Resources - University of Victoria

1 week ago

Colloquium Friday! Friday, November 30th at 2:30pm CLE A303 Title: Discrimination, Emotion, and Health Inequities Speaker: Dr. Carina Fourie, University of Washington Abstract: In this paper, I turn critical philosophical attention to a primary topic of public health research – the social determinants of health – connecting public health literature with theories of injustice. I critically assess a model of discrimination as a social determinant of health, arguing that the implications of this model can reinforce inequities, and I demonstrate how this criticism should help inform theories of health equity. In the first section of the paper, I identify the discrimination-emotion-health model and its implications. This model details the way in which discrimination can affect emotions and in turn health. Racial discrimination, for example, functions not only to skew access to resources such as healthcare and opportunities for healthy living, it also creates stress and negative emotional states such as psychological distress which can in and of themselves be manifestations of ill-health, e.g. in the form of psychological ill-health, or they can increase the risk of physiological disease and impairment, or both. The discrimination-emotion-health model appears to underlie much public health literature on discrimination as a psychosocial determinant of health but is not made explicit. In the second section I argue that an appreciation of the political dimensions of emotions, indicates that the model can have problematic implications, for example, reinforcing gender, class and racial stereotypes. I will provide a critique of the model focusing on six categories of concern: reinforcement, agency, respectability, dissidence, fragility of privilege and object of emotions. In the final section, I will demonstrate how this critique helps us to develop the features required of a theory of health equity in order for such a theory to best represent discrimination as a psychosocial determinant of health. I highlight six implications of the critique for theories of health equity, including the recognition that health policies have expressive value, and that oppressive systems can damage the privileged, as well as the oppressed. Thinking about the model and its critique according to such a theory will provide health policy-makers and practitioners with a nuanced way of thinking about the role of emotions in health disparities. In turn, this can help with the development of suitable policies and guidance for reducing health inequities.

UVic Philosophy

3 weeks ago

Colloquium Friday! Date: Friday, November 23rd at 2:30PM in CLE A303 Speaker: Dr. Thomas Land (UVic) Title: Epistemic Agency and the Self-Knowledge of Reason: On the Contemporary Relevance of Kant’s Method of Faculty Analysis Abstract: Each of Kant’s three Critiques offers an account of the nature of a mental faculty and arrives at this account by means of a procedure I call Faculty Analysis. Faculty Analysis is often regarded as among the least defensible aspects of Kant’s position; as a consequence, philosophers seeking to inherit Kantian ideas tend to transpose them into a different methodological context. I argue that this is a mistake: in fact Faculty Analysis is a live option for philosophical inquiry today. My argument is as follows: Faculty Analysis is a live option for certain kinds of philosophical theories if so-called “agentialist” views about the nature of belief are correct. There are good reasons for thinking that such views are correct. So Faculty Analysis should not be dismissed out of hand. Since the first premise in this argument bears a lot of weight, a large part of the paper is devoted to clarifying and defending it, in part by arguing that Kant himself holds a version of agentialism about belief.