Power, Inequality, and Resistance in Health Professions

ASA 2020: Power, Inequality, and Resistance in Health Professions

This year at ASA, Kelly Underman and Alexandra Vinson organized an invited thematic session on power, inequality and resistance in health professions. They were joined by four panelists, Lauren D. Olsen, PhD (Temple University); stef m. shuster, PhD (Michigan State University); Clare L. Stacey, PhD (Kent State University); and LaTonya Trotter, PhD (Vanderbilt University). Read on for a short description of the panel. You can access the session recordings and transcript at the link below. 

Panel Introduction
Like pretty much everyone else at ASA, Kelly and I conceived the idea for this panel before COVID-19 hit the world earlier this year. Our impetus for organizing a panel on the topic of power, inequality and resistance in health professions was our shared work on medical training and changing standards of medical work. In recent decades we’ve seen major transformations to healthcare work in the US. For-profit healthcare industries exert considerable control over the provision of healthcare, demanding efficiency and tracking health outcomes and satisfaction metrics. New professional mandates also increasingly include inter-professional collaboration, reconceptualizing the healthcare provider and the healthcare team.

These structural and organizational changes have important implications for the provision of healthcare, as well as implications for how health professions prepare the next generation of workers. Our panelists today examine healthcare work, professional training and medical knowledge from a range of professional perspectives: nurse practitioners, palliative care providers, the expertise of trans medicine providers, and medical students. In doing so, they will help us see how power, inequality and resistance are taking shape in the health professions today.

By highlighting research on inequalities that emphasizes the everyday racialized and gendered experiences of trainees and patients, a goal of this panel is to increase our understanding of mechanisms of the reproduction of professional cultures that, at different points in the training process, contribute to durable inequalities in professional work. By drawing attention to healthcare workers’ forms of resistance, our goal is to establish links between professional work and traditional labor organizing. With this session we want to advance the conversation beyond conventional measures of inequality to a focus on the social processes that maintain and challenge inequality in professions.

To access the recording, follow this link: https://drexel.zoom.us/rec/share/x5IvI5jR10BIU43jsh70c6l9M6j3eaa8h3QW-vBczUlKqECTISnzKkQ9F-PSHToV
The password is: L$3IkL$*
To access the transcript, click here.