“Conversations like this are important to make the complexity of medical knowledge and information visible, and to create discussion in the field. Not least the consequent effects of this knowledge.”
The two editors of the anthology Medical Humanities and Movement of Knowledge participated in the discussions: Kristoffer Hanson, senior lecturer in the Department of Social Work, Malmö University, and Rachel Irwin, researcher in the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University.
“I believe that it’s also important for us to reach out to the general public, to the healthcare system, and to people who work with public health. One part of this is to consider the content of our communication, and another is the language we can use”, Rachel Irwin pointed out.
Other participants in the discussion were Jenny Gleisner, assistant professor in the Department of Thematic Studies and CMHB; Hannah Grankvist, assistant professor in the Department of Thematic Studies and CMHB; and Maria Björkman, senior lecturer in the Department of Culture and Society and CMHB, all at Linköping University.
Work must continue
The seminar illuminated several perspectives and ideas related to challenges that arise when knowledge moves between patients, caregivers and society. It also highlighted the importance of being aware of these challenges relative to the fact that the medical humanities are part of a dynamic field that is developing in several ways.
“Questions about knowledge and questions that deal with the epistemological dimensions of interdisciplinary research are topics that we must unceasingly analyse and discuss. No matter whether we work within the medical humanities, or the medical humanities that focus on the social sciences, or in projects in which researchers from biomedicine and the medicine humanities work closely together”, Kristin Zeiler concludes.
The webinar was held during April 2021, and was attended by around 20 participants from institutions of higher education in Sweden.
