Abstract
Preamble: This essay is a critical literary approach to structural competency which uses as its starting point the lives and thinking of figures from the Black Freedom movement as political role models for students in medical education. A premise of this essay is that professional training tends to depoliticize medical students and mold them into technical experts, but not necessarily freedom-minded civic and political activists. The crisis in the professions that we are witnessing with the advent of Trumpism is a challenge to the integrity of all professions and credentialing institutions like medical schools. The facile answer is call for professional neutrality. Structural competency can never be politically neutral in a society that is quickly moving to deeper divisions and open social conflict. This essay is a literary experiment in calibrating the ethical and political costs of training students at looking at medicine and its array of institutions from a conflict-based perspective. At the core of this essay are two underlying ethical questions: Will the healthcare professions be explicit and conscious about the political power they wield already? Also, what will they do with the power in these times of profound conflict?
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Appendix 1: Structured Observation Guiding Questions
Appendix 1: Structured Observation Guiding Questions
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1.
What is this space? How does it function? What are its physical characteristics? How is it bounded? How does one gain entry or exit?
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2.
What are the individual behaviors that are occurring here? What does this space have to do with these behaviors? Are certain behaviors encouraged and others delimited?
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3.
What are the social interactions that can be observed in this space? How does the setting structure those interactions?
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Are there odd or outlier activities occurring in this space? Can one observe any patterns or tendencies toward patterns in this setting?
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5.
Describe the bodies in this space. Does this space change or sustain certain bodily stances or experiences? How does my body feel in this space? How is my subjectivity influenced and influencing the setting under observation?
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What are the indicators of social/economic/cultural differences that can be observed in this space? How do these indicators relate to my embodiment of social, cultural, and economic privilege and/or inequality and/or difference?
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Rivera Colón, E. (2019). This Ain’t No Tool, This Ain’t No Toolbox. In: Hansen, H., Metzl, J. (eds) Structural Competency in Mental Health and Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10525-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10525-9_3
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