Humanités et santé publique

Humanities and public health


Call for participants 

 

an exploratory workshop

Online, Monday 22 May 2023 (13.30-16.30 BST)

The Public Health Humanities network is holding its inaugural workshop online on Monday 22 May 2023, and we invite expressions of interest from researchers across the humanities who would like to participate.

Public health as a field of research, policy, and practice distinguishes itself from medicine by focusing on populations rather than individuals, often stressing the prevention of illness or injury rather than treatment and cure. Some of its typical modes of intervention – national testing and vaccination programmes; education and regulation to control behaviour; and calls for global co-operation – were brought to the fore during Covid-19, but its remit can extend far beyond the management of infectious disease outbreaks to include any and all issues that affect health.

This exploratory workshop responds to calls for the integration of a wider range of disciplinary perspectives within public health. Such initiatives have made a powerful case for the value of the humanities as a field of enquiry that develops understanding, provides evidence, enables evaluation, and generates better policy and practice. Public health declares itself to be highly multidisciplinary, but it still remains rare to see concepts, methods, and insights from the humanities integrated into public health research, publications, curricula, and practice.

As a first step towards addressing this, the workshop will bring together humanities researchers whose work engages with the issues, problems, or methods of public health, such as (and this is not an exhaustive list): 

• infectious disease and its management;
• national / collective responses to chronic illness, mental illness, disability;
• health systems and services;
• sanitation, town planning;
• health and safety at work;
• resource allocation;
• food purity; diet;
• addictive substances;
• regulating/providing abortion; reproductive health;
• planetary health; pollution;
• population surveillance / data collection;
• health promotion and education;
• statutory measures to improve health;
• balancing collective needs and individual rights;
• health inequalities; social determinants of health.

We welcome participants from any humanities discipline, including (but not limited to) legal studies, philosophy, literary studies, area studies, history, theology, classics, and the performing and visual arts. The aim of the workshop is to make connections between humanities researchers with interests relating to public health, and to identify shared questions or problems that future network events might address.

If you would like to participate please fill out this form by Friday 28 April 2023. We would like to know your research interests and career stage so that we can design the workshop’s content around its participants. You can propose a short (10 minute) paper or provocation that you would like to present, and/or propose questions, problems, or topics that you would like to discuss.

For any questions (and especially if in doubt about your disciplinary/thematic fit) please get in touch: janet.weston@lshtm.ac.uk.