CALL FOR PAPERS: FEMINIST HEALTH HUMANITIES

In 2022, the Journal of Medical Humanities announced its intention to re-focus its content on the nascent subject of health humanities, and in 2023, NYU Press published Keywords for Health Humanities, collectively signaling a change in disciplinary trajectory to the medical humanities community. The field’s re-configuration of nomenclature, which also includes critical medical humanities and narrative medicine, reflects its evolution and expansion according to the impetuses of inclusivity and accessibility. “Health,” as Sari Altschuler, Jonathan M. Metzl, and Priscilla Wald note in the introduction to Keywords, “is a site in which the social and global inequities of the world are writ large.” Health allows us a wider lens through which to approach lived experience and affords us the ability to draw on a fuller range of theoretical frames and nuanced interpretations as we attend to social justice.

In this issue of the Journal of Integrative and Innovative Humanities, we are soliciting articles that broadly address feminist health humanities. Feminism challenges oppression and bias, calls for intersectional analysis, and tests epistemological formations. We are curious about what feminism’s intellectual tradition and critical approaches bring to the health humanities and how feminist methodologies challenge or change medical practices or knowledge.

A non-exhaustive list of topics manuscripts might address includes:

• How could healthcare change when informed by a justice-oriented or feminist lens, particularly when women’s reproductive healthcare is often a political site of resistance and strife? 

• How can the health humanities inform or reflect approaches from other feminist approaches such as critical race theory, disability studies, madness studies, etc.?

• How does feminist data science work towards closing the gender data gap (in medicine, the sciences, and other disciplines)?

• What do under-studied narratives – from patients, medical practitioners, encounters between Eastern and Western medicines, etc. – bring to our understanding of the health humanities?

• Can we find feminism in our historical approaches and encounters to the health humanities, which have informed our contemporary understanding of the field?

• How do body technologies, medical procedures, or pharmaceuticals shape our encounters with health, the body, the mind, and gender? 

Submission guidelines

Contributions that adhere to the Journal of Integrative and Innovative Humanities’ general aims and scope will be considered. Authors who wish to contribute to the upcoming issue should upload their manuscripts at the journal’s webpage no later than January 15, 2024. The journal does not have a strict word limit, but we recommend manuscripts be in the range of 5000-7000 words, excluding footnotes and references. The manuscript must include an abstract no longer than 150 words. References must follow APA style. 

The Journal of Integrative and Innovative Humanities is an academic peer-reviewed journal that“…aims to promote the importance of interdisciplinary studies and the coalescence between humanities and other areas such as science – be it natural-, social-, or applied science, economics, and business administration. The journal publishes interdisciplinary papers, bridging the gap between humanities and other disciplines, and emphasizing the critical role of humanities in any fields of study’s discussion and innovation.”

Inquiries are welcome. Please write: Nicole Infanta Keller, nicole.keller@cmu.ac.th or Laura Hartmann-Villalta, lhartm13@jhu.edu