Complex health challenges in shifting socio-political contexts and times as well as rapid introductions of new medical technologies and practices demand in-depth analyses through interdisciplinary and disciplinary research strands and collaborations. The medical humanities and bioethics are crucial for interpreting and critically examining such challenges and developments, while also envisioning and working towards just, inclusive forms of care – in the present and for the future.
The conference provides a platform for exchange among researchers and encourages dialogue and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.
About the research fields
Medical and health humanities encompass the humanities, the interpretative social sciences, and research at the intersections of medicine, the humanities, and the social sciences. Some research in this field examine how sociocultural, ethical, and political aspects shape the development and use of medical technologies and practices, and how these, at the same time, raise sociocultural, ethical and political questions.
Central to this field are also studies of lived experiences of illness, health, embodiment, bodily and functional variation, risk, and wellbeing; the conditions for and meanings of narrativity in medicine and the medical humanities, and the conditions for knowledge production in medical humanities, medicine, and interdisciplinary health research, to mention but some examples.Ìý
Bioethics examines ethical questions and aspects of biomedicine, health care practices, old and new medical technology developments, health care policies, as but some examples. Further, scholars in bioethics critically examine how values, norms, structural inequalities and power relations shape ethical agency, responsibility, and the very practices of health care.