Lecture Series: Introduction to the Health Humanities
Beschrijving
In Spring 2026, CHARM will present an evening lecture series titled Introduction to the Field of the Health Humanities, hosted at De Krook Library in Ghent. The series is designed to provide an accessible introduction to the rapidly expanding interdisciplinary fields of the Medical and Health Humanities. Each lecture will feature two guest experts from different disciplines within the Health humanities, encouraging a fruitful dialogue on a specific care and health-related topic. Through five thematic double sessions, the series will explore how diverse fields shed light on issues such as health, care, illness, ageing, disability, suffering and dying. All lectures will be delivered in English and recorded for wider dissemination.
Confirmed speaker duos will reflect on topics such as:
* the intersection of Geriatrics and the Humanities in reimagining person-centred care for the elderly;
* Palliative care and Literary Studies in conversations on sense-making practices at the end of life;
* the History of Medicine as a lens for understanding contemporary practices in Medicine;
* the fruitful intersection of Graphic Medicine and Medical Sociology in narrating and analysing lived experiences of health and illness;
* co-creative and participatory and arts-based methods in bridging Public Health and Cultural Community work.
By bringing together practitioners and scholars from medicine, the social sciences and the arts, this series highlights the Health Humanities’ richness, complexity and social urgency. It invites audiences to witness and participate in interdisciplinary thinking that broadens our understanding of illness, care, and humanity.
Programma
- 24/03: Prof. Em. Mirko Petrovic & Prof. Jürgen Pieters: Introduction: “Person-centred care and the human experience of ageing”
- 31/03: Prof. Maïté Verloigne & Bart De Nil : (preliminary title): “On Public Health and Culture; Co-Creation and Arts-based Community interventions”
- 21/04: TBA
- 28/04: Dr. Melissa Ceuterick & Octavia Roodt: “On Medical Sociology and Graphic Medicine”
- 05/05: Dr. Fleur Helewaut & Prof. Rina Knoeff: “On Medicine and the History of Medicine”
- 12/05: Prof. Kenneth Chambaere & Dr. Zoë Ghyselinck: “On Meaning-making and End-of-Life Care”
- 02/06: Closing event: Panel debate on ‘Ghent Health Humanities’, with Prof. Petra De Sutter, Dr. Dominique De Kokere and others
Opmerkingen
No prior knowledge needed
image: Gideon Kiefer, The most dramatic hand in art history
Partners
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Introduction: “Person-centred care and the human experience of ageing”
This dialogue – the first one in the series – brings together a physician (specialist in geriatrics) and a literary scholar to explore the possibilities of the broad interdisciplinary of health humanities and some of the issues that we need to keep in mind when we try to translate knowledge from one disciplinary field to the other. Starting from their respective professional backgrounds, they will first talk about humanistic care for older people in general and then move on to the potential of Shared Reading (SR) as a personalised and context-sensitive approach within health care. SR is an arts-based practice in which small groups engage with literary texts through communal reading and reflection. While it has often been studied within single, homogeneous populations, the interlocutors examine how SR unfolds across contrasting institutional environments such as psychiatric care, nursing homes, and hospital settings for adolescents and young adults living with chronic or life-threatening illness.
Their conversation challenges the assumption that SR produces uniform effects regardless of context. Instead, they highlight how reading experiences arise from the dynamic interplay between texts, readers, facilitation strategies, and the cultures of care that shape each setting. From this shared inquiry emerges a central question: how can SR be adapted in responsive, reflective ways without reducing participants to diagnostic labels or predefined social categories?
By considering both participants and caregivers, formal and informal, the physician and the literary scholar explore how more heterogeneous SR groups might foster less stigmatising interactions, deepen mutual understanding, and soften traditional boundaries between caregivers and care recipients. Their collaboration invites a reconsideration of what meaningful engagement in health care can look like, suggesting that literature, when read together attentively, may help cultivate more humane, relational, and personalised forms of care across diverse environments.
Inschrijven
“On Public Health and Culture; Co-Creation and Arts-based Community interventions”
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Inschrijven
TBA
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Inschrijven
“On Medical Sociology and Graphic Medicine”
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Inschrijven
“On Medicine and the History of Medicine”
tba
Inschrijven
“On Meaning-making and End-of-Life Care”
tba
Inschrijven
Closing event: Panel debate on ‘Ghent Health Humanities’, with Prof. Petra De Sutter, Dr. Dominique De Kokere and others
tba