How Societies Stay Together - Christie Caruana

How do societies hold together? What creates unity among individuals? Christie will be discussing social relationships and how institutions (think: schools, the government, families) both create and destroy social cohesion. 

Is Society Making You Sick? - Lily Plowden

What does it mean to be sick? Is society making you sick? Lily will be discussing her research on how illness is not only a physical condition, but also shaped by our culture. She will lay out the history of mental illness diagnoses to demonstrate how illness is socially constructed. Trigger warning: this talk will include discussion of sexual violence.

Christie Caruana and Lily Plowden are both students in UAB’s Medical Sociology PhD program.