From Medical to Health Humanities: Evolving Interventions (NeMLA 2025 Roundtable)
The fields of medical and health humanities often aim to intervene in socially embedded systems of care and advance health justice. This roundtable explores ways to work toward that goal through pedagogy, research, and community partnership.
In recent years, 'medical humanities' has increasingly been shifted into the broader conceptual scope of 'health humanities.' Dynamic scholarship continues to be done under both interdisciplinary umbrellas, bringing humanistic approaches and epistemologies to bear on the discourses of medicine, biotechnology, and public health. A central underlying—sometimes explicit—aim of this work is to improve provider-patient communication; cultural competencies; and ethical, equitable treatment in contemporary systems of medicine, within a society that urgently needs to advance health justice on the national and global scale. Kairos thus infuses how the medical and health humanities strive to help healthcare evolve in theory, representation, training, and hands-on embodied practice.
This roundtable invites talks on specific humanistic interventions in health and medicine that you have created or are developing, whether in the context of a course or as an extension of community-engaged research. What texts, projects, and initiatives enable this field to contribute to a growing culture of health advocacy and activism in academia and beyond? What limitations in impact can medical/health humanities scholars face, perhaps due to the multidisciplinary nature of these enterprises and their reception by students, colleagues, or professionals from bioscience and social science backgrounds? What other critical spheres of influence are evolving through allied subfields that likewise offer a humanistic perspective on care, such as the history of medicine and the rhetoric of health and medicine? What collaborations exist or could be cultivated to relate scholarship in medical/health humanities to support for mental and physical wellness within our institutions and wider society?
Please submit short (250-350 word) abstracts for 5-10 minute talks at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP (or paste into browser cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP and search keywords 'From Medical') by September 30th, 2024. The roundtable format prioritizes the exchange of ideas, so participants should present brief 'overview' talks that will lead into our full-group discussion.
For more information, please contact Natalie Mera Ford at nford1@swarthmore.edu.
The 56th Annual NeMLA Convention, sponsored by La Salle University, will be held on March 6-9, 2025, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.