In 2000, the Arts and Humanities Medical Scholars Program at Stanford University School of Medicine issued its first grants to medical students interested in researching an area of the medical arts or humanities in depth. To date, 34 projects have been funded, including renewals. The projects encompass a range of genres and topics, from a website on Asian American health and culture to an ethnographic study of women physicians in training in Spain. Two projects are highlighted here: an online history of medicine course and a poetry project. Students are mentored by faculty from a wide array of university departments and centres and submit completion documents to the committee overseeing the programme. Students are encouraged to present their work at conferences, such as the programme’s annual symposium, as well as in publication or other appropriate formats. Future directions include integration with the scholarly concentrations initiative at the medical school.
The quest for a common collective identity has become a challenge for modern democracy: Liberal demands for greater inclusion and individual freedom, aspirations for a strong and solidaric political community, as well as nationalist or right-wing populist calls for exclusion and a preservation of hegemonic national identities are creating tensions that cannot be overlooked. This article therefore formulates the central question of how collective identity can be possible in a liberal democracy. Based on a case study on Germany, it will therefore be examined whether Leitkultur as a model of political integration can serve in generating a functional democratic collective identity. The necessary benchmarks guiding the analysis will be defined beforehand from a systems-theoretical perspective, balancing inclusion and exclusion within three crucial dimensions: normative basics, historic continuity, and affirmative bindings. The results show that a static definition of a German Leitkultur would in the long run neither achieve functional inclusion nor be able to generate the necessary cohesion of a political community, especially regarding the second and third identity dimensions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.