Gautam Chebrolu

In today’s sociopolitical climate, questions pertaining to the health needs of refugees are highly relevant. This course will cover the various factors that impact the access to and quality of healthcare refugees and migrant groups receive upon entering the United States. Examining everything from the unique health challenges refugee populations are likely to face to the various health related impacts of acculturation, this course provides a comprehensive look at both the current state and prospective future of refugees’ healthcare in the United States.

“A political office is a tool…not a destination.  Political capital is there to be spent!” 

Blunt talk from Annise Parker, the 61^st mayor of Houston, Texas in conversation with Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith in the latest in a series of conversations in the Kenan Institute’s “Ethics of Now” series.  Ms. Parker, whose mayoralty lasted from 2010 to 2016, holds the distinction of being one of the first openly-gay mayors of a major U.S. city.  Raised in a Republican Texas family, Ms. Parker was instilled with a strong sense of volunteerism during her childhood, that made her a natural leader in the LGBTQ movement in the 1970s.  She founded the first openly gay student organization at her alma mater, Rice University and has remained active in the fight for equality ever since.

In keeping with the theme of the “Ethics of Now” series to address topics of mutual concern to Duke and Durham, Dr. Lentz-Smith emphasized the mutual responsibilities individuals and public officials have to each other to ensure that government works the way it should, especially as American cities like Houston and Durham have become more diverse and more susceptible to external shocks like climate change.

Ms. Parker recounted how Houston had changed from a classic, bi-racial southern city thirty years ago to one in which a quarter of its residents are now born outside of the United States and locals are in the minority.  These demographic changes occur due to economic growth which make such cities magnets for global citizens. 

Managing this diversity poses challenges to public officials, Ms. Parker observed, who are in the difficult position of explaining to wealthier residents why limited municipal resources may have to be targeted towards alleviating the effects of neglect and poverty, while crafting policing strategies that address minority communities’ concerns as well.  Here, altruism should act as a guiding moral principle for ordinary citizens and policy makers: for example, we all ought to support education as a public good even if our children are grown or we have none of our own.

Dr. Lentz-Smith concluded the discussion by praising Ms. Parker’s remarks and observations as “an ode to local government,” and asked her to provide insight into the upcoming midterm elections.  Describing herself as “energized” going into the midterms, Ms. Parker pointed out that while many candidates are angry at the status quo, most also care deeply about the communities they seek to represent.  She concluded by encouraging the audience to balance concern over issues such as voter suppression with hope stemming from the unprecedented number of candidates who hail from diverse gender and racial backgrounds in this election cycle.

As part of its ongoing series “Conversations in Human Rights,” the Kenan Institute for Ethics facilitated a discussion with Dr. Myaing Myaing Nyunt during which she shared some of the ethical lessons learned over a career of directing research teams seeking to eradicate malaria. Dr. Nyunt has designed and led clinical and field research on malaria and malaria treatment outcomes in the United States, Zambia, Mali, China, and Bangladesh. She currently directs a rapidly growing malaria research program in Myanmar.

The Kenan Institute’s director, Dr. Suzanne Shanahan, posed several questions to Dr. Nyunt that probed the successes and challenges she faced directing research teams in Myanmar. Dr. Nyunt explained how she came to work on malaria research in terms that were at once deeply personal as well as professional. Being forced to leave Myanmar in the 1980s due to her opposition to the military regime in power, Dr. Nyunt’s early efforts to study the disease were on the borders of the country she called home. At first, she was discouraged after observing malaria’s devastating impact, but quickly found inspiration in the “pure science” of clinical trial work aimed at seeing which drug therapies worked best to fight malaria.

Dr. Shanahan asked Dr. Nyunt a question on the minds of many in the Duke community who have followed current events in Myanmar: is it ethical to engage with a regime accused of the crimes which the Myanmar government has been charged? Dr. Nyunt responded that it was not easy to reengage with a country she had fled in her youth and admitted that American audiences had difficulty seeing the rich cultural diversity of its people in the aftermath of the Rohingya crisis. However, the urgent need to improve the quality of life for Myanmar citizens made her receptive to new projects in the country, funded by the Open Society Foundations and the Gates Foundation. In Dr. Nyunt’s opinion, these projects have not only improved medical care in Myanmar, but also expanded its citizens’ intellectual horizons.

