Decentring the Medical Humanities: NNMHR (Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research) early career workshop
Date: Starting on 29 October 2026 at 13.00, and concluding on 30 October at 13.00.
Place: University of Stirling
Facilitators: ‘Global History of HIV/AIDS Activism’ project (led by Dr Nikolaos Papadogiannis), in partnership with the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research NNMHR.
Aim: To explore ways of challenging a Western-centric focus in the medical humanities by exchanging ideas and deepening the relevant knowledge of PhD students who take or wish to take decentring/decolonising approaches in their research. The workshop builds on, and aims to contribute to the paradigm of the Critical Medical Humanities, which is working to illuminate social hierarchies in health, healthcare, and health campaigns (Viney, Callard, Woods, 2015; Whitehead and Woods, 2022). It incorporates non-western perspectives in an effort to comprehensively include the different voices of activists globally. Such research dovetails with recent work in Queer and Transgender Studies, which challenges the ‘West’ as necessarily the reference point for notions of gender and sexuality globally (e.g., Aizura 2018). Thus, the workshop aims to encompass research explicitly addressing perspectives from the Global South and/or racialised minorities in the Global North, which explores topics including, but not limited to:
- Health geographies that contest and complicate the binary of the ‘West and the rest’.
- Notions of health and healthcare, and critically engages with binaries, like healthcare professionals/community actors and biomedicine/alternative medicine.
- The role of creative practitioners in health and healthcare, and relevant transregional encounters.
- The role of translation in transregional encounters addressing health, like interactions between professionals and/or activists.
- Spaces of care and healthcare beyond medical institutions.
- Understandings of sexuality, gender, race and dis/ability.
- Representations of the body and the senses.
- Perceptions of non-human objects and presences, and health.
- Material conditions creating hierarchies in medical research and global health policies.
- The role of creative methodologies in decentring the medical humanities.
- Equitable collaboration with community partners from the Global South and racialised minorities in the Global North, in conducting research.
Intended participants: Up to 10 PhD students, postdoctoral fellows or early career researchers from across the UK, who will be able to join the event in person. Up to 10 more PhD students, postdoctoral fellows or early career researchers from across the UK, will be able to join online. We define ‘early career’ as within ten years of receiving your PhD (excluding career breaks), or not yet in a permanent academic post.
Structure/content: The event will last for two half-days and will comprise the following sessions: A) Talks and time for questions (1.5 hour). Dr Benjamin Dalton, Lecturer in French History, University of Lancaster, and Dr Chisomo Kalinga, Chancellor’s Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Kalinga is a leading expert in decolonising methodologies, while Dalton is a specialist in queer medical humanities as well as multilingual and transcultural approaches to the medical humanities. All speakers will stay for the rest of the workshop to offer feedback on the work of the participants.
B) A scoping session (1.5 hours), which will entail brief talks by all participants and time for discussion to identify common research interests and similar challenges facing several early career researchers aiming to decentre medical humanities.
C) A writing session (2 hours), which will involve some time during which each participant will write a draft text (e.g., a section for a conference paper) and discuss this draft with the other participants.
D) Lunch (1 hour) and, possibly, a lunchtime tour (1 hour) of the NHS Forth Valley Archive.
Format: The talks, the scoping session and the writing session will run hybrid.
Outcome: Participants will be encouraged to contribute a 1000-word text on their work and/or the workshop for potential takeover of The Polyphony.
Funding: The cost of one overnight stay for all in-person researchers will be covered by the UKRI Future Leadership Fellowship project of Nikolaos Papadogiannis. The same project will cover the cost of lunch for all in-person participants on 30 October. NNMHR will cover in-person participants’ travel costs within the UK up to an average maximum of £100 (depending on distance).
Eligibility: PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and early career scholars based in the UK.
Selection: through an open call for applications, based on a one-page statement submitted by applicants regarding their engagement with decentring methodologies in their research projects, and a CV. We strongly encourage applications from a diverse range of backgrounds (which might include gender, identity, race, age, social class, dis/ability and neurodiversity, and ethnicity), and welcome a critically engaged and reflexive approach to the applicants’ positionalities in their statement. A panel of NNMHR Steering Group members will assess the submitted applications based on the following criteria: a) existing knowledge of decentring/decolonising methodologies; b) implementation of, or willingness to implement, such methodologies in the applicant’s research. Please send both documents as an attachment to Nikolaos Papadogiannis via email ().
Extended application deadline: 12th June 2026.
Contact: For informal enquiries, please contact Nikolaos Papadogiannis ()