Wits University To Hold International Conference on Medical Humanities

Medical Humanities Conference

The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) presents the first ever Medical Humanities Conference to be held in southern Africa from Monday, 2 September 2013 to Wednesday, 4 September 2013 at the Wits School of Public Health on the Parktown Education Campus.

More than 100 researchers in various disciplines - including the arts, literature, film, sociology, anthropology, history, medicine, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - from Wits University, the University of Cape Town and various international institutions will be attending the three-day conference themed Body Knowledge: Medicine and the Humanities in Conversation. Ground-breaking work will be done at the conference with the aim of establishing the first ever Medical Humanities research centre in Africa.

Click here for all the conference details and programme.

Julie Livingston, Professor of History at Rutgers, New Jersey will open the conference on Monday, 2 September 2013 at 09:00 with a keynote address entitled Figuring the tumour: photography, self, and cancer. View here profile here

The conference will also consist of roundtable discussions on topics such as: the reverberations of the HIV epidemic; medical pedagogy; and medicine and mining.

Panel sessions include papers focused through topics such as: embodiment and the body as a site of knowledge; body parts in culture, history, art and literature; metaphors and representations of health and illness; politics and power relations in medicine and health research; medical plurality; medicine as a fusion of practical scientific knowledge, tactics and performance; medical genres; theoretical paradigms through which the humanities ‘reads’ biomedicine; and the social life of clinical trials.

According to Dr Catherine Burns, lead conference organiser and researcher at WiSER, researchers are extremely excited about the research possibilities a Medical Humanities research centre can add to the South African academic research pool.

BACKGROUND TO MEDICAL HUMANITIES:

The field of Medical Humanities is well established in countries such as the USA and the UK, where considerable institutional energy and resources are invested in facilitating conversation and research between Medical Schools and disciplines in the Humanities.