Hello, and welcome to the Digital Alchemy podcast brought to you by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. My name is Moya Bailey. I am an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the founder of the Digital Apothecary Lab. For this episode, I've invited Dr. Cooper Owens to join me to discuss her journey as a historian, speaker, and her commitment to teaching community based history.
I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I want to read your bio, and just give people a little bit of an introduction into all of the awesomeness that you are bringing to the podcast today. Dierdre Cooper Owens, an award winning historian and popular public speaker is the trials and Linda Wilson professor in the history of medicine, and director of the humanities and medicine program at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. In this position, Dr. Cooper Owens is one of two black women in the US running a medical humanities program. Dr. Cooper Owens is also the director of the program in African American history at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the country's oldest cultural institution, as a teacher and a public speaker. Cooper Owens is a proud graduate of two historically black colleges and universities, the all women's Bennett College and Clark Atlanta University. She earned her PhD in history at UCLA, and has had a number of prestigious fellowships at the University of Virginia, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and as a big 10 Academic Leadership Fellow, as one of the country's most acclaimed experts in US history. According to Time Magazine, Cooper Owens is steadily working towards making history more accessible and inspiring for all. So one, what an incredible bio. What an incredible person who's doing the work that is actually helping our communities to grow and learn, and so I wanted to start a little bit with the history that you provide, in your own story. What got you interested at this intersection of blackness, and medicine? And how do you feel like that interest has carried you forward in your academic career?
Yeah, what a great question. Thank you to so much for having me, and for indulging me prior to the recording of this podcast. That shows your generosity and your collegiality. What got me interested is really an all honesty. When I think about it, it's my family. My mother has a degree in biology and as a retired teacher, but also our family historian. She's a genealogist who traced our family's history back to the colonial period in South Carolina. And then my father worked at the National Archives for 30 something years before he retired. And so when I think about it, I've always been kind of immersed in those worlds without really appreciating it until I became a historian. But outside of my parents, I would say my grandfather, he has the blackest name ever. He was born in 1911 in South Carolina, but his name was King Solomon Cooper.
Okay, King Solomon.
King Solomon is my favorite human being, even though he's passed on some while ago. His telling of stories and his patience with me in asking a ton of questions about the past. I was always interested in history, and here was this man who lived through so much. He really was the person who sparked my interest with being attracted to the stories of history.
Wonderful. One of the other beautiful aspects of your work is that you've been able to do it within the academy but also make it accessible to people outside of the academy. I wanted to know a bit about what that is like for you. How does it feel to navigate both making your work accessible for the people you want it to be accessible to and then the kind of structured rigorous swathes of the academy tries to move our work and keep it separate from the people we care about.
Yeah, as a grad of two HBCUs. One is an all women's college and the other ACOA college, I was able to see the ways that black academics, these were like huge luminaries, Maya Angelou, Marie Evans, and James Cohn. And they're speaking to a group of undergraduates, for the most part, I didn't necessarily know what theory meant at the time. But they were able to take these really complex ideas and distill it in a language that everybody understood. That always was a kind of template for how I wanted to be as a scholar, and how I hope I am. A part of my own discomfort, with some of the jargon of the field, I do sometimes feel like it's like I have another language on my tongue.
Yes.
It doesn't feel natural. Today, for instance, I spoke to a high school class here in in Lincoln, Nebraska. And one of the teachers responded, she said, "You spoke so plainly, I could understand and I'm not a historian. I don't understand, you know, these fields, but yet you brought us into the past and explained it in a way that was so clear." That's important. I always was a talkative person. I won a lot of speech contests in my town for the state of South Carolina. Sometimes people are like, "Oh, my gosh, you don't use notes". And I was like, "Well, the secret's out". I was South Carolina is like extemporaneous speaking champ for the state. Those are things that come rather easily, because I've been doing it for so long, and I just translated that field. Really, I think when my book came out, who brought me into the public eye, or black birth workers, and doulas, and midwives. They were the ones that okay, you wrote this book, we love it. It speaks our history. You need to come speak with us, we need to introduce you to you know, these activists, these community members. They were really the ones who were like, "Girl, you better come on. This work for the people". I give them all the praise.
Oh, that's fantastic. What I'm also hearing, is this connection to Communication Journalism, these fields that in my experience, is someone newly immersed in this area, that these fields have historically been very white, not a lot of women. Do you feel like those folks are understanding and seeing your work? Other historians are understanding and seeing your work as something that is touching on this incredible history that is meaningful to so many people outside of these fields?
Yeah, I think so largely because of what the younger generation of scholars are doing, and that just mean in terms of being a bit more junior to me. They've changed the trajectory so these are people who are doing their own podcast. They are using social media as a platform to teach others. They use less formal language that is conversational and yet really complex, nuanced way of thinking. It has created is this way that everybody is now trying to scramble to see more relevant,
Yes.
