Medical humanities research showcase: the emergence of a new trans-disciplinary field in a time of precarity

ABSTRACT

This brief showcase of the medical humanities research networks and collaborations emerging at the University of Queensland explores the role this interdisciplinary field may play in post-pandemic Australasia. Suggesting that cultural, social and historical negotiations with medicine will become increasingly important as our societies recover from the COVID-19 crisis, the showcase presents case studies and perspectives from medical educators and practitioners, historians and experts in the fields of cultural studies and communication, on the topics of medical education, historical understandings of sexual health and clashes between public health and social justice movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical humanities
• COVID-19
• medical education
• history of sexuality
• #BlackLivesMatter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Notes from student feedback collected in December 2019.

2. Some works in this strand other than Kahan’s work include Foucault (1978); Halperin (2004); Rohy (2009); Katz (2014) and Sedgwick (2007).

3. Given that racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia have similar necropolitical implications, why ageism has managed to gain this type of medicalized validity over racism or sexism is a separate, highly important question altogether: see Mbembe (2019).

4. For example, those who have a negative attitude towards ageing have a slower recovery rate from disability and are less integrated in social networks: Levy et al. (2012); Vitman, Iecovich, and Alfasi (2014).

5. The nature of the systematic review thus echoes the methods of the history of medicine and science, except done for a specifically clinical purpose. For more on the history of the systematic review and particularly in relation to Cochrane and clinical practice, see Starr et al. (2009).

6. For a good overview of contemporary conceptualizations of ageism, see Ayalon, Tesch-Römer (2018).

7. Chang (2020): The same review also notes that interest in systematic approaches to ageism have in fact decreased since 2010.

8. Notably, the situation is very different in the field of critical gerontology, where there is a strong focus on dismantling systems of oppression rather than ‘vaccinating’ individual people to become more resilient against the threat of infection by ageism. See for example: Katz (2019); Kastenbaum, Cole, and Jakobi (1992); Estes (2001); Minkler and Estes (1999).

9. Much like Foucault (1978), Katz (2014), and Halperin (2012) did with sexuality; and Cryle and Stephens (2017) did with normality.

10. One of the very first studies that followed Butler’s article was Palmore and Manton (1973). It is also no coincidence that one of the foremost activist groups against ageism in late-twentieth century America were the Grey Panthers led by Maggie Kuhn, an older woman, whose name echoes the Black Panther Party, a radical black activist group: see Sanjek (2012).

11. Whether this conceptualization survives engagement with critical race theory and feminist theory is a topic for another essay altogether.

12. The QUEX Institute is a collaborative initiative between the University of Exeter (UK) and the University of Queensland (Australia).

13. Subsequent citations refer to the 1906 English translation of Psychopathia Sexualis: Krafft-Ebing (1906).

14. It’s worth noting that the urge to compare Australia’s and the US’s context doesn’t happen when focussing on the public health order. In Australia, the risk of community transmission is low, and there have not been upticks in transmission correlating to relaxed restrictions in recent weeks (O’Brien 2020). In the United States, restrictions are being relaxed on a state-by-state basis, even as 21 states continue to record increasing new diagnoses (Mervosh et al. 2020). Rates of infection are markedly higher in the US – at June 2, the US had recorded 5500 cases per million population, compared to Australia’s 280 per million (Creagh 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karin Sellberg

Karin Sellberg is a lecturer in Humanities at the University of Queensland. She specializes in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century feminist fiction, medical history, and theories of gender, sexuality and embodiment. She has published extensively on points of convergence between fiction, medical humanities and new materialist feminist theory. Her many publications include two edited collections, Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (London: Ashgate, 2015) and Gender & Time (New York: Cengage Macmillan, 2018) and four journal special issues, ‘Somatechnics of Movement’ (Somatechnics, 4:1, 2014), ‘Bodily Fluids’ (InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies, 9, 2015), ‘Quantum Possibilities: The Work of Karen Barad’ (Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 30, 2016), ‘The Somatechnics of Life and Death’ (Australian Feminist Studies, 32:87, 2019).

Elizabeth Stephens

Elizabeth Stephens is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. She is the author of three monographs: Normality: A Critical Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2017), co-authored with Peter Cryle; Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool University Press 2011), and Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet’s Fiction (Palgrave 2009). Her Future Fellowship examines practices of experimentation as a site of collaboration between the arts and sciences, from the nineteenth-century scientific laboratory to contemporary experimental art.

Anna Efstathiadou

Dr Anna Efstathiadou is a modern Greek language tutor and cultural historian, specializing in war propaganda posters and photographs and the ways these images are archived and curated in institutions in Australia and Greece. As the Liaison Officer for the Hellenic Photographic Society in Australia, Anna organizes and coordinates numerous photographic exhibitions, promoting Greek culture to the Australian audience. Her recent research on medical humanities, focuses on the interface of arts and humanities in the teaching of medical students.

Suja Pillai

Dr Suja Pillai is a Lecturer in Pathology and an Early Career Researcher in School of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Queensland. Suja’s exceptional teaching has been recognized through multiple teaching awards notably the John Pearn Medallion and the Higher Education Academy Fellowship. Suja’s research in medical education is in the field of online education, assessments, innovative technologies, and integrated learning in pathology along with disciplinary research in molecular pathology and cancer genetics.

Kazuki Yamada

Kazuki Yamada is a PhD Candidate at the QUEX Institute of Global Sustainability and Wellbeing, a joint partnership between the University of Exeter (UK) and the University of Queensland (Australia). He is primarily interested in using medical humanities methods in dialogue with contemporary public health perspectives to help establish a more capacious and equitable approach to age and ageing, particularly in relation to sexuality. He is a member of the Wellcome Trust funded Rethinking Sexology project and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at Exeter, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Queensland. He has a background in social gerontology and biomedical science.

Beck Wise

Beck Wise is Lecturer in Professional Writing at the University of Queensland. Her research is at the intersection of technical communication, medical rhetoric and feminist studies, investigating how science is used in public debates about social justice. Beck’s work has also appeared in Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, and Research in Online Literacy Education.