We look forward to welcoming Jen Rose Smith from the University of Washington on Friday, May 29 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.

Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?

Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu) is assistant professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She works at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, cultural human geography, and environmental humanities. Her book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity in the Arctic was published with Duke University Press and she has also published in EPD: Society and Space, The Geographical Journal, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She serves on the advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes language and cultural revitalization gatherings.

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.