TONGUES: Medical Humanities across linguistic and cultural frontiers
NNMHR Congress, 21-23 May 2025 (online)
Organisers: Benjamin Dalton, Alexander Wragge-Morley, and Stephanie Wright, Lancaster University

FINAL PROGRAMME
In recent years, the medical humanities have increasingly looked beyond western medical perspectives, and canonical western works of art and literature. The attempt to decentre western viewpoints has encouraged an openness to value systems from a wide range of cultural contexts, with alternative epistemic models and/or understandings of aesthetic value. This engagement with a wider range of cultural contexts both parallels and motivates efforts to make the medical humanities more global.

As a field, however, the medical humanities remains deeply anglophone both in the sense that it is for the most part carried out in English, and in the sense that it mostly relies on English-language scholarship. Meanwhile, the dominance of English as the language of scientific and medical research seems, if anything, to be growing even more pronounced. Yet the learning and acquisition of languages, as well as questions of translation, are central to meaningful epistemic and cultural pluralism. This is beginning to be recognised in the field, with scholars such as Steven Wilson putting forward a‘Manifesto for a Multilingual Medical Humanities’. This congress, invites reflections on the role of language, languages and translation – broadly construed – in medical humanities research. How might a greater attention to language, languages and translation change understandings of the medical humanities?

This workshop features an exciting array of papers, interventions and creative sessions, organised into 27 panels and sessions over three days. Papers will be presented in a range of languages, and automatic live translation will be provided. The workshop will take place online, using Microsoft Teams.
We are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers will be:

Professor Steven Wilson (Queens University Belfast), The “Language Worlds” of Health and Illness

Professor Nandini Bhattacharya (University of Houston), Medicine and Its Alternatives in the Global South

Sophie Guingouain (Manchester Metropolitan University), The obvious and not-so-obvious challenges when approaching medical translation