Generate: Prompting the New in the Medical and Health Humanities 

An online symposium organised by the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Health Hub  

Monday 11th and Tuesday 12th May 2026 

 

Call for Papers 

We invite proposals for papers, panels, and creative/critical interventions for an online symposium ‘Generate: Prompting the New in the Medical and Health Humanities’. The symposium seeks to explore how notions of generation—creative, biological, technological, political, and epistemic—are reshaping the medical humanities at a moment of rapid transformation in health, medicine, and society. 

To generate is to bring forth new forms of knowledge, new bodies, new relations, new futures. In clinical practice, research cultures and patient experience, the term ‘generation’ evokes a wide range of processes, from biological reproduction to the emergence of life-sustaining technologies, generational identities and disparities, the production of narratives that anchor meaning in illness and care, ways of thinking and living beyond normative assumptions about bodies and health, and AI-mediated practices that increasingly shape our understandings of health and care. 

This conference asks: 

  • What does it mean to generate—or to be generated—within medical practice, discourse, or culture? 
  • How have histories of medicine shaped the conditions for what is considered generative, innovative, or possible today? 
  • How do new technologies prompt new ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic understandings or forms? 
  • What responsibilities arise as medical humanities engages with practices that create, imagine, or simulate the ‘new’? 

We welcome papers and creative interventions that examine how generative processes—material, metaphorical, or methodological—unsettle established narratives and open emergent modes of inquiry in the medical humanities. 

Topics may include but are not limited to: 

  • Histories and futures of innovation in medicine: invention, discovery, and the politics of the ‘new’ 
  • Generational identities and inheritances in health and healthcare 

 

  • Regeneration: the place of the medical humanities in regenerative medicine and regenerative approaches to the environment, such as ‘rewilding’ 
  • Degeneration: discourses of decline in healthcare systems and human societies  
  • Ethical and philosophical inquiries into creation, novelty, intervention, or transformation 
  • Narratives of reproduction, fertility, birthing and intergenerational care 
  • Disability, chronic illness, and the generative potential of lived experience 
  • AI and machine learning in clinical and cultural contexts 
  • Generative metaphors and epistemologies in discourses and representations of health 
  • Creative, artistic, or experimental methods that generate alternative forms of knowledge 
  • The imaginative generation of future health worlds and spaces 
  • The role of the medical humanities in generating public engagement, activism, or policy 

 

We invite submissions for: 

  • Individual Papers (10 minutes) 
  • Panels (3 x 10-minute papers) 
  • Creative/Artistic or Multimedia Contributions (readings, visual media, etc.) 
  • Flash workshops (30 minutes) 

 

Please submit an abstract of 200 words, with a brief biographical note (100 words), to fhasshealthhub@lancaster.ac.uk  by Friday 20th March 2026.  

Panel proposals should include a 100-word overview of the session and individual abstracts and bios for each participant. 

Applicants will be notified of acceptance by Friday 10th April 2026. 

 

Organizing Committee: 

Professor Charlotte Baker, Languages and Global Cultures, School of Global Affairs 

Dr Ben Dalton, Languages and Global Cultures, School of Global Affairs 

Dr Sara Wasson, English, School of Arts  

Dr Alex Wragge-Morley, History, School of Global Affairs 

Dr Steph Wright, History, School of Global Affairs 

Postgraduate reps: Finty Royle and Darcy McDonnell, MA Global Medical and Health Humanities