Susan McHugh, PhD, Professor of English in the School of Arts and Humanities, was an invited speaker at the Medical Posthumanities: Governing Health Beyond the Human virtual workshop on April 14-16, hosted by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. McHugh’s talk, entitled “Rabies on Ice: Learning from Interspecies Suffering in Arctic Canada” begins at minute 24 on the April 16 recording uploaded to the Baldy Center website: http://www.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/events/conferences/medical-posthumanities.html
The workshop brought together leading-edge medical researchers, social scientists, conservation biologists, and arts and humanities scholars to propose an innovative approach to pandemic problem-solving: while medical humanities have tended to focus almost exclusively on humans, a medical posthumanities, by contrast, would take seriously the role of “more-than-human” actors to explore the complex entanglements of human, animal, and ecological health. Given that the human individual has long served as the subject of liberal societies and the systems of governance to which they gave rise, the legal implications of a medical posthumanities are immediate. The conversations captured in the workshop recordings confirm broader potentials for creative, ethical, social, and scientific thinking to address the interlinkages of the most pressing global problems today.