International Health Humanities Network Membership

Em Rabelais is an academic health ethicist with interests in health inequities and health humanities, with a primary focus on decentering whiteness* in health professions and research education and practice. Dr. Rabelais’s current research projects center on identification and enactments of unconscious racism and other discriminations within centered whiteness in health professional and research educational and clinical settings. They achieve this by centering patient and student narrative voices as the definers of discriminations from centered whiteness to assist in dismantling the transmission of learned, enacted centered whiteness in these settings. They also interrogate the embedded centered whiteness in educational and research documents (scholarly work, policy, accrediting bodies, etc.), as these dominating structures reveal their own narratives of oppression. Their use of narrative as method and ethics includes focusing on writing, eliciting, and contextualizing narratives to address, highlight, or otherwise inform research, clinical, or pedagogical questions. Narrative ethics in their work makes apparent the actors' positionalities within structural racism, white supremacy, and centered whiteness while simultaneously identifying stories and positionalities within dominant and non-dominant narratives. Dr. Rabelais's work (a) finds, records, and highlight these narratives followed by (b) contextualizing them for healthcare establishments (education, research, practice) in order to (c) mobilize compelling narratives that will work toward policy change.

*Centered whiteness defines social, political, and other normalities. These include what is defined as normal for race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, disability, body size and shape, behavior, interpersonal interactions, communication, country of origin, religion, and all types of professionalisms.