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 Emerging Infectious Diseases * Volume 3 * Number 1 * January-March 1997
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News and Notes

"Emergent Illness and Public Scholarship" Fellowships

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Emory University's Center for the Study of Public Scholarship announces
four semester-long fellowships for its program on Emergent Illness and
Public Scholarship to be held during the 1997-1998 academic year. Emergent
Illness and Public Scholarship is the first of a 3-year series of programs
funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and organized by the Center for Public
Scholarship. The center is directed by Dr. Ivan Karp and is housed in the
Institute for Liberal Arts. Emergent Illnesses and Public Scholarship is
being coorganized by Emory's Center for the Study of Health, Culture, and
Society, which is directed by Dr. Randall M. Packard.

Emergent illnesses, from Legionnaires' disease to AIDS, not only challenge
the scientific and medical communities to find new explanations and
treatments, but prompt patients and their caretakers and families to
challenge the authority and expertise of biomedical specialists. In various
settings globally, the formal scholarship of health scientists coexists
with, and is frequently challenged by, that of lay persons searching for
knowledge and explanations of their own illnesses.

Emergent Illness and Public Scholarship will address the politics of
knowledge as well as the mechanics by which information travels between
professionals and lay communities that simultaneously produce and consume
knowledge. Issues of education, technology, audiences, and the ownership of
knowledge will stand alongside more traditionally focused biomedical and
epidemiologic concerns as foci of the workshop.

Fellows in the program will spend part of the semester talking across
disciplinary and institutional boundaries about emerging illness; help
determine the agenda of the workshop series; plan one of its sessions; and
interact on a limited basis with Emory graduate students.

Especially welcome to the program are applicants working on health issues
outside academia, as the workshop's goal is to transcend the boundaries
that often mute discussions between producers of knowledge with differing
credentials.

For more information, contact: Michael McGovern, Center for the Study of
Public Scholarship, S-412 Callaway Building, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
30322.

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Emerging Infectious Diseases
National Center for Infectious Diseases
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Atlanta, GA