Summer school Health inequalities: Approaches from the humanities
From June 20-24, the summer school “Health inequalities: Approaches from the humanities” takes place at the University of Groningen. This summer school has been designed for graduate students and researchers from the humanities and the health sciences.
Organizations like the WHO and medical journals increasingly call for changing vocabularies and strategies to deal with today’s health challenges. During the summer school we will explore how the humanities are essential in this current call for change. The module follows the new methodology of the critical medical humanities, which assumes that the humanities and health sciences are entangled and ask for non-reductionist and non-hierarchical forms of interdisciplinary cooperation.
The programme consists of five parts.
Part 1 will introduce students to the methodology of critical medical humanities as well as the summer school’s ‘regulative cycle’ and the related question of what the humanities can contribute to questions of health inequality.
Part 2 will discuss the significance of poverty in relation to health, especially given that despite the underlying understanding of the summer school that poverty is responsible for bad health, it is imperative to understand that for a long time in Western culture, poverty has been presented as irrelevant or even as healthy for body and soul.
Part 3 will focus on the politics of global health. Students will critically examine the structures of global health governance such as infectious disease and population politics, as well as policy discourses to understand underlying
cultural and political narratives and myths.
Part 4 will deal with the ways art practices and art consumption affect wellbeing and the differential access individuals have to participation in and ways of understanding the arts.
The summer school closes with communication in health settings, which is very heterogeneous in terms of goals, settings, modalities, and participant frameworks. We will discuss how research from the humanities can help to analyze different discourse on health and how outcomes from communication research can help to optimize health communication in different settings.
All information on “Health inequalities: Approaches from the humanities” is found here.
This week can be attended as a stand alone course, or as part of the five week summer school “Health inequalities & What to do about them?” organised by the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health (an institute that is part of the University of Groningen). This multidisciplinary summer school combines the expertise of various expertise centres in the field of health and is led by experts from six participating faculties: Behavioural and Social Sciences, Arts, Medical Sciences & Dentistry, Law, Theology & Religious, Economics & Business.
More information on the five week programme is found here.
