Programme
Registration
Attendance to this two-day conference, including coffee breaks and lunches, is free of charge. There is the possibility of attending the conference in-person and virtually.
Registration to the conference has been closed.
The Polyphony's 'Takeover'
We are delighted to collaborate with Multilingual MedHums at The Polyphony.
The inaugural piece, 'Medical Humanities' Translational Core: Remodelling the Field', was cowritten by Marta Arnaldi and Charles Forsdick.
The collection of all the essays linked to this conference can be found here.
With a special thank-you to associate editor Jordan McCollough and to the contributors.
A Multimedia Podcast Series
In collaboration with Oxford University's Educational Media Services, we have created a series of videos presenting the ideas at the core of this project and/or capturing some of the conference's key moments. These include roudtables, key notes as well as a collaborative project with, and visit to, the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
Please access the recordings here.
Call for Papers
This conference explores the interzone between translation studies and medical humanities by bringing together students, researchers, and professionals in these and adjacent areas.
The need for this conference stems from the realisation that the visions and methods of translation studies and translation theory have up to now remained largely overlooked, if not altogether ignored, in critical medical humanities (Whitehead et. al. 2016) and health humanities alike (Crawford, Brown, and Charise 2020).
This lack of attention is particularly surprising given these fields’ inclusive, activist, applied, and culturally diverse agendas. Similarly, an unrecognised yet implicit division between the medical – as in individual and/or societal health – and the ecological – as in planetary, non-human health – has facilitated the evolution of medical humanities and environmental humanities along parallel lines that have only rarely intersected (e.g., Bleakley 2019).
Even though a translational understanding of health and disease has been evoked (e.g., Kristeva et al. 2018), a systematic appraisal of the contribution of translation studies and translation theory to the fields of medical and health humanities is overdue.
We welcome 20-minute contributions that creatively and differentially address and/or challenge this gap by exploring the interfaces between medical humanities and translation.
In an attempt to mobilise ideas of health and disease across space and time, we invite different stakeholders to use translation, broadly construed, as a medium to explore the role of the arts, humanities and social sciences as ‘essential services’ for medicine and health care.
Simultaneously, in the spirit of reciprocity in cross-disciplinary research, we aspire to reappraise the significance of biomedical advancements in the shaping of our linguistic, cultural, and societal ecosystems.
Possible questions and/or lines of enquiry may include, but in no way are limited to, the following:
Language
- What counts as language when ideas of health and disease are formed, (mis)communicated, or challenged?
- To what extent can discourses of, and from, illness be treated as texts, inscriptions or signs, and what are the limitations of such understandings?
- What is the role of the non-verbal in medical communication? What languages do diverse-able bodies speak?
- How do we communicate with machines and robots in, and about, health and illness?
- How can local and indigenous languages be articulated in discourses about global and planetary health?
Culture
- How and why do/did concepts and experiences of health and illness move in space and time?
- What can we learn from the mutual interrogation of notions and methods from medical humanities and medical anthropology when addressing ideas, practices, and understandings of culture?
- Why, and with what consequences, have aesthetic, intellectualised and /or historicised notions of culture been dominant in medical humanities (e.g., historiography, literature, the history of literature)?
- What can translation studies offer to practices of decolonisation within, and across, healthcare systems (e.g., laboratories, hospitals, governments)? What different cultures of health and diverse-ability may emerge from such practices?
- How can a global, cosmological and/or inter-cultural medical humanities be developed?
- Can medical AI represent a cultural risk and how do modern cultures respond to it?
Power
- How and by whom is/was medical knowledge created?
- To what extent has the historical and cultural dominance of biomedical knowledge over other types of knowledge limited and/or undermined our understanding of health and disease?
- How does AI impact our ways of creating and interpreting medical knowledge across disciplines?
- How can notions of translation from the humanities and social sciences help us advocate for a biocultural epistemology of health and illness? Vice versa, how can medical theory and practice inform and enrich our ways of seeing and doing translation?
- How can we implement just and sustainable cultures of health and wellbeing on individual, societal and/or planetary levels?
Keynote speakers
- Mona Baker, Affiliate Professor, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, Oslo
- Charles Briggs, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
- Trish Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences, Oxford
Confirmed speakers include Charles Forsdick, James Barrow Professor of French, University of Liverpool; Eivind Engebretsen, Executive Chair and Co-Founder of the Faculty of Medicine's Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), University of Oslo, and Academic Chair of Global Health at the European University Alliance Circle U; Nicola Gardini, Profesor of Italian and Comparative Literature, University of Oxford; Banafshé Larijani, Director of the Centre for Therapeutic Innovation, University of Bath; Tawona Sithole, UNESCO artist-in-residence at the University of Glasgow, and Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts.
How to contribute
Please submit an abstracts (max. 250 words) and a short bio-bibliographical note (max. 100 words) by 30 June 2023. Selected papers will be considered for publication in a collected volume or as special issue of an academic journal.
Organisers
The conference is organised by Dr Marta Arnaldi and Prof John Ødemark, in collaboration with Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation.
With the contribution of
- Medical Humanities, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford
- Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
- Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
- The Polyphony, Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University
Funded by
Bodies in Translation: Science, Knowledge and Sustainability in Cultural Translation, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, and The Research Council of Norway.
Contact and information
For further information, please be in touch with Dr Marta Arnaldi at marta.arnaldi@ikos.uio.no.