Tongues: The Edinburgh Companion to the Global Medical Humanities
Editors: Benjamin Dalton (Lancaster University), Steven Wilson (Queen’s University Belfast), Alex Wragge-Morley (Lancaster) and Stephanie Wright (Lancaster)
NEW Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2026
The deadline for proposals to participate in a new Edinburgh Companion to the Global Medical Humanities has been extended. Following on from the landmark Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, this handbook aims to catalyse the emerging field of global, multilingual work in the medical humanities. In its earliest form, the medical humanities sought to recognize the importance of literature and the arts to medical education and communication. In the following decades, scholars have recognized the entanglements that have existed between mind, body and environment – entanglements that call into question still prevalent distinctions between the sciences and the humanities, or between biology and culture (Whitehead et. al., 2016). Now, scholars and practitioners are increasingly bringing global cultures, epistemologies, and languages to bear on the medical humanities. At the same time, new approaches that both challenge and extend the concerns of the medical humanities are emerging in non-Anglophone and non-Western contexts.
This volume will give students and scholars a comprehensive guide to the dynamic and emerging field of global medical humanities – identified as such in recent editorials in Medical Humanities, The Polyphony and The Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities. This is a field that engages critically with the notion of global studies, recognizing that some of its iterations simply perpetuate the cultural, epistemic, and cultural hierarchies that have so long dominated the fields of health and the humanities. At once synthesizing and developing the insights of the field, this Edinburgh Companion will deploy the metaphor of the tongue to bring together, without homogenizing, a globally diverse range of contexts and interconnections. The tongue is at once an instrument of speech and a bodily organ that connects people to their cultures and environments. Indeed, through its communicative function and the pleasures and pains of taste, the tongue relates people to the language and foodways frequently taken to define cultures and societies. Moreover, the tongue is an interface for pleasure, intimacy and connection between bodies. And, of course, the tongue quite literally brings the world into the body through acts of taste and eating (Mol, 2021).
On the one hand, therefore, this Companion will deal with language, exploring the manifold ways in which translation between cultural and linguistic contexts can change our understandings and experiences of health. But at the same time, taking its cue from the corporeality of the tongue, it will explore how thought, perception and bodily reality may alter or be altered by movement in and between cultural and linguistic settings. This new handbook will thus serve as a crucial resource for anybody engaging with the trans-cultural and trans-linguistic aspects of health and wellbeing, from scholars and students to medical practitioners and carers.
The handbook will include a foreword by Angela Woods (Durham University), and the editors invite proposals for chapters on any topic relating to the global medical humanities, including but not restricted to:
- Translating the medical humanities across cultures (broadly conceived)
- Vernaculars of healthcare
- Non-verbal languages
- Global conceptions or expressions of pleasure, sexuality, taste, and/or pain
- Bodies, senses and environments
- Failures of language to communicate pain and/or bodily resistance to translation
My source: NNMHR list www.jiscmail.ac.uk/NNMHR
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