The Occupational Health Clinical Centers are pleased to sponsor Invisible suffering: The reality of women’s health and safety on the job. A presentation by Karen Messing, Author of  Pain and Prejudice: What Science Can Learn about Work from the People Who Do It.

With thirty-five years of health and safety research experience, Dr. Karen Messing says the quality and impact of research is far improved when you involve and talk to workers.  Messing, professor emeritus of ergonomics at the Université du Québec à Montréal, will appear at ArtRage where she will discuss her latest book. This event is part of Workers’ Memorial Week activities in Syracuse and the ArtRage exhibit, AT ALL COSTS: Photographs of American Workers by Earl Dotter.

Through some personal accounts, Messing’s latest book explains how dedicated academic, government and labor partnerships allowed her to delve into the real concerns and suffering of workers, especially low-paid workers. Support for this research is dwindling warns Messing describing it as an, “empathy gap—an inability or unwillingness among scientists or decision-makers to put themselves in the workers’ position.”

Karen Messing is an award-winning and internationally recognized expert on occupational health. She is the author of more than 130 peer-reviewed scientific articles and the book One-eyed Science: Occupational Health and Working Women . She is also the editor of Integrating Gender in Ergonomic Analysis , which has been translated into six languages.  Messing is also co-founder of CINBIOSE, which conducts interdisciplinary research and training on workplace and environmental health issues. With CINBIOSE researchers and union partners, she also co-founded L’invisible qui fait mal (the Invisible that hurts), which promotes research on women’s occupational health and safety issues.

For her outstanding and innovative approaches to ergonomic and occupational health research, Messing was the 2014 recipient of the William P. Yant Award from the American Industrial Hygiene Association.

Free to the Public

This exhibition was made possible, in part, by funding from the County of Onondaga, administered by CNY Arts.