This seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada from February 26-March 1, 2026 invites explorations of the entanglements between health, disease, and the urban space in the 21st century as they are represented in literary and cultural texts from the Global South. Building on the well-established spatial turn in literary and cultural studies, the seminar will bring together the frameworks of health/medical humanities and literary urban studies as a productive site of dialogue to examine the variegated intersections of spatialities and diseases in contemporary cities, with an emphasis on urbanities of the Global South. The seminar is interested in the urban as a critical site for the experience, representation, and governance of health where questions of disease, care, and access converge. It is particularly vested in the politics of spatialised modes of care and its manifestations in material infrastructures, such as hospitals or clinics, and immaterial infrastructures such as networks of communal care or informal systems. The seminar will also foreground how access to healthcare and experiences of illness and ‘treatment’ are marked by social determinants such as gender, caste, class, race, religion, citizenship and migratory status—particularly in cities marked by overcrowding, informal labour structures and consequent precarity. It also welcomes engagements with speculative and dystopian imaginaries of urban health, environmental degradation, and bodily vulnerability. Through a focus on the Global South, this seminar aims to generate critical conversations around the lived realities and narrative representations of health in rapidly evolving and contested urban landscapes. We invite papers that investigate these intersections between health and the city through a range of literary and cultural forms, including traditional fictional forms as well as graphic narratives, film, visual art, and other media. Papers that undertake a comparative reading of texts from the Global North and Global South are also welcome. 

Topics of interest include but are not limited to representations of: 

• Perceptions of disease, illness, and infections
• Contagion, pandemics, and governance
• Spatial politics of biomedical care
• Infrastructures and architectures of care
• Waste, dirt and disease in the city
• Disease, touch, and caste
• Notions of cleanliness, pollution, and waste
• Urban ecologies, green cities, and notions of well-being
• Digital spaces and disease
• Isolation, loneliness, and mental illness in the city
• Segregation and spatialisation of care and containment
• Intersectional identities, access, and health

Scholars working in the areas of environmental humanities, health or medical humanities, urban studies, and other allied domains within literary and cultural studies are invited to contribute nuanced and critical readings on how health is experienced, imagined, and narrated in urban environments.

Proposals due through the ACLA portal by 2 October 2025. 

Seminar Conveners:

Shobha Elizabeth John, Antara Chatterjee (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India)