Symposium Creative-Critical Approaches to the Health Humanities

On Friday 9th May 2025 the symposium Creative-Critical Approaches to the Health Humanities is held in Perdu, Amsterdam

CALL FOR PAPERS The emerging field of ‘health humanities’ has been arguing for and highlighting the value of different and complementary perspectives on health, medicine and disability from fields ranging from literature and anthropology to sociology, philosophy and cultural analysis. Concurrently, there has been an increasing interest in approaching research as a creative practice and developing innovative ways of conducting and presenting academic work, a field termed ‘creative-critical writing’. This symposium aims to bring both fields together with the aim of exploring in what ways creative-critical approaches to research and/or writing can provide new ways of thinking about health, illness and care. Proposals are invited from (Re)MA and PhD students, as well as established researchers on this topic.

Open to: PhDs and (Re)MA students as well as early-career and established researchers; OSL members
have first access.

Credits: 1EC. NB: Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities.

Proposals for 20-minute presentations (ca. 300 words), together with a biographical note, should be sent to Hannah Van Hove (havhove@vub.be) by 10 March 2025. Creative-critical approaches to papers are welcomed.

Keynote speaker: Hanna Meretoja, is a literary scholar, narrative theorist, novelist, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory (University of Turku). Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018, Oxford University Press). She currently runs the research project ‘Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency’ (2023-2027, The Research Council of Finland). As a novelist, Meretoja has a unique lyrical voice that seamlessly threads cultural theory and philosophy into a poetic, ruptured narrative with an acute sense of lived experience.

Organisation: This symposium is one of the activities organised by the OSL-funded research incubator ‘Creative-Critical Approaches to the Health Humanities’ which brings together researchers working in the fields of literary studies, creative writing, disability studies, nursing and narrative medicine to form a transdisciplinary and interuniversity research group.

Core members: Sarah De Mul (Open Universiteit); Nadia de Vries (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis); Andries Hiskes (Universiteit voor Humanistiek en De Haagse Hogeschool); Hannah Van Hove (Vrije Universiteit Brussel); Mia You (Universiteit Utrecht and Sandberg Instituut).

For more information about this symposium, visit this website.