DATE: Oct. 12-13, 2006.

EVENT: Against Health: Resisting the Invisible Morality.

Joycelyn Elders, former President Clinton’s controversial surgeon general, will be a keynote speaker at a two-day conference to explore health, who defines it, what it means, and who is healthy. The conference will bring together scholars, research scientists, activists, and medical experts from around the world to offer a thoughtful critique of the ways in which current definitions of health are, in some instances, at odds with human well being.

The School of Social Work is a co-sponsor of Elders’ talk, which is the Fedele F. and Iris M. Fauri Memorial Lecture.

In addition to Elders, Dr. Susan Love, a surgeon and breast cancer prevention advocate, and Cornell University literary scholar Richard Klein will present keynote talks. There will be workshops led by international leaders in such fields as law, medicine, sociology, gender studies, HIV/AIDS research, and media studies will address topics as diverse as pharmaceutical advertising, health and the African American community, HIV/AIDS, drug use, the so-called obesity epidemic, pharmaceuticals, genetics, and childbirth.

” Health is a term often reflexively assumed to be universal, normal, and good,” said Dr. Jonathan Metzl, conference chairman and a professor of psychiatry and women’s studies at the University. ” But forces in our society also use the language of health to make moral judgments, convey prejudice, sell products, or even to exclude whole groups of persons from health care. Our conference will put this dichotomy under a microscope, in order to explore how health is an ideological state as well as a desired state.”

” We have an excellent, collaborative panel of speakers who will present alternative, provocative perspectives about health,” said Carol J. Boyd, IRWG director. ” The goal is to begin a conversation that breaks down traditional right-left political divides about health and health care in order to find new ways of addressing issues that face everyone.”

” Health is the new morality,” said Anna Kirkland, professor of women’s studies and political science. ” Even people who otherwise don