A key question that was raised during the discussion was how Dr. Nyunt’s scientific work was related to the process of accelerated political change in Myanmar over the past decade, which has led to a greater role for civilians, like Aung San Suu Kyi, in government. She spoke movingly of the strong relationships she and her research teams established with local people who are eager for exposure to viewpoints different than their own. “On many levels, there is a feeling of making a small difference” she reflected. Myanmar’s international isolation for many years fragmented its civil society which in turn made it difficult to have conversations involving new points of view.

Dr. Nyunt’s research protocols (which bring together diverse stakeholders from the government, the military, and Myanmar’s ethnic groups) create a space for new avenues for combating malaria, but also provide spaces to consider novel approaches to ethical challenges. Dr. Nyunt and her colleagues made research ethics a top training priority for their local partners, including the right that potential subjects had to refuse to work with the researchers. Imagine their surprise, when they discovered that some of their local partners adapted this clinical trial rule to their everyday interactions with those in authority! This is but one example of the reciprocal exchange of knowledge that took place with local partners: each group learning valuable lessons from the other.

Asked about her vision for Myanmar twenty years from now, Dr. Myunt expressed her hope that the open, transparent conversation with the international community she has been a part of will lead to future Myanmar scientists becoming part of the global research community where they freely exchange ideas. She encouraged the Duke audience to contact her if they had an interest in working in Myanmar and urged them not to shun the country’s rich cultural diversity when so much good work remains to be done.

Two Kenan-affiliated scholars, Gov. Sarah Bloom Raskin and Meredith Edelman, are working with Lecturing Fellow Lee Reiners from the law school on a Bass Connections project entitled “How Cyberattacks Hurt Us.” This project involves undergraduate and graduate students who, together with help and consulting from across the Duke community, are working as though they were a consulting firm whose only client, society, needs help understanding how to protect itself from hacking, data misappropriation, and other forms of cyberattack. The investigation has covered some of the biggest hacks in history, and students have already started their work to propose projects to address the harms arising out of these hacks.  In the spring semester, our consulting firm will become an incubator, and will produce one or more deliverables that will help people across American society better understand the risks and potential harms arising out of cybersecurity issues and what can be done about them. Edelman notes,

“The students in the class continue to impress me with their intellect, curiosity, and hard work.  I am thrilled to be working with such an exceptional group of Duke students and faculty and am looking forward to seeing what we come up with.  I’m sure that it will be a valuable social contribution of which the entire university will be proud.”

72 hours, 14 students, 3 cities, and 1 memorable experience. Kenan’s Alternative Fall Break introduced students to the complex “telling” of the last two centuries of history in the South through the monuments, museums, and memories preserved in Montgomery, Tuskeegee and Atlanta. What forms our generational memory? Whose stories are told? How do those stories influence us? These questions recurred throughout visits to both old and new sites that inform the collective memory of America’s history of slavery, lynching and segregation and influence what all of that means for us today.

In Montgomery, the first White House of the Confederacy and Jefferson Davis’s gold star on the Alabama capitol steps were just a short distance from the Freedom Rides Museum built in the same Greyhound station that was the marked by violence during the protests of racially segregated transportation. Allison Bunker, a first-year student from Seattle, commented that these contrasts provided the opportunity to experience “history not in bits and pieces but in whole narratives of places and to see multiple sides in one place.” With stops at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, The Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Martin Luther King National Historic Site, the Tuskeegee Airmen National Historic Site, and the Center for Civil and Human Rights, students learned some of the harsher truths of America’s past—pieces of which many admitted were entirely new to them. Lucas Lynn, a student who originally hails from Alabama, summed up the experience by sharing, “America tries to distance itself from an ugly past, but when you hear from those who marched on Selma, who went to jail as kids for a movement, you become connected and realize that the issues then are not unique or different from the current ones.”