UNDERSTANDING PATHOLOGIES OF POWER IN THE AGE OF COVID-19
On Wednesday, December 9, The Invisible Institute and Partners In Health (PIH) hosted a virtual panel discussion on the systematic conditions affecting the health, safety, and freedom to flourish of those living in marginalized communities from Chicago’s South Side to Haiti's Central Plateau featuring PIH co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer, Invisible Institute founder Jamie Kalven, Dr. Thomas Fisher of University of Chicago Medicine, and moderated by journalist and former Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Turner.
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Dawn Turner is an award-winning journalist and novelist. A former columnist and reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Turner spent a decade and a half writing about politics, race and class in Chicago and beyond, as well as telling the individual stories of people who fly below the radar. Turner, who served as a 2017 and 2018 juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, has written commentary for The Washington Post, “The PBS NewsHour,” “The CBS Sunday Morning News Show,” National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” show and the “Chicago Tonight” show. Turner spent the 2014-2015 school year as a Nieman Journalism fellow at Harvard University. In 2018, she served as a fellow and journalist-in-residence at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. Turner is the author of two novels, Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven and An Eighth of August, (both published by Crown/Random House and winners of Illinois Arts Council awards). Only Twice won an Alex Award, among others, and an excerpt from a novel-in-progress won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her memoir, Three Girls from Bronzeville, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2021.
Thomas Fisher, MD, MPH, is a board-certified emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago where he serves the same Chicago community where he was raised. He is a former health insurance executive and the past president of NextLevel Health, an Illinois Medicaid managed care health plan. Prior to that Tom led segments of Affordable Care Act implementation for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Montana as vice president of health delivery transformation at Health Care Service Corporation. Serving as the 2010-2011 White House Fellow at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Fisher was special assistant to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. There he worked on ACA regulations and led the development of the HHS Action Plan for Reducing Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. He graduated from Dartmouth College, finished medical school at The University of Chicago and public health school at Harvard. His forthcoming book on restructuring the health care system will be published by One World an imprint of Penguin Random House
Paul Farmer, MD, PhD is a medical anthropologist and physician. He is Co-founder and Chief Strategist of Partners In Health (PIH); Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston and serves as the United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti. Dr. Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he is the Kolokotrones University Professor and the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Farmer has written extensively on health, human rights, and the consequences of social inequality. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Bronislaw Malinowski Award and the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Jamie Kalven is a writer and executive director of the Invisible Institute. He has reported extensively on patterns of police abuse and impunity. He was the plaintiff in Kalven v. Chicago, in which the Illinois appellate court ruled that documents bearing on allegations of police misconduct are public information. His reporting first brought the police shooting of Laquan McDonald to public attention; and he co-produced 16 Shots, an Emmy Award winning documentary on the McDonald case. His 2016 series “Code of Silence” in The Intercept exposed the criminal activities of a team of corrupt Chicago officers operating in public housing and has contributed to more than seventy exonerations. Among the national awards he has received are the 2015 George Polk Award for Local Reporting, the 2016 Ridenhour Courage Prize, and the 2017 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism.