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Critical Geographic Engagement with Health and Medical Humanities: A Cross Disciplinary Conversation

Sessions - Calls for Participants


Critical Geographic Engagement with Health and Medical Humanities: A Cross Disciplinary Conversation

Sarah de Leeuw and Ebru Ustundag

The uptake of arts and humanities across a variety of disciplines, including geography and health and medical sciences, is resulting in innovative pedagogies, research methods and methodologies, disciplinary configurations, and modes of practice and communications (see for instance de Leeuw et al 2017, 2018; Donovan and Ustundag 2017). Literatures and documentation about the risks of these creative returns, and their lack of critical and spatialized analysis, remain under theorized. This session has, therefore, two goals. First, we seek to expand critical understandings about medical and health humanities (and their concurrent creative returns): how do these disciplinary turns remain or entrench white colonial norms; are there ways medical and health humanities are complicit in neoliberal healthcare; what positionalities and subjectivities are erased in turns to the humanities?  Second, we are interested in what geography, in part as a humanities discipline, might add to medical and health humanities. How can the medical and health humanities be critically spatialized? How can the humanities inform places and spaces of health and medicine? Where and for whom are medical and health humanities unfolding? What kinds of dialogues and praxis are emerging between critical geographies and geo-humanities? We encourage a wide range of engagements in this special session, from creative interventions to more formal academic papers. If you’d like to discuss your ideas further, please be in touch. Or please send abstracts for consideration, to BOTH Ebru Ustundag and Sarah de Leeuw: eustundag@brocku.ca; deleeuws@unbc.ca

de Leeuw, S., Donovan, C., Schafenacker, N., Kearns, R., Neuwelt, P., Squier, S. M., ... & Atkinson, S. (2018). Geographies of Medical and Health Humanities: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation. GeoHumanities, 4(2), 285-334.

de Leeuw, S., Parkes, M. W., Morgan, V. S., Christensen, J., Lindsay, N., Mitchell‐Foster, K., & Russell Jozkow, J. (2017). Going unscripted: A call to critically engage storytelling methods and methodologies in geography and the medical‐health sciences. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 61(2), 152-164.

Donovan, C. & Ustundag, E. Graphic Narratives, Trauma and Social Justice. Studies in Social Justice, 11(2), 221-237.