The Future(s) of Medical Humanities is a special series produced and hosted by Ends of Knowledge collaborators Mona Baie, Swati Joshi, and Annabelle Olsson.

What does the future of the medical humanities look like to YOU? And what are the obstacles you encounter in shaping that future? In a report commissioned by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, Sarah McLusky (2022) states that one of the main challenges medical humanities researchers are facing is ''to feel isolated lacking like-minded peers''. With this mini-series we want to open a networking and discussion space for anyone working or interested in the medical and health humanities, but particularly so PhD students and early career researchers from across the globe. We hope to lay grounds for a fruitful conversation about the present state of our field, and our hopes and visions for its (multiple) future(s). We encourage people from non-anglophone countries, and countries where medical humanities as an (institutionalised) field is barely existent or just emerging, to participate and express ideas and concerns.

——

Identifying Barriers

Chaired by Mona Baie, Swati Joshi, and Annabelle Olsson.

The second session of Future(s) of the Medical Humanities series centres on barriers to medical humanities research in both national and transnational contexts. These barriers appear in various forms: lack of organised networks, barriers of language and time zones, financial crunch, and much more. Moreover, a lot of non-Anglophone scholarship remains untranslated, making it difficult for non-native speakers to gain access to and/or interpret it. Our session aims to provide a platform where Anglophone and non-Anglophone researchers of medical and health humanities can brainstorm issues of global collective collaboration and perhaps discover similar struggles.

Group discussions might revolve around questions such as:

•         What are the barriers (institutional, financial, political, ideological…) to medical and health humanities research as perceived in different contexts, different institutions, and different countries? How can we research, communicate, and address such barriers?

Suggested reading:

McLusky, S. (2022). Overcoming barriers to progress in medical humanities research. Report commissioned by the IMH at Durham University, UK.

Event image credit: Photo by Krzysztof Hepner on Unsplash.