Space, Place and Design in the Medical and Health Humanities

The CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network is a partnership of over 30 universities worldwide working in the medical and health humanities. In 2021, the annual Summer Institute of the CHCI HMHN will be hosted by University of Southern Denmark, with the theme, “Space, Place and Design in the Medical and Health Humanities.”

The objective of this CHCI Summer Institute is to investigate how space, place, and design might interplay with individualized and compassionate health care. Space, along with its less abstract and more social corollary, place, are critical terms in the formal study of literature; meanwhile, the architectural concept design has newly entered a broader disciplinary lexicon to simultaneously suggest method, process and form. We want to consider the role that space, place and design play in health care and aesthetics.

• What can medical humanities learn from theories of space and place?
• How might the notion of a “poetics of space” transform how we think about the institutional settings of treatment and healing?
• How is a sense of space distinguished from the “actual” places in stories of illness, death and/or healing?
• What is the interplay between space and time in stories of illness, death, and/or healing?
• How do the perception and experience of space and place change across historical time and cultural geography?
• How does modern health care design take into account disabled or sick bodies and peoples?
• What is a “healing architecture”?
• And what are the more pragmatic effects of space, place and design on the delivery of health care?

This conference will investigate these and other broad questions about the complex relationships between spatiality, illness, humanities and health care.

Registration

You register at www.sdu.dk

Further information

Read more about the CHCI Summer Institute in Odense on SDUs website