession set out to address.
Lauren D. Olsen examines how U.S. medical school faculty conceived, designed, and implemented their vision of education, tracing the failures of curricular reform. She argues that the way medical students encounter humanities and social sciences material in practice has served to reinforce the status quo by teaching them to individualize systemic problems. Students learn to avoid advocacy, critique, and attention to structural inequalities—while also gathering that it will be up to them to find coping strategies for problems from burnout to systemic racism. Olsen pinpoints the limitations of how clinical faculty understand the humanities and social sciences, arguing that in structuring and teaching courses, they assumed, reinforced, and glorified a white, elite model of the medical profession. Showing how deeply intertwined professional and social identities are in medical education, Curricular Injustice has significant implications for how occupations, organizations, and institutions shape understandings of inequality.
Lauren D. Olsen joined the Department of Sociology within the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University as a faculty member in 2019. Before starting as an Assistant Professor at Temple University, Dr. Olsen completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she also received her Master’s degree in the same field. Prior to that, she received her Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Religion from Columbia University. As a sociologist of medicine, Dr. Olsen’s award-winning research has been published in flagship journals, like the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, and Social Problems and has a new book out with Columbia University Press (2024), entitled Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities.
Date: 05/22/2026
Time: 12:30 - 1:30 PM
Location: Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom