The Hidden in the Hidden Curriculum: Technocentrism, Race and Colonialism in Medical Knowing and Feeling

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 15: Knowledge-Making and Educational Institutions

Abstract

The complicity of health care institutions and health care professionals in shaping, perpetuating, even pathologizing inequities has been an uncomfortable awakening for many in health professions, and the existence of a hidden curriculum has been a compelling explanation for their persistence. Insofar as the idea of the hidden curriculum roots these inequities in forces that surround medical practice, however, it conceals how forces such as technocentrism, racism and colonialism exist at the core of medical knowledge and feeling. Using a close analysis of the ways clinicians who often treat pain talk about patients who are most likely to be marginalized, silenced, and harmed, we show that these patients not only present challenges to that which surrounds medical practice, but also to the disciplinary core of clinicians’ knowledge and identities. We argue the ways in which clinicians talk about and link patients’ conditions to factors seemingly “outside” medicine itself – race, culture, social determinants, organizational constraints – in fact reveal how forces of racism, colonization and technocentrism are intertwined and deeply embedded in what clinicians know and feel. Our analysis is rooted in a critical phenomenological approach, which recognizes that embodied experience and the language used to express that experience is inscribed by power structures, including disciplines, which permeate, organize and reproduce ways of knowing and making the world.

Authors

• Ariel Ducey, University of Calgary

• Pratim Sengupta, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary

• Martina Kelly, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary