TONGUES: Medical Humanities across linguistic and cultural frontiers
NNMHR Congress, 21-23 May 2025 (online)
Organisers: Benjamin Dalton, Alexander Wragge-Morley, and Stephanie Wright
In recent years, the medical humanities have increasingly looked beyond western medical perspectives, and canonical western works of art and literature. The attempt to decentre western viewpoints has encouraged an openness to value systems from a wide range of cultural contexts, with alternative epistemic models and/or understandings of aesthetic value. This engagement with a wider range of cultural contexts both parallels and motivates efforts to make the medical humanities more global.
As a field, however, the medical humanities remains deeply anglophone both in the sense that it is for the most part carried out in English, and in the sense that it mostly relies on English-language scholarship. Meanwhile, the dominance of English as the language of scientific and medical research seems, if anything, to be growing even more pronounced. Yet the learning and acquisition of languages, as well as questions of translation, are central to meaningful epistemic and cultural pluralism. This is beginning to be recognised in the field, with scholars such as Steven Wilson putting forward a ‘Manifesto for a Multilingual Medical Humanities’. This congress, invites reflections on the role of language, languages and translation – broadly construed – in medical humanities research. How might a greater attention to language, languages and translation change understandings of the medical humanities?
We invite proposals for individual papers, panels, work-in-progress sessions, and performances addressing questions of language and translation – in the broadest sense – in the medical humanities. Topics for exploration may include but are not limited to:
- Languages of medicine, healthcare, and corporeality
- Issues of translation and untranslatability in the medical humanities
- Linguistic and cultural barriers to medical care
- Visual and oral traditions of medical humanities
- Taste, touch and smell as language
- Medical humanities and the non-verbal
- Medical humanities, orality, and oral health
- Intersections of medical humanities, language and gender, race, sexuality, class, etc.
- Medical Humanities, the global, and global health
- Decolonial Medical Humanities
Proposals need not be limited to standard papers, but could also include sessions devoted to workshopping specific issues and problems, such as questions about how to translate terms/ideas/practices across linguistic and cultural divides. We also note that the remit of languages is very broad, and could include body language, sign language, evolutionary languages, and so-on.
Each individual paper or activity should last no more than 10-15 minutes. To apply, please submit a short (50-word max) biography and 250-word abstract to fasshealthhub@lancaster.ac.uk by no later than 31 December 2024. Informal enquiries can be directed to the same address. We encourage proposals for sessions to take place in any language. If your abstract or panel proposal is in a language other than English, French, Spanish, or German please also provide a translation for ease of the selection committee.