Decolonizing Dentistry to Centre Health Justice: Dismantling White Supremacy and Power from Oral Health
9 January - 19 February 2024
Biography
Eleanor Fleming (she/her/hers) is a Clinical Associate Professor of Dental Public Health and Assistant Dean for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry in West Baltimore, Maryland, USA. She was an inaugural National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education Academic Diversity Officer Fellow (2022-2023). Prior to her appointment at the University of Maryland, she was an Associate Professor of Dental Public Health and the Director of the Center for Educational Development and Support at Meharry MedicalCollege (2020-2021). She transitioned to academic dentistry after spending nine years as an epidemiologist where she investigated health inequities and informed public health practice.
Dr. Fleming’s research examines how dentistry as a clinical and academic practice and research enterprise can be antiracist. With an interdisciplinary lens, her works seeks to move dentistry beyond describing disparities to dissecting the impact that racism and oppression have on oral health. Her scientific contributions have been both theoretical and conceptual to name racism as a problem and specific in the effort to disrupt racism’s impact on oral health, especially in workforce pathways and academic dentistry. Her work has been published in the fields of dental education, epidemiology, and dental research.
Her work focuses on equity and justice in academic dentistry using antiracism to inform curricula and practices to support a diverse oral health workforce and advance health justice. She leads strategic efforts at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry and within professional organizations to advance health equityand diversity science.
As a subject matter expert, she co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Public Health Dentistry “Antiracism in Dental Public Health: Engaging Science, Education, Policy, and Practice” (2022). She has published and presented her work nationally and internationally.
Research Summary
Dr Fleming will be hosted by Dr Patricia Neville, Bristol Dental School. The collaboration addresses a central ethical, social and epistemological dilemma for dentistry-to recognise, challenge and dismantle the colonial power structures and tools of oppression that constitute dental knowledge and clinical practice, and to re-instate social justice into all aspects of the profession, oral health care systems and modes of delivery.
The overall aims of the visit are:
to incubate new, multidisciplinary ideas about the role of race, racism and coloniality in the dentistry, and
to identify strategies that can meaningfully address and intervene with the systems and biases that reinforce racial inequities and discrimination in oral healthcare.
The visit will allow Dr Fleming to familiarise herself with thedecolonisingdentistry movement in the UK and inform her of our school’sefforts to decolonise our dental curriculum. This will enable the bringing together of US and UK perspectives on decolonisingdental education and oral health care with a view to capitalising on progress already achieved in these emerging areas of enquiry as well as sharing and devising pedagogic and professional practices that champions anti-racist and inclusive practices.
Planned activities include: School-level talks and seminars on decolonising the curriculum and anti-racist and inclusive practice in oral healthcare. A university wide/open seminar on decolonising dentistry and (re)centring social justice intooral health care will be hosted in conjunctionwith the Centre for Black Humanities and the Black and Brown in Bioethics Network. Drs Fleming and Neville will also pursue several collaborative research grants, as well as writea book proposal,during the visit.
Dates, times and venues of Dr Fleming's lectures and seminars will be posted in due course, in the meantime please contact Dr Fleming's host for further information.
