Call for papers on medical humanities

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This conference aims to place Medical Humanities as a vibrant field of enquiry firmly onto the scholarly agenda in South Africa. To this end, it hopes to draw local scholars and practitioners working in this area into conversation with one another and with international colleagues, whose research is located within established medical humanities projects.

The Medical Humanities research group at WiSER invites abstracts of up to 500 words for papers that speak to its broad, inclusive theme of 'Body Knowledge'. It welcomes submissions from scholars and practitioners in a wide variety of disciplines, including the arts, literature, film, sociology, anthropology, history, medicine, philosophy, ethics and psychology.

In addition to panel sessions, it is planning a public event that will draw in a wider Johannesburg audience, as well as an art exhibition and film screening.

Suggested topics

20-minute scholarly papers might address, but are not limited to the following:

• Themes of embodiment and the body as a site of knowledge
  
• Body parts in culture, history, art and literature (including organs, skin, skulls, bones, tissues and blood)
  
• Metaphors and representations of health and illness
  
• Politics and power relations in medicine and health research
  
• Medical plurality: the coexistence of indigenous pre-colonial systems of healing, their modern shifting forms, their conversations with biomedicine, and the links between these and religious practices of the body
  
• Medicine as an art: as a fusion of practical scientific knowledge, tactics and performance Medical genres (case histories; medical memoir etc.)
  
• Theoretical paradigms through which the humanities 'reads' biomedicine

Abstracts of up to 500 words, together with a brief biography of 250 words, should be submitted to or . For more information, go to http://wiserweb.wits.ac.za/event/call-papers-body-knowledge-medicine-and-humanities-conversation.