The complexity of the social and health problems that are experienced today require the training of professionals and researchers who are sensitive to cultural diversity and the subjectivity of people who day by day live within problematic contexts, where situations such as discrimination, violence, the difficulty in accessing health services, the breakdown of communities, the loss of values and traditions, and an ever-fluctuating economic context that hinder the development of communities and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (UNDP, 2023).
The Master’s program in health, art and community aims to contribute to the solution of these problems from a transdisciplinary perspective and sensitive to the needs of the community, preparing researchers who can diagnose and intervene in social and health problems from a framework of sensitivity to cultural diversity. ethnic and gender, and above all respecting the subjectivity of the individual, through the use of flexible strategies designed to work in a given time and context.
Likewise, the cultural contribution of artistic genres is used as a means of expression that facilitates communication with the target population and sensitizes them to increase their participation in community processes that contribute to the solution of inherently complex problems. The content embodied in this study plan presents the theoretical, artistic, methodological, technical and administrative foundations, necessary to train professionals and researchers capable of functioning effectively within the complex scenarios presented by the current postmodern context, attending to the multiple social, cultural and health needs of a population that constantly lives extreme situations. due to deficient or insensitive attention on the part of public and private organizations.
Graduates of the master’s degree are trained in the management of transdisciplinary and artistic strategies in the approach to problems in health and community issues, so their field of work action is diverse, in this are educational institutions of middle and higher level, public institutions dedicated to the care and promotion of health such as the DIF and the IMSS, municipal departments dedicated to cultural dissemination, civil associations and artistic collectives, among others.
Social Context
The emergence of the Master’s Degree in Health, Art and Community (MISAC) responds to the need to comprehensively attend to the training of professionals capable of performing with competence, relevance and sensitivity, and to overcome excessive disciplinary specialization through transdisciplinary methodology, which, at its base, advocates an ethic that puts the well-being of people and communities before any other interest.
The program aims to establish itself as an innovative project in accordance with the current state of professional training and research: on the one hand, the vision of the world as an open space in constant communication, on the other, the overcoming of excessive disciplinary training (there are more than 8000 disciplines in the world today) and, finally, the understanding of reality from multiple perspectives. Based on the transdisciplinary methodology, proposed by the Romanian-born physicist Basarab Nicolescu (2005), the master’s degree seeks to establish bridges between diverse knowledge, so that it helps to make each person, whatever their condition and origin, a creative subject and promoter of personal and collective well-being; From this context come the reasons that cement the relationship between the three axes of the program: health, art and community.
In this sense, we argue that it is necessary to rethink, at first, and successively counteract, the absence of significant social and cultural ties in the care and treatment of the disease and its most extreme consequences such as death. We, being framed from a university environment and from the field of health sciences, have the responsibility to take a critical look at our training, dynamics and construction of knowledge; within which the subject of science and its approaches have dominated the field, falling into «… the serious error that consists in the separation between science and culture.» (Martínez, 2009) The above is a myth that Morin points out well when he reflects that «… even in science that is believed to be purer, there is always a suspension of culture, history, politics and ethics…», it is for this reason that we appeal in the construction of this program to give a deep approach from a self-critical position, which allows us to get out of an epistemological myopia, to give way to encounter, listening and transdisciplinary dialogue. which is the axis of this project.
It is undeniable that modern life and its medicine have systematically tried to hide both disease and death, treating them as a fact exclusively limited to the individual who suffers from it. In this way, the ties that in other times and places held them together in the social sphere have been broken and, with it, all those ritual and even performative practices that allowed the pain and tragedy of loss to be collectively absorbed for both the patient and their community have been lost (Seppilli, 1989, Cited in Comelles, et al., 2017). Health implies much more than the loss of health, since, as social medicine maintains today, it is configured as a life experience and, therefore, everything concerning this delicate issue must be addressed from a praxis that reintroduces knowledge and attitudes that are not strictly medical in health processes. The health/disease profile in Mexico is characterized by ailments still rooted in poverty, while at the same time there are those chronic-degenerative diseases called «diseases of civilization», which correspond rather to a development model based on the plundering of both human beings and the environment. This worrisome situation seems unsolvable today because it exceeds the budgetary possibilities of the health sector, which, as a result, faces the dilemma of how to care for a growing number of people with serious and costly ailments (González and Ángeles, 2009).
On the side of the discipline around the arts, there are a series of discussions, debates and problems within the spaces where it is thought, built and practiced. One of the main ones is the strong influence that the neoliberal economic system has had within the university classrooms of art schools, where students tend to enter a strong confusion about under which node the moment of creation is generated, since they tend to give all the weight of this responsibility to technical knowledge and the speed of production of objects. This has strongly permeated the institutions that are dedicated to the financing and organization of festivals, and therefore the current imaginary around this discipline. The conception of the creative process has faded (Blanco, 2019), while the time of commodities overlaps with the time of the arts, desire and the singular are being left aside (Graw, 2017), generating in turn a series of discomforts that not only affect the disciplinary nature of this community, but also cause psycho-emotional discomfort in the subjects.
In this sense, the creative and humanistic perspective present in the epistemology of the arts can contribute to the vision and orientation of actions around health. Of course, art, in its multiple manifestations, is not exempt, as we have already pointed out, from the market forces that move it in the direction of responding to demands for products lacking in coherence, harmony and ethics, but when it acts with a deep sense it tends to consider all aspects of reality. In this sense, the most substantial of art represents a non-fragmentary and non-exclusive practice of knowledge, which is why it is presented as an important resource in the face of the hyper-specialization and instrumental efficiency (in many cases ineffective) of the hegemonic praxis of intervention in the field of health and, more generally, of knowledge.
Curricular Map
First Semester
- Transdisciplinary methodology I.
- Health Studies.
- Social Studies.
- Art Studies.
Second Semester
- Transdisciplinary methodology II.
- Elective I: Practical Strategies for Health Intervention.
- Elective II: Application of artistic knowledge in health promotion.
- Thesis Seminar I.
Third Semester
- Social Awareness for intercultural work.
- Elective III: Promoting Community Participation.
- Thesis Seminar II.
Fourth Semester
- Elective IV: ICT Management in Information Analysis and Dissemination.
- Thesis Seminar III.
