Updates from the CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network
Dear all,
I'm delighted to share recent news from Network members! Many thanks to everyone who shared their updates. We are featuring a recent interview, three new books, and two exciting new online publications.
Interview
From Yasi Naraghi at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, a recent interview on Toxicity and Nuclear Cleanup with Shannon Cram, the author of Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility (2023). The interview discusses the embodied politics of nuclear waste remediation.
New Books
Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment
Reaktion Books / University of Chicago Press, 2024
More info & purchase: https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/being-ill
Original, moving, and drawing from a range of fields, an essential exploration of what it means to be ill.
A serious illness often changes the way others see us. Few, if any, relationships remain the same. The sick become more dependent on partners and family members, while more distant contacts become strained. The carers of the ill are also often isolated. This book focuses on our sense of self when ill and how infirmity plays out in our relationships with others. Neil Vickers and Derek Bolton offer an original perspective, drawing on neuroscience, psychology, and psychoanalysis as well as memoirs of the ill or their carers to reveal how a sense of connectedness and group belonging can not only improve care but also make societies more resilient to illness. This is an essential book on the experience of major illness.
How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic
Edited by Mara Mills, Harris Kornstein, Faye Ginsburg, and Rayna RappNYU Press, 2025More info & purchase: https://nyupress.org/9781479830855/how-to-be-disabled-in-a-pandemic/ How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic documents the pivotal experiences of disabled people living in an early epicenter of COVID-19: New York City. Among those hardest hit by the pandemic, disability communities across the five boroughs have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence—as much as by the virus itself. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic includes contributions by wide-ranging disability scholars, writers, and activists whose research and lived experiences chronicle the pandemic’s impacts in prisons, migrant detention centers, Chinatown senior centers, hospitals in Queens and the Bronx, subways, schools, housing shelters, social media, and other locations of public and private life. By focusing on New York City over the course of three years, the book reveals key themes of the pandemic, including hierarchies of disability "vulnerability," the deployment of disability as a tool of population management, and innovative crip pandemic cultural production. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic honors those lost, as well as those who survived, by calling for just policies and caring infrastructures, not only in times of crisis but for the long haul. "So many forces want us to forget about the pandemic, to say that it’s over and not a concern anymore. How To Be Disabled in a Pandemic documents the wisdom of disabled oracles who resisted and challenged the system during the first three years of the pandemic in New York City. After reading this book, it’ll leave you wondering what could have happened if our ableist society centered disabled people and took them seriously." ~Alice Wong, author of Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life
Applied Global Health Humanities: Readings in the Global Anglophone Novel
Fella Benabed
De Gruyter, 2024Volume 4 in the series Medical & Health Humanities
More info & purchase: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111396392/html
This book highlights the importance of global Anglophone literature in global health humanities, shaping perceptions of health issues in the Global South and among minorities in the Global North. Using twelve novels, it explores the historical, political, sociocultural, ethical, and environmental aspects of health by analyzing the experiences of characters who suffer from infectious diseases, mental disorders, or disabilities, and who seek holistic healing practices.
New Online Publications
Embodied Books Collection
https://www.embodiedbooks.com/ Dr. Darian Goldin Stahl is pleased to share the outcome of her Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Northern British Columbia's Northern Medical Program: Embodied Books: Binding Together Illness, Art, and Learning This website hosts a high resolution, page-by-page digital archive of artists' books made by folks who identify as having an illness, disability, or caretaking experience. This archive is meant to serve as an arts-based teaching and research resource of primary, first-person medical experiences.
MedHum, a website focused on healthcare, humanities and the arts.
Medhum.org/
We are a collaborative group of physicians, academics, artists and a journalists, many of whom were editors of the NYU LitMed Database. We publish reviews, essays and interviews under the broad umbrella of the human condition.
MedHum welcomes new contributors. Anyone who would like more information about the project is welcome to contact Lucy Bruell (Project Director) directly.