,to make their work more appealing to an audience outside the confining holes of academia. For me, it has really been a blessing to be able to do the things that I always dreamt of doing in terms of talking, you know, like being a public speaker. I'm almost 50. When I graduated from high school, every black girl wanted to be Oprah. You saw a kind of flowering of black women majoring in Mass Comm and broadcast journalism. She made it possible for folks like us who were able to weave these stories in ways that could teach that could help that could transform. In that way, that communication piece becomes really important. Now, others are saying, oh, gosh, maybe these younger folk, maybe these people of color, maybe these queer folks, maybe these trans folk, they had their finger on something that is shifting and transforming as we speak and maybe we need to model it. I'm seeing that happening outside of the spaces where minorities reside, and now the majority is trying to emulate what we've been doing for quite some time.
Yes, and also we know that doing this work doesn't come without cost, so I'm thinking today about you know, the recent passing of Dr. Valerie Boyd, who's another person, another black feminist, who, you know, has been doing this work in the academy for so long. So relatedly, I'm wondering what kind of practices do you employ for yourself to kind of keep you going in, in your work. Especially when a lot of the work that we do has such like, we don't research easy things, you know, the the material, the content itself can be really taxing on your spirit, in addition to the academy, and all of the things that it puts on you, how are you maintain yourself?
Humor, I tend to think I'm a fun person, I like to laugh. I like beautiful things. So I tend to adorn myself with clothes or accessories that are black women designers. So I tend to have beautiful pictures of black people, black women in particular around me. Those are the things that keep me going because you're right, this history can be really depressing.
Yeah.
I'm a historian of slavery and medicine. I'm writing about sick people, and so that means they're vulnerable, they're fragile, they're not feeling well. There's not a lot of pleasure in being sick, in pain, and knowing you're in the limbo of life and death. But I'm also writing about slavery.
Yeah.
And that is, was a brutal system.
Yes. Moving in that direction, is there something that you hope your students are getting from the medical humanities, things that you're researching, that you want them to take into their future health practice ambitions as doctors or health care providers?
To be flexible, be respectful, that means listening to others to build community. And that's really important. When you build community, you can begin to institution build. If there's one thing that has been consistent in my study of black people across time and space is that black people build community, and they institution build. We have had to do so in this country. I am constantly telling the students to be respectful, to listen, to just gather all of the information you can and use it in a way where you are of service to others. Always move with love. But doesn't matter whether they want to go to med school, dental school, investigative journalism on the medical track, the lobbyist, even pharmacist, use love as a methodology.
I love that so much, and I definitely am really moved by your bring up community because that's one of the reasons we connected is through this community that we're building of black feminist health science studies. People who are trying to think of these intersections of black, feminist health, all of these things. I'm curious, what made you interested in joining the collective? And what kind of things are you hoping for the collective to provide for you going forward?
When I saw that this was a Black Feminist Collective, and people are interested in health science, Allied sciences, black women's history, feminism, and feminist theory, and all of these really wonderful things. I was like, "Oh, yeah, Sign me up. Of course, I want to be a part of this". To have an organization try to create space, through retreats, where we can just think, and be in a place that is calming. One of the things I know being a medical humanities scholar is that the stressors that black women and female identified people deal with is racism and sexism, and I mean all the other isms that affect our lives. We manifest that in our bodies, by you know, higher cortisol levels, inflammation, and the things that are supposed to calm you down, and bring that inflammation and those stresses down like sleep, our sleep is often interrupted, you know cause our body is like constantly fighting this, to be in a group that was cognizant enough to try and create a retreat space where we could actually rest and be calm, was also attractive to me. I'm glad I got the invitation. I'm so happy to be in this space.
Wonderful. My last question to you is, really what do you hope people take away from your work your research? What is it that you want people to understand about the history that you uncover about the medical humanities that you don't think that people are paying attention to?
That as long as we have had colonization on this continent, black women have been involved. Black women have been institution builders. I just came back from Buffalo, New York where I had given a talk at the Med School for the surgery department. I was speaking with some students, and I remember sharing with them, that the first sight of healing and what becomes the Dominican Republic, a hut of African born woman who was poor, and humble, yet pious. She creates a space of healing for sick people inbetween 1497 and 1503. We might not know her name, but after she dies, or retires, no one knows, the first quote unquote hospital within this colonial age is built, the very place where her hut was. This is something that people don't recognize. Black women have been here trying to heal ever since the colonial project happened in these Americas. At our very core, you know, symbolically, we are the people who bring healing to some situations and balanced, despite all the stresses that we are going through. I think it is a testament to the ways that black women in particular, black female identified people have had to navigate this really hostile space, and still try to create healing and balance for ourselves and others. That is remarkable in and of itself. People can take away that lesson. That is a blueprint for all of us to use as a laboratory means.
Way to just drop the mic at the end. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you all for listening to another episode of Digital Alchemy.
Digital Alchemy is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Our producer is Daniel Christain. Our production consultant is Nick song. Our executive producer is Alberto Diaz Caballero. The theme music is by Matt Oakley. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me my guests and digital alchemy overall. Thanks so much for listening.
