IU Bioethics Grand Rounds is an annual lecture series hosted by the IUCB on a variety of topics in ethics and medicine. These sessions are hosted both in-person and online. Recordings are available on our website.
Justin Clapp, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care and Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine. He is also Associated Faculty in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Clapp is a linguistic and medical anthropologist who uses qualitative methods and anthropological theory to examine issues in empirical bioethics, health care communication, and medical decision-making. His primary work examines patient care trajectories in the perioperative and critical care spaces, seeking to understand how diffuse chains of health care interactions lead to the pursuit of particular treatments.
In bioethics and adjacent fields, enhancing the involvement of seriously ill patients in their medical care is commonly framed as better aligning care with patients' 'values and preferences' (or 'goals,' 'wishes,' 'priorities,' etc.). In this talk, Dr. Clapp will examine this framing by interrogating the conceptions of mind, action, and interaction that underlie it. He'll suggest that it renders opaque many of the most interesting and ethically consequential dimensions of clinical interaction, illustrating this with findings from an ongoing multi-sited ethnographic study of communication in the medical intensive care unit.
This talk will be in person (location TBD) and online via Zoom (register here).