The Social

The social is constituted by on-going communication and behavior patterns that influence participants perceptions, expectations and moral boundaries. For some, moral boundaries protect the racial hierarchy of American prosperity by calling natural what is actually social. Controversary about the meaning of sex, race, and ancestry can help us understand this difference, and thereby sharpen our awareness of our experiences of the social from social diversity to social amnesia. Social amnesia eliminates any awareness of the climate of injustice. In this context, a disturbing trend is our increasing reliance on private philanthropy to solve social problems, which moves us toward a new form of feudalism instead of a civic democracy. In a civic space that arises from the connections between our shared humanity and social differences, it is possible to listen to diverse voices and to make incoherent stories coherent.

The Civic

We bring forth a civic realm with the mutual recognition of our shared humanity that allows us to repair violations of human dignity and to restore social coherence. Given our social inequalities, this takes the form of those who have resources (citizens) responding to the rightful demands of those do not (civilians). The paradigmatic model for civic engagement is the Civilian Review Board, where citizens listen and respond to civilian claims for justice and limits of the use of force. The civilian call for limits can be applied to the other three parts of the four-part framework: the Earth, humanity, and the social. This gives us permission to recognize that we have only one Earth, that death is a natural limit to human life, and that social trends, such as American Prosperity, should not be treated as limitless. Acknowledging these limitations is a necessary condition for creating a climate of justice.

The future of global health is inclusive and anti-racist

In global health, a discipline with a racist and colonial history, white supremacy, white privilege and racism are still present today. 1 Although many believe we are witnessing a resurgence of racism in global health, because of a recent rise of extreme right comments and racism in the community and online 2 , 3 . In reality racism has always been an inherent aspect of global health and its predecessors: tropical health and international health by prioritizing the health issues of the colonizers over those of the native populations. 4 As such, we are rather bearing witness to long standing issues that have been persistently overlooked. There is a need for a paradigm shift to enable true authentic leadership that promotes the values of our shared humanity.

“Humor Saves Steps”

Marianne Moore treats humor as a way to recognize what we have in common with others and to create understanding across difference. In her early work, Moore experiments with combinations of satire and empathy. In “A Prize Bird” and “The Wood-Weasel,” she uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in “The Pangolin,” like the artists’ tools Moore discusses in the poem, is an end in itself and a way to discover new possibilities: it marks shared humanity and unites the human with the divine. Moore’s laughter occurs when we understand intuitively what it is like to be someone else; the more apparently unlike us the other, the more satisfying the laughter. Throughout Moore’s work, humor can be read as an ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that American poets of the last hundred years use laughter to promote recognition of shared humanity across difference. Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols the boundary between in-group and out-group, but laughter can also help us cross or re-draw that boundary, creating a more democratic understanding of shared experience. Poets’ uses of humor reveal and reinforce deep-seated beliefs about the possibility of empathic mutual understanding among unlike interlocutors. These beliefs also shape poets’ senses of audience and their attitudes toward the notion that poets are somehow exceptional. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they make a claim about the basic ethical function of poetry, because humor and poetry share fundamental structures: both combine disparate subjects into newly meaningful wholes. Taking W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore on one side and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot on the other as competing models of how humor can embrace, exclude, and transform, the book charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and Lucille Clifton, among others. Poets whose race, gender, sexual orientation, or experimentalism place them outside the American mainstream are especially interested in humor’s potential to transcend the very differences it demarcates. Such writers increasingly replace mockery, satire, and other humorous attacks with comic forms that heighten readers’ understanding of and empathy with individuals, while revealing the failures of dominant hierarchical moral and logical systems.

Feelings and the Patient-Doctor Relationship

In this autobiographical piece about conducting psychotherapy with a patient during residency training, a physician reflects on the shared humanity between patients and doctors and the feelings that unite them.

Friendship and Loneliness Among People Living With Dementia: Toward Community and Shared Humanity

An increasing number of people living with dementia (PLWD) age in community. In North America, this number ranges from 61-81% of the total number of PLWD. As many as one in three PLWD do not live with a care partner. Since most PLWD do not drive, many may spend a significant proportion of time within half a mile of their homes. Yet, the neighbourhood may or may not provide “ways of being in the world that are more accepting and embracing of the kinds of disruptions that dementia can produce” (Hillman & Latimer, 2017). To support continued social participation, meaningful everyday networks are required. PLWD and care partners may identify more or less strongly with a community depending on their position in the network, its spaces, and activities. According to Nancy (1991), “community” has been conjured as an antidote to the loneliness of the human condition, which explains its allure. In response, Costello (2014) argued that “community” requires one to constantly try and “fall short” in caring for another’s changing experiences. The value of a community thus depends on the quality of its friendships – the ability of otherwise lonely individuals to empathize – which may be threatened by challenges to PLWD’s personhood. This symposium brings together expertise in community gerontology, philosophy, and neuropsychology to advance current conceptualizations of personhood in community amid cognitive decline. These will be discussed in relation to lived experiences, with the aim to inform future research and practice of dementia care and prevention in community.

Shared Humanity: Advancing the Personhood of People Living With Dementia

During the past three decades, the idea of personhood, and the degree to which people living with dementia (PLWD) possess it and ought to be treated as such, has been discussed by a number of important scholars such as Tom Kitwood and John Swinton. Although both asserted that PLWD ought to be treated as persons, their notions of personhood appear to be quite different. Kitwood noted that personhood was a status “bestowed” on another individual, whereas Swinton asserted that personhood was endemic to human beings. Yet, these approaches are complementary. I show, using case studies, how supportive communities are required for PLWD to teach us about our humanity, so long as we remain “finely aware and richly responsible” (Nussbaum, 1990). Our humanity is shared, in the Zulu concept of “Ubuntu” (Tutu, 1981;1989), when each individual’s humanity is ideally expressed in relationship with others. This has important implications for clinical practice.

Older Adults as Virtual Subject Matter Experts in COVID Graduate Education

COVID-19 has further illuminated the need for educational approaches in gerontology that are person-centered and experiential. Ideally, this includes in-person experiences with students and older adults. Through their classroom participation as subject matter experts in aging, older adults share their personal experiences, and react to gerontological theories and ideas. Shared learning offers a platform for exploration of shared humanity, so that older adults are not seen as the “other”, but “us”. This prepares a generation of gerontologists to identify and reject ongoing ageism, again highlighted by the pandemic. COVID-19 has also challenged educators to offer these experiential opportunities. In this presentation we will outline how older adults from a Continuing Care Retirement Community participated virtually in a graduate course. We will discuss how their virtual involvement was structured, how their real-time COVID experiences were integrated, and share feedback from older adult participants and students on their shared learning experiences.