Young Scholars in Medical Humanities Conference 2026
This is a preliminary program, it is being updated. Please note that the conference is on-site in Uppsala only.
Conference Program
5 November
9.30 Pre-conference workshop: Writing with the body: Creative Practice in the Critical Medical Humanities
This two-hour creative workshop will open our conference, inviting participants to explore their relationship to creativity and research within the Critical Medical Humanities. Led by poet and PhD Researcher Grace Brimacombe-Rand, we will explore how lived and embodied experience can guide new approaches to our research and support our development as emerging scholars. Taking an interdisciplinary theoretical approach, the session will utilise a range of scholarly approaches to writing with body and methods from contemporary literary texts. Participants will co-produce new directions for the field of Critical Medical Humanities, and have the opportunity to experiment with creative approaches to reinvigorate their own research.
Room: 22-1017
11.30 Lunch
Light lunch served outside Humanistiska teatern for all participants
13.00 Welcome address
Room: Humanistiska teatern
13.15 Keynote: The Work Ahead: Medical Humanities at Its Limits
by Angela Woods, professor of Medical Humanities, Durham University. Abstract TBA.
Room: Humanistiska teatern
14.15 Break
14.45 Parallel sessions 1
The Presentation of Medical Knowledge | Technologies of Care |
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This session examines how medical knowledge is produced, visualised, and contested through visual representation and literary form, highlighting how aesthetic and representational practices shape embodied experience and epistemic authority. | This session explores how medical technologies present, mediate, and reshape health knowledge and care, from data‑driven clinical interactions to AI systems and life‑sustaining devices in the home. |
16.00 Parallel sessions 2
What Remains Written: Documentation and the Ethics of Care | Re-thinking Practice |
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This session examines how medical records and archives shape care, memory, and ethical visibility, highlighting how documentation practices produce conditions for understanding, remembering, and representing patients and carers. | This session examines how professional identities, communication practices, and institutional structures shape contemporary healthcare, from interprofessional collaboration to transnational training and humanistic inquiry within clinical trials. |
17.00 Networking with snacks
Networking event outside Humanistiska teatern. Light snacks will be served.
18.30 Conference dinner (for presenters)
Separate information will be distributed to presenters at the conference
6 November
9.00 Parallel sessions 3
Knowledge Production and the Making of Medical Meaning | 9.00-10.30 (4 presentations) |
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This session examines how medical knowledge is produced, governed, and negotiated across social, cultural, and material contexts. Through analyses of community expertise, literary representations, moral epistemologies, and the politics of place, the presentations explore how medical meaning emerges through situated practices and contested frameworks. | This session explores how gendered bodies encounter medical systems, technologies, and forms of epistemic power. Through studies of medical violence, endometriosis, and at‑home vaginal microbiome testing, the presentations examine how gender shapes experiences of harm, recognition, and embodied self‑care. |
10.45 Parallel sessions 4
Narrating Illness: Representation and Lived Experience 10.45-12.15 (4 presentations) | Illness in Context: Cultural and Historical Understandings 10.45-12.15 (4 presentations) |
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This session explores narrative, aesthetic, and phenomenological approaches to illness, showing how stories, representations, and lived experience can generate new understandings. | This session examines how illness is shaped by cultural, historical, and political forces, highlighting how societies construct, contest, and govern experiences of disease. |
12.15 Lunch
Light lunch served outside Humanistiska teatern for all participants.
13.45 Parallel sessions 5
13.45-15.15 (4 presentations) | 13.45-15.15 (4 presentations) |
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This session examines how legal, political, and institutional structures shape healthcare practice, migration, and professional decision‑making across diverse global contexts. | This session explores new approaches to care, highlighting how movement, lived experience, and psychosocial perspectives can generate new understandings of health and caregiving. |
15.15 Break
15.30 Concluding remarks and summary of the conference
Room: Humanistiska teatern
Contact
Martina Wallberg, conference organizing commitee
Erika Sigvardsdotter, coordinator at the Centre for Medical Humanities
