Humanities

Casey Hammett

Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Sean McKeever

There have been many different approaches to doctor-patient relationships throughout the history of medicine. In western medicine, there has been a very recent shift from paternalistic doctor centered doctor-patient relationships to non-paternalistic patient centered doctor-patient partnerships. The doctor-patient partnership, designated mutual participation, contains many attractive characteristics that some consider an ideal for doctor-patient relationships. While mutual participation may be ideal in many cases, there are some cases where it would be inappropriate or difficult to establish in a timely and robust manner. In order to address the gap that is created when mutual participation cannot be established, I propose an evolving doctor-patient relationship model. I describe how this evolving model could promote patient autonomy. Finally, I outline the respective responsibilities of both the doctor and the patient under this evolving model at various stages of the doctor-patient relationship.

Kevin Andrews, Nadia Baye, Sion Boney, Hudson Eglin, Min Heo, Elizabeth Opp, Olivia Pelaez, Emily Roebuck, Maria Rojas

Faculty Sponsor: Kristen Stern

Students present different major cities of the francophone world: Dakar, Montreal, Paris, Algiers. We explore these cities through various cultural events, online newspapers, music, films, literary texts, other media, forming the basis for different formats of cultural critique on our course website: blogs, blogs, podcasts, and more.

Olivia Daniels

Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Vivien Dietz

My Kelley honors thesis explores how the standardization of female medical practitioners (midwives) impacted British women’s access to reproductive healthcare and pregnancy decisions. I investigate the period between the Midwives’ Act, which required midwives to be trained and certified, in 1902 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act, which legalized abortions under certain circumstances, in 1929. My primary focus is on how these national policies impacted women (both practitioners and patients) in rural Devon (and vice versa) through rural district nursing programs.

Lily Burdick

Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Melissa Gonzalez

This project is an archival project of Davidson’s queer community, black community, and queer black community. The goal of this project is to recuperate documents that characterize what it means to navigate Davidson with an intersectional identity through time. The project starts in 1986, when the Gay Support Group was first introduced to campus, and moves through the present, demonstrating how conversations surrounding race and sexuality change over time and across campus. Throughout Davidson’s history, there has been a lack of intersectionality in conversations surrounding race, gender, and sexuality. Thus, while the archive houses documents that do not, on their own, address intersectionality, the project includes a queer of color critique to address the ways Davidson has thought about race and queerness. In addition, oral histories from current students and Davidson alum present an intersectional analysis of the ways that queer black Davidson is perceived currently and remembered as time post-graduation progresses. There are also a few oral histories that discuss non-black intersectional identities at Davidson.

Matthew LeBar

Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Paul Studtmann

Claims of racial injustice can often trigger concerns of some kind of “group based” foundation for justice, where white people are responsible for racial injustice merely in virtue of being white and black people are victimized by the system merely in virtue of being black. Critics worry this essentializes race and places groups, rather than individuals, as the center of normative concern. This concern, when raised in good faith (if ever), seems to arise from a concern of how we are to ascribe responsibility for racial injustice (in the sense of responsibility for having caused it, not for having to fix it). Although individuals certainly too often do hold reprehensible personal feelings towards people of other races, and act on those feelings by discriminating against or even acting violently against those people, it seems deeply implausible to think that the entirety of racial injustice in the United States is caused by such individual-level wrongdoing. But if that’s the case, where are we to locate the wrongdoing? How are we to say that most people have some complicity in structures of racial injustice even if they’ve never engaged in interpersonal racial hatred or personally discriminated against anyone of a different race?
I argue that a concept called ‘structural injustice’ can provide us a powerful answer to this question. The idea of structural injustice is that there are cases of what certainly look like serious injustices where we are unable to find any specific agent who seems to have acted wrongly. I will first argue for a novel way of understanding structural injustice that points us to think of how we are responsible not just for our actions in direct interpersonal interactions, but how the choices that we make and others make can combine to produce unjust effects for others that may be physically distant from us. I then defend the claim that substantial portions of racial injustice in the United States — in particular, de facto segregation and the failure to provide reparations for the country’s history of slavery and racial plunder — are in large part structural injustices. Finally, I discuss the institutional implications of structural injustice, arguing that forces of spontaneous order without intentional direction attempting to solve structural injustice will be insufficient to remedy them.

Blake Botelho, Ricardo Pinnock, Jordan Scott

Faculty Sponsor: Rosaline Kyo

Art can depict many aspects of how a society functions, such as what professions are considered upper class. Royalty and other elite can use artworks to demonstrate their prowess by building large or intimidating structures. They may use expensive mediums to build artworks or simply exemplify their elite status through the penmanship of their calligraphy. Artworks may sometimes be used to illustrate the day to day operations of someone in a high court. In general, the upper class tends to portray itself in a stately manner, with an upright, confident posture and a proud gaze angled above the onlooker. More belongings often suggests a greater social status. In particular, one can see the status that elite women held in society. Elite women enjoyed the prosperity of their high social status, but were often constrained by the patriarchal societies from which they came. Despite the discrimination they faced, artworks from Japanese and Chinese cultures show women overcoming these obstacles and serving in court, among other typically male dominated professions. Additionally, female artists from China and Japan took the depiction of women into their own hands and used the opportunity to show women beyond the normal scope.

Cole Thornton, Drake Wielar, Ashley Ip

Faculty Sponsor: Rosaline Kyo

Our exhibition concept centers on the beliefs and practices surrounding burials and preparation for death and the afterlife. We will be diving into the art of China, India, and Japan, and our database of images for the ultimate exhibition is pulled from temples, tombs and tomb artifacts, figurines and statues, as well as drawings and paintings in order to engage the viewer in a wide range of form and media. As noted, our exhibit will be divided into three subsections with different countries: China, India, and Japan. The presentation will both textually and visually guide the audience through the art revolving around burials and preparing for the afterlife in these countries. Our goal is to educate the observer further on the form and history of these arts and to show the similarities and differences across the cultures and how they may have influenced one another in the practice of burials and preparing for life after death.

Nina Austin, Anna Catalanotto, Hudson Eglin, Sarah Eskra, Samuel Levine, Martin Malotky, Jules Xiao

Faculty Sponsor: Caroline Fache

French Seniors have done research projects on revolts and revolution s in the Francophone world. They will present their conclusions on their topics during the VMC symposium.