To ‘otherise’ someone is “to make a person or group of people seem different, or to consider them to be different” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d). ‘Othering’ individuals can occur with respect to age, sexual orientation, religion, gender identity, and skin colour (Very Well Mind, 2023). Othering can lead to the development of prejudices against individuals.
Often when developing inclusivity in medicine, it seems that the representative group becomes ‘othered’. Rather than inclusivity being the norm, when something is made inclusive, it is highlighted as novel and different, when that shouldn’t be the case. True inclusivity would be no ‘inclusivity’ at all - if everything was inclusive we wouldn’t require a word for it. Instead of something being inclusive, it would be ‘normal’ or the ‘standard’. Currently, that is not the climate in which we are being educated.
When we highlight something as ‘inclusive’, we may be inherently ‘othering’ the inclusive group, showing them as different to the standard. The hope with AnatoMe is that we will develop inclusivity in anatomical education as what is normal, but it’s difficult to have any degree of positive movement towards inclusivity without othering certain characteristics. Because a diverse range of bodies is not considered the standard in anatomical education, including these bodies at first would make these bodies different to the standard. But is it only with othering that we can achieve true inclusivity?
Another example is in teaching, such as embryology, we learn about congenital abnormalities of anatomical development. It is usually only in lecturers representing pathology that we see disabled bodies. This otherises disabled people to the group of medical students, of which some may be disabled. If the only representation of disability we see is associated with pathology, it is may be possible that students develop an implicit bias to negatively react when faced with a disabled patient, because this is the way our education is framed. To combat this, we should be including representations of differently abled bodies within teaching where the focus is not on their disability. Disability is not the only feature of an individual, and therefore it shouldn’t be the only representation of these individuals in our teaching.
The same goes for ethnicity. In an effort to increase the diversity of textbook images, distributors pepper-in imagery with darker skin tones. In some cases, these images are obviously different, with different lighting and quality. This could indicate that diversity is something included to appease rather than because there is an actual change at the level of the manufacturers. In this case, skin tone diversity is an add-on. While an add-on is better than nothing, it still goes to show that these skin tones are different to the images that came before them.
Overall, it seems impossible to promote inclusive changes without some degree of othering, but we can go some of the way to promote inclusivity by making positive changes.
References:
Cambridge Dictionary, ‘Otherize’, available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/otherize (Accessed 09/06/2023).
Very Well Mind, ‘What is Othering?’, available at: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-othering-5084425 (Accessed 09/06/2023).
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