Frameworks
Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism offers engaging educational material that allows visitors to learn new or often erased stories about our past and how it shapes our present. Each year, Art Hx invites a number of contributors—scholars, healthcare professionals, community organizers, and more—to tell stories about medicine, race, and art informed by their expertise and personal experiences. The project approaches these issues by employing three core frameworks: Pathologies of Difference, Cultivating Care, and Medicalized Space.
Pathologies of Difference maps the ways medicine and race shaped colonial expansion and traces their impact on perceptions of racial difference, disease and health today. Cultivating Care considers the many meanings of care in the practice of (historical) interpretation and the practices of health and medical treatment. Medicalized Space focuses on the ways medicine as a field of knowledge was used to interpret, categorize and circulate meanings about humans and their environments.
Under each of these three frameworks, you will be able to find object-centered narratives that use the above questions as a starting point. Through Art Hx and these frameworks, we endeavor to “see” imperial networks, better understand how colonial expansion, the development of medical knowledge, and the production and circulation of visual culture were and are still entangled, and grapple with how such connections have often been elided or erased.
