MCL GRAND ROUNDS - 11:30AM PT
Why Was the U.S. COVID-19 Pandemic a Health Communication Disaster and What Can It Teach Us about Health / Communicative Justice?
Provider-patient interaction guidelines are designed to render clinical encounters communicable, to maximize the exchange of clear and useful knowledge. Building on Frantz Fanon and Black feminist writers, this talk explores how attempts to impose communicability can produce incommunicability, portraying patients— particularly from Black, Latinx, and Native American populations—as unable to effectively grasp providers’ words or translate them into recommended behaviors. It centers on how COVID-19 clinical and public health communication relied on a unilinear, hierarchically ordered model that clashed with a widespread patientcentered, individualistic version, engendering resistance from conservative whites.
Charles Briggs
Charles L. Briggs is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Interim Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Co-Director of the Medical Anthropology Program, the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Center for the Critical Study of the Health of Latinx Communities at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Learning How to Ask, Making Health Public (with Daniel Hallin), Stories in the Time of Cholera and Tell Me Why My Children Died (both with Clara Mantini-Briggs), and, in 2024, Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
