This VIRTUAL panel invites papers on “Narrative Medicine and Community Empowerment in Asian and Arab Graphic Narratives” for NeMLA 58th Annual Convention to be held on March 6-9, 2027.

“Recent scholarship on increasing global conflicts and ensuing health crises urgently demands an intercultural and interdisciplinary re-inscription of the the intersection of medical humanities with arts and cultures.  Such growing interest evinces how artistic and cultural forms reshape the diagnosis of traumas and pathologies and propel new forms of narrative engagement that fosters deeper connections, communal care, and collective empowerment” (Atieh 2026). As a pertinent example, graphic and narrative medicine “diverts from the standardized language of established medicine discourse and clinical frameworks whose limitation eclipses” (Atieh 2026) the “collective experience” and “mutual recognition” (Charon et al., 2016) of pathologies, whether psychological, physical, social, cultural, or ecological.

Graphic narratives are “exceptionally committed to the reconceptualization of accessibility and care as communal practices that depart from individualized framings of clinical guidance or neutralized or centralized resilience. In particular, the implementation of visual narration moves beyond the abstraction or exclusive rhetoric of clinical diagnosis to develop the aesthetics of somatic-experiential embodiment that aligns with a decentralized experience” (Atieh 2026)

Graphic medicine then “corroborates a multimodal intervention in clinical medicine narrative that anchors categorization and measurement as standardized indicators for the diagnosis of illness or its remission. Ultimately, graphic narration unsettles the opacity of biomedical discourse and its exclusive language, and reclaims an experiential or relational language that fosters deeper connections, promotes care, and advances responsibility toward whole and multispecies communities” (Atieh 2026).  

In this regard, we invite papers that particularly address the perspectives of Asian and Arab graphic narratives on “decentering healthcare discourse and transferring authority to embodied and collective experiences of pathology” (Atieh 2026).  The invited papers may illustrate how the shared experiences that underpin Asian and Arab graphic medicine mobilize an inclusive healthcare culture that advocates the agency of decentralized access and collective production of knowledge, and contribute to future formation.

Possible topics can include, but are not limited to:

- Breaking collective stigma and silence around pathology

- Promoting affinities around pathology

- Posthuman graphic narration and multispecies cooperation and survival

- Graphic narration and multilingual accessibility

- Graphic narratives on ecological precarity and possibility

- Comics and climate change traumas

- Graphic narratives and war traumas

- Graphic access and medical education

- Empathy Building

-Clinicians/caregivers and patients’ solidarity

-Graphic narration and remission societies

- Visual storytelling and health literacy

- Recuperating patients’ voices as story-tellers and story-listeners

- Visibility and inclusion of migrant storytelling of trauma

-Solarpunk graphic narratives

Interested individuals are asked to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words (excluding abstract title) and a 100-word mini-biography.  Submissions will only be accepted through the CFP address https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22530

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2026; Modality: Remote only

Panel Chair: Majda R. Atieh;  Sultan Qaboos University