“Concepts of Race & Ethnicity in Health Care ”

October 30-31, 2024 at King’s College London 

While concepts such as race and ethnicity play a central role in much contemporary discourse, a commonly held view (in academia and society more generally) is that race is a social construct – that race is only relevant because of legacies of colonialism, systemic racism, and other forces that embed racial inequality into society. However, the widespread use of racial classifications in medical practice seems to be at odds with such an account. How should we understand the relevance of racial and ethnic classifications to medical science and intervention, including diagnosis, prognosis and treatment?

One possible answer is that racial prejudices and inequalities have consequences that affect medicine, for example by producing health inequalities, which have observable effects in the biological as well as the social world. While this is certainly part of the answer, it arguably is not complete. Inequalities cannot explain, for example, the use of racial or ethnic classifications for genetic screening. Medicine is a practice which necessarily operates at the intersection of the biomedical sciences and the socio-cultural world; as such medical racial discourse is not easily conceptualised as belonging to either. This raises particular challenges for health care and its philosophy.

The workshop will be held from October 30-31 at Kings College London and will be followed by the Annual Sowerby Lecture, given by Professor. Quayshawn Spencer (UPenn), on the evening of October 31st. 

The Sowerby Philosophy & Medicine project is a joint initiative of the Peter Sowerby Foundation and King’s College London. The project works to bring together healthcare professionals and philosophers working at the intersection of philosophy and medicine, exploring the ways that philosophical research can enrich medical research and practice and vice versa.