For our second event of the second season, we had a thought-provoking conversation with Dr Keisha Ray, who is Assistant Professor at the McGovern Center For Humanities & Ethics. We spoke with Keisha about how she experiences the relationship between humanities and medicine, and how she balances a dual philosophical and bioethics identity. She also told us about her journey studying Black people’s health and what she wants the world to know about Black health.

Here are some of our key takeaway messages from the conversation and some good reasons why you should listen to the podcast to find out more about Keisha’s important work.

Why we need philosophers to talk about Black health

Keisha shared her academic journey with us during the conversation. Although she originally wanted to avoid being typecast as a Black health scholar, she eventually returned to studying Black health, as there is still so much work to be done in this area. Keisha especially identified ongoing misconceptions about Black people’s health as a key reason that drives her research. Philosophy offers the critical tools to debunk misconceptions about the biological or hereditary root of certain conditions and instead highlights the real causes, including systemic racism and other social environment factors.

Why we need the humanities to promote just healthcare

According to Keisha, one key structural problem that perpetuates racism in health contexts is inhumanity toward Black people. There is a harmful process of othering at play where the experiences of Black patients (and other marginalised groups) are reasoned away as fundamentally different to white patients, which fuels the mistaken assumption that the same principles of care need not apply. For Keisha, it is exactly the humanities which can help us to address this inhumanity that prevents just healthcare. Humanities can spark the humanity which is otherwise all too often missing from the ways people understand Black health.

Is bioethics part of medical humanities?

Philosophers are very careful in defining the concepts they use. That’s why we were struck that Keisha talked about bioethics as seemingly separate from (medical) humanities. Philosophy and ethics are of course traditionally part of the humanities. But what Keisha was able to put her finger on was a lack of status that the humanities traditionally hold in medical contexts. She explains that it was therefore strategic for bioethics as a discipline to associate itself more clearly with science than with humanities. This intriguing diversion in the podcast adds to our continuous exploration of prejudices about the scientific robustness of scholarship in arts and humanities.

We are very grateful that Keisha took the time to tell us more about her important research in Black bioethics during a truly inspiring conversation. She also told us more about her personal relationship to her research as a Black woman, while the podcast also includes rich perspectives offered by attendees at the live webinar. Of course, we couldn’t do justice to these personal perspectives in this short summary. So do listen to the podcast to find out more!

Dieter and Ian