July Sunday Assembly

“Beyond Biology and Behavior”   

with Leslie Lewis, Academic Coordinator for Health and Wellness for the Urban Sutdies & Planning Program in UCSD

With our culture emphasizing individual success and failure, we tend to see health and illness as either outside our control (e.g. genetics) or entirely within our control (lifestyle “choices” and health behaviors like diet, exercise, and drug/alcohol use). But the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety, poverty, and mass incarceration, such oversimplistic attributions are not only inaccurate, they are deeply questionable.  

Rather, it is our collective social responsibility to develop policies and practices that create the conditions under which humans can flourish: health, justice, opportunity, and compassion. Dr. Leslie Lewis, Continuing Lecturer in the Urban Studies & Planning Program at UCSD, will give an overview of the ways that our social policy and the cities and towns around us shape our health, safety, sociality, and overall wellbeing.

Leslie R. Lewis, PhD, MPH, is a Continuing Lecturer and the Academic Coordinator for Health and Wellness for the Urban Studies & Planning Program, as well as PI/Co-Director of the new Life Course Scholar Program at UC San Diego. Her research interests include the social, structural, and environmental determinants of health, health inequalities, critical medical anthropology, and community-based participatory action research. She is the Founder and Director of the Community Hope Project, a nonprofit, all-volunteer organization that partners with communities locally and internationally to foster hope, justice, peace, education, sustainable living, and human flourishing. One important aim of her work is to facilitate connections that traverse constructed boundaries of race/ ethnicity, gender, class, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, age, and (dis)ability, and help translate these connections into collaborative action towards positive social change. Dr. Lewis was awarded the 2016 Eleanor Roosevelt College Outstanding Faculty Award for excellence in teaching, and the 2016 UC San Diego Outstanding Faculty in Sustainability Award.

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 Kids program is available for free at every Assembly.

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Stay after the assembly for coffee, snacks and to hang out with other assemblers

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Sunday Assembly San Diego is a new radically inclusive secular community that meets monthly to hear inspirational talks, connect for service projects, sing songs and generally celebrate life. Assemblies are free to attend, and everyone is welcome.

Our motto: Live Better. Help Often. Wonder More.