Call: Annual Meeting Panel on Resentment in Healthcare
Dear all,
The Steering Committee of the CHCI Health & Medical Humanities Network is very happy to share that we have been awarded an official panel session at the upcoming CHCI conference in Berlin (23-26 June, 2025). We would now like to invite you to submit abstracts to participate on an in-person panel that speaks to the conference theme of "Resentment and the Work of the Humanities." Please see the call below for details, and please feel free to circulate it to your colleagues! We will be grateful, also, for your recommendations of expert guests and people with recent writing on this subject, including scholars outside our Network.
Invitation for the CHCI Health & Medical Humanities Network Panel on Resentment in Healthcare: Deny, Delay, Defend
In late 2024, Luigi Mangione—a 26-year-old man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—sparked an unexpected international debate about frustrations and resentment that ordinary Americans citizens harboured towards what they view as an exploitative and ineffective for-profit system of health insurance. A recent statement issued by his own legal defence team acknowledged the ‘extraordinary volume of inquiries and outpouring of support’ shown by the general public towards the primary suspect of a murder that took place openly on the streets of New York City.
In this panel, we will open up the discussion to explore resentment as a global phenomenon to better understand the roots of anger and frustration that build up towards healthcare systems and providers around the world. We invite abstracts of up to 500 words that examine the various ways that resentment manifests both within systems of care and the lived experiences of illness, wellbeing, and seeking care. Please submit abstracts to Deadlines for submissions should be received by Friday 21 March, 2025. Please send abstracts to Arden Hegele (aah2155@columbia.edu) for collection; they will be reviewed by the Steering Committee.
Healthcare is a field that is not immune to emotionally charged settings, exhaustion, burnout, doubt, and cynicism. This panel invites discussions about how resentment manifests in the field as it is experienced by patients, healthcare professionals, carers, families, and communities. We aim to explore how we ethically pursue and undertake this research in critical health and medical humanities studies. Therefore, we offer a consideration of the following questions:
- How should we engage with experiences of ‘resentment’ from a standpoint of care?
- What responsibility do we have to acknowledge and appropriately frame the roots of resentment in the provision of care?
- How does resentment manifest across various communities towards healthcare professionals (policymakers, clinicians, carers, vaccines researchers etc.)?
- In what way is resentment reciprocated between people within co-dependent frameworks (ex. health professionals and patients, doctors and insurance providers, policy makers and government agencies, researchers and clinical trial participants?
- Can resentment be seen as a way to reclaim agency or autonomy or is it simply a manifestation of anger, mistrust, or misinformation?
Topics can include but are not limited to:
- Transgender and LGBTQI+ affirming care
- Insurance
- Abortion rights and access
- Race and Racism
- Epistemic injustice and physical violence
- Translational studies
- Clinical trials and studies
- Ethics and consent
- Sexual and reproductive health
- Refugees and migrants
- Othering and undesirables
- DIY healthcare – the rise of Internet self-diagnoses
- The Policing of Healthcare – doctors as police
- Necropolitics and Eugenics
- Post/neo/colonialism and legacies of unethical medical practice