When Talking is Taboo by Ayesha Ahmad In this piece, I want to talk about what it was like to be a panellist at a recent event strategically entitled “Talking Taboo” at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I spoke for ten minutes; ten minutes that represented a life time. I began the introduction […]
Category: Global Health
Global Humanities: On Being Invisible
Ines Ongenda – A Personal Reflection In September 2015 I started a Master of Science in Global Health and Development at a leading UK institution. My background was in biological sciences and I was your typical aspiring medical doctor who had a strong interest in global health and wanted to explore and learn […]
Global Humanities: Writing as a form of protest
Ayesha Ahmad ‘Daughters of Rabia’ is a social media blog with over 50,000 viewers a week. The blog is a dashboard containing narratives of different forms – poems, essays, and short stories – from women, and sometimes men, in Afghanistan about the challenges they face often in the shadows of being silenced and shielded from […]
Global Humanities – Finding New Narratives
Conflict, Culture, and the Clinic: Finding new narratives Ayesha Ahmad In a recent publication “Syria Speaks”, the book volume is a collection of various forms of narrative that have been born in conflict. In reflection, there is a line that says: “War ignites people’s anger, and acts against culture, which is the work […]
Global Humanities – A Refugee in the Clinic
“You see a war zone, I see my home” Ayesha Ahmad “In my land”, you say. I trail away from your story into my own exploration; I am wondering about your possession—about your land, what it means for your to be yours, or what it means for you that my land is […]
The Screening Room: a review of the Lebanese film Ghadi
Music overcoming disability – Ghadi, Lebanon, 2013, directed by Amin Dora Reviewed by Dr Reem Gaafar, a Sudanese doctor, writer, filmmaker and graphic designer A special screening will take place at the Polish Cultural Centre, 238 King Street, Hammersmith, London W6 0RF, Sapphire Room, 2nd Floor, at 8pm Friday 3rd June 2016. To book […]
Ayesha Ahmad: ‘Lahore is an Illusion, Lahore is Everywhere’
The mango tree faded many shadows ago, its fruit became stones and the branches became a skeleton. Yet, the roots remained, and they embrace the soil in the womb of the earth. This was the cradle of my family’s birth. Now, blood is watering Lahore’s gardens. In sorrow, I remembered these words given to me a […]
Ayesha Ahmad: Introduction to Global Humanities—Through Creation, Violence Will Die
Against the backdrop of violence, I have been examining through my research the qualities of our human condition that perpetuate both our survival and our spirit. As an introduction to an ongoing series on Global Humanities, I will be discussing ways we can counter the dominant narrative of violence. Our globalised world, or rather, the collective […]
Ayesha Ahmad: Spirituality in Conflict
This is a story about spirituality in conflict. As with all stories, there are two sides to the tale. There is, on one side, the battle to find and keep the spirit during conflict, when lives and worlds and families and homes are falling apart and disappearing. On the other side, there is the spirituality […]
Maslaha Workshop for Medical Students: Practical implications of working with diverse communities
Narrative is an increasingly potent concept for medical educators; developed as a tool to un-cover the patient experience as well as to illustrate the nuances where empathy has a place to fill the gap between the patient and their doctor. Medical humanities, then, has an integral role for students learning how to become a doctor; […]