Medical and Health Humanities: Literary and Cultural Contestations

Sourit Bhattacharya Announcement
Subject Fields
Cultural History / Studies, Environmental History / Studies, Literature, Race / Ethnic Studies, Humanities

Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry Vol 8, Issue 1 (May-June 2022)

Call for Papers

Medical and Health Humanities: Literary and Cultural Contestations

 

In the last decades, medical and health humanities have emerged as key interdisciplinary fields that have asked to recognise human and nonhuman illnesses, psychological issues, health debacles, disabilities, and recuperations as major foundations upon which the archetypal impulse within literature and art stands, i.e., telling tales. Many societies consider healing through talking and sharing of life narratives as fundamental to medical treatment (as Fanon famously wrote in The Wretched of the Earth). In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic which saw major health debacles including in the most socio-economically advanced societies, it was stories and videos of suffering, pain, help, and solidarity, of clapping, singing, and working together, and of standing strong with health workers, doctors, delivery workers, and subjects/victims that stitched a vulnerable global society together and redeemed hope in humanity and internationalism. In this issue, we would like to engage with narratives (literary and audio-visual) and literary archives as vital for the fields of medical and health humanities. Literature is rightfully seen as an archive of health discourses and narrative cultures often impact health policy-making (e.g., R. Fadlallah, 2019).   

With the neo-historicist currency of literature as archive, we have seen a major consolidation of work in medical and health humanities that engage with the literary archive for documentation and examination of medical culture and health discourse. In this issue, we invite papers that deal with the cultural network that connects literature with questions in medicine, mental health, public health policies and so on.  How does literature represent medical and health discourses? How does history of health and medicine in turn get inflected by literary culture? With developments in fields like narrative medicine, there has been a serious interpenetration of literature and medicine as creative acts. Literary pedagogy has received a good deal of acceptability within medicine and health while literary scholars have become attentive to health questions, themes of health crisis and medical tropes in literature. We invite articles that dwell on this reciprocal relation between literature on the one hand and health and/or medicine on the other.

 

Topics may include but are not limited to:

Medical Care

Mental Health

Literature and Medical History

Literature and Psychoanalysis

Trauma Studies

Clinical Communication

Medical Ethics

Narrative and Graphic Medicine

Medical Theatre

Literature and Symptomatology

Health Policy and Literature

Health History and the Literary

Please send in your full papers (within 7,000 words, including notes and references, and excluding abstract in 250 words, 3-5 keywords, bio in 150 words) to sanglapthejournal@gmail.com by Jan 15 2022.

We follow MLA 7th edition: in-text citation with endnotes and an alphabetical WC list at the end.

We will get back to you after the peer-review by March 15, 2022. The issue will be published in May-June 2022.

Contact Information

Dr Sourit Bhattacharya

University of Glagsow

Co-editor, Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry

 

Contact Email
sanglapthejournal@gmail.com