Forum 2018

Our annual BU Center for the Humanities forums are designed as “open air markets” in the classical sense, that further the free exchange of ideas among scholars in humanities and other academic fields with professionals and practitioners from private and public institutions across the city, the country, and the world, by bringing them together to discuss social problems and their prospective solutions. Our subject in 2017 was Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age; our 2018 forum treated Humanities Approaches to the Opioid Crisis, and our topic in 2019 will be The State of the Academy.

Our collaboration this year with BU’s School of Public Health yielded a range of participants from area schools of public health and medicine, and from the city, state, and federal government to reflect upon the problem of Opioid Addiction and the social crisis it has generated. The Forum demonstrated the ways in which humanities fields provide a language that builds bridges across disciplinary boundaries while also foregrounding the role of language in the many aspects of treatment and policy, from the obvious social stigma associated with addiction, to the much harder-to-define subjective experience.

The Forum’s three panels — Friday evening, October 12th, The Public Face of the Crisis; Saturday morning October 13th, The Crisis, Its Internal Language; and Saturday afternoon, October 13th, The Crisis, Its History and Culture — identified three areas of particular significance: how society comes to define a “social crisis”; the different meanings and various uses of narratives in representing ‘the crisis’; and the underlying social and political circumstances.

Sandro Galea, Dean of the School of Public Health, observed that one of the most important questions to be raised about our current “Opioid Crisis” is how it came to be classified as such. Columbia historian, Samuel Kelton-Roberts noted how our society tends to tolerate high rates of drug addiction, violence, and even death when it is confined to disadvantaged communities, a sentiment echoed by John E. Rosenthal, founder of The Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative.

Eoin Cannon, Chief Speechwriter, City of Boston, discussed how addiction narratives can be appropriated and misappropriated, and emphasized that the term ‘narrative’ has different meanings in the various spheres dedicated to addressing the Opioid Crisis, a point Amy Appleford, Professor of English, developed in her remarks and I pursued as well in my paper on David Foster Wallace and Breaking Bad.

Paul Summergrad, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Tufts, offered a stirring account of the “savagery” of our contemporary culture, responding implicitly to Michael Botticelli, Director of the Grayken Center for Addiction Medicine, who highlighted the social breakdown that has contributed to “the crisis.” Perhaps the most poignant moment of the Forum occurred when Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, described one of the inadvertent consequences of the Opioid Crisis: that for the first time, we do not have a lack of organs for donation.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2018

THE PUBLIC FACE OF THE CRISIS

Introduced by Robert Brown, President, Boston University | Moderated by Martha Bebinger, WBUR Health Care Reporter

Sandro Galea, Robert A. Knox Professor and Dean, School of Public Health, Boston University
Samuel Kelton Roberts, Associate Professor of History (School of Arts & Sciences) and Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences (Mailman School of Public Health), Columbia University
Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value, Harvard University
Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2018

THE CRISIS, ITS INTERNAL LANGUAGE

Introduced by Wendy Gordon, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, Boston University School of Law

Michael Botticelli, Boston Medical Center Executive Director of the Grayken Center for Addiction Medicine.
The Role of Personal Narrative in Changing Policy – When Science Is Not Enough

Rafael Campo, Professor of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Award-winning Poet
Hurts So Good: Poetry in Response to the Opioid Crisis

Eoin Cannon, Chief Speechwriter, City of Boston
The Role of Storytelling in Addiction Recovery

Jessica Miller, Chair, Department of Philosophy and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Interdisciplinary Programs
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Maine
Clinical Ethics and Substance Use Disorder: Autonomy, Trust, and Hope

Moderated by Richard Saitz, Professor, Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health and Chair, Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health

THE CRISIS, ITS HISTORY AND CULTURE 

Introduced by James Uden, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Boston University

Susan Mizruchi, William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities, Director of the Center for the Humanities, and Professor of English, Boston University
Democratizing Addiction: The Epic Ambitions of “Infinite Jest” and “Breaking Bad”

John E. Rosenthal, Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors, The Police Assisted Addiction Recovery Initiative and President, Meredith Management Corporation
Rethinking Police Work: Non-Arrest Pathways to Treatment and Recovery

Benjamin Siegel, Assistant Professor of History, Boston University
The International Origins of the US Opioid Crisis

Paul Summergrad, Dr. Frances S. Arkin Professor and Chairman, Department of Psychiatry, Professor of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, Psychiatrist-in-Chief, Tufts Medical Center, Past President, American Psychiatric Association
The Second Arrow: Opioid Addiction and Mental Disorders

Moderated by Amy Appleford, Associate Professor of English, Director, Medieval Studies Program, Boston University

October 19 – November 19, 2018

The BU Center for Humanities hosted an exhibition of work by local artists in conjunction with the 2018 forum.  In addition to the four works that were displayed during the forum at a pop-up exhibit on October 13th, four other artists also contributed their work to this month-long exhibition in our office. We are grateful to our jury and to everyone who submitted work. Photographs of the works and the one animation are found below.

Updated: November 15, 2018