Who gets sick, who gets better, and why?

The biological mechanisms of medical science and the quantitative sciences of public health only get us partway to the answers to these fundamental questions.  Key aspects of our understanding of health and illness are only answerable through analyses that draw from the methods of humanities and social sciences—including ethnography, history, philosophy, and sociology—to help understand the social context of illness and health outside of the ordered environment of the hospital, clinic, and laboratory. The Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine is an interdisciplinary teaching and research unit that bridges the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences across the campuses of Johns Hopkins University to foster innovative interdisciplinary scholarship with maximum impact, and to train undergraduates, graduate students, and health professionals with skills to apply critical social analysis to the study of health and disease.

The Center’s current programs investigate: Medicine, Science, and Humanities; Critical Global Health Studies; Reproduction, Health, and Society; Technology, Data, and Health; Race, Racism, and Health; Social Medicine in Medical Education; and Arts, Humanities, and Health.

Together, the fields of social medicine and medical humanities and arts help health care professionals develop acumen in addressing nuance, contradiction and uncertainty in health care settings and in broader society.  


Events

Critical Global Health Studies / Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society / Medicine, Science, & Humanities / Race, Racism, & Health
All Day
November 30

**2024 Workshop and Special Issue: Call for Proposals**

Call for paper proposals for an international workshop on child health history hosted at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, on June 21-22, 2024. There is support available for travel and lodging. The workshop is sponsored by: The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the University of Fribourg

In bringing together junior and senior scholars working on issues surrounding children’s health and healthcare, the workshop aims at developing a series of articles for a special issue journal focusing on child health and children’s experiences of health and illness from a historical perspective. Though the field of children’s history has grown over the past thirty years, it deserves more attention from historians of medicine and public health. Therefore, the workshop aims to underscore the importance of child health as a field of research and point to its potential for historical and historiographical interventions in the history of medicine and public health. In addition to historians, we encourage paper proposals from scholars working at the intersections of histories of children’s health, disability studies, non-western areas of study, healthcare disparities, health policy, sociology, anthropology, or other related fields.  We especially encourage submissions from scholars whose work focuses on child health in low- and middle-income non-Western countries. Applicants must be prepared to submit a full working draft of their paper prior to the meeting. The workshop will be led by Jason Chernesky (Johns Hopkins University; jcherne2@jhmi.edu),  Janet Golden (Rutgers University; jgolden@camden.rutgers.edu), and Felix Rietmann (University of Fribourg; felix.rietmann@unifr.ch).

Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and a brief CV here. The deadline for submission is Friday, November 30, 2023. All questions can be addressed to Jason M. Chernesky: jcherne2@jhmi.edu

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