Olynyk co-organizes Medical Humanities Symposium

Professor Patricia Olynyk was among the organizers for WashU’s medical humanities symposium, “Unstable Evidence: Art, Data, and the Culture of Health,” hosted on campus Oct. 16. The interdisciplinary symposium brought together artists, scholars, researchers, and scientists to explore cultural representations of illness, treatment, and care in an era of global mobility and data-driven systems. Priscilla Wald of Duke University, whose research focuses on the intersections among the law, literature, science, and medicine, gave the keynote address.

Olynyk, who holds affiliate appointments in WashU’s Bursky School of Public Health, School of Medicine, College of Arts & Sciences, and Center for the Environment, moderated the panel “The Unstable Archive,” with faculty from across WashU along with artist Jesse Colin Jackson. The panel examined the coded body and how the use and interpretation of medical archives changes over time.

Jackson’s “Marching Cubes,” a high-resolution set of 3D blocks based on algorithmic language systems that utilize medical scans, was installed during the event. The symposium also featured a screening of 2013-14 Freund Fellow Mariam Ghani’s feature-length documentary, “DIS-EASE,” which probes how our conception of disease affects our behavior when we encounter pandemics and other outbreaks.