Transparent Boundaries as Scenographies of Trust: The COVID-19 Pandemic from the View of Material Cultural Studies and Artistic Works

Article Summary by Monika Ankele and Céline Kaiser From the start, the profound transformations that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic found expression in a plethora of objects and facilities that dominated our daily lives far beyond the clinical sphere. Supermarkets, hotel receptions, taxis, restaurants, doctors’ surgeries and even schools were equipped with plexiglass screens of all […]

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What Makes a ‘Good Doctor’? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Perspectives from Medical Students with Lived Experience as Patients

Article Summary by Erene Stergiopoulos and Maria Athina (Tina) Martimianakis What counts a ‘good doctor’ depends on who we ask. Research has shown that patients prioritise communication and empathy, while doctors emphasise medical expertise, and medical students describe a combination of the two. This study explored the concepts of the ‘good doctor’ held by medical […]

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Forensic Rhetoric: COVID-19 and the Boundaries of Healthcare Evidence

Article Summary by David Houston Jones The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the role of medical evidence in public health presentations. This article investigates the rhetoric of those presentations, from ‘podium’ presentations such as press conferences to online forums and visualisations of the virus. In all of these, rhetorical forms arise from the […]

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Solidarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from a Nine-Country Interview Study in Europe

Article Summary by Katharina Kieslich, Amelia Fiske, Marie Gaille, Ilaria Galasso, Susi Geiger, Nora Hangel, Ruth Horn, Marjolein Lanzing, Sébastien Libert, Elisa Lievevrouw, Federica Lucivero, Luca Marelli, Barbara Prainsack, Franziska Schönweitz, Tamar Sharon, Wanda Spahl, Ine Van Hoyweghen and Bettina M. Zimmermann Solidarity is a term that many people are familiar with, but most would […]

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Listening, learning, caring: exploring assemblages of, ethics of and pathways to care for avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID)

Article Summary by Andrea LaMarre, Kathryn McGuigan and Melinda Lewthwaite What does care mean, in the context of treatment for avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID)? In this paper, we explored that question, engaging with stories shared with us by 14 caregivers of individuals with ARFID. We were specifically interested in how participants described their […]

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UK Media Responses to HIV through the Lens of COVID-19: A Study of Multidirectional Memory

Article Summary by Fran Pheasant-Kelly Covid-19 affected, and continues to affect us all to some degree. For those who were around in the 1980s, there are aspects of the virus that chillingly recall the initial terrors of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Such connections are evident in news media coverage of Covid-19 – this article examines those […]

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Cristina Mejia Visperas, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory

Announcement from the Levan Institute for the Humanities Upcoming Levan Book Chat Thursday, December 7 | 12:00 PM | Virtual Cristina Mejia Visperas is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California. She will be joined in conversation by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (NYU) and Anthony Hatch (Wesleyan University), moderated by Nayan Shah […]

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September 2023 Standard Issue

Ethics and medical specimens Brandy Schillace Human-centred design, disability and bioethics Matthew Wolf-Meyer The use of an object: exploring physician burnout through object relations theory Jo Winning Reversing the medical humanities [read the article summary] Helene Scott-Fordsmand ‘Why They Laugh At Us?’: the functions and ethics of humour in Singaporean theatrical depictions of stigmatised illness […]

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‘Freudism’ and Modernity: Transcultural Impact of Psychoanalysis in the Modern Turkish Novel

Article Summary by Burcu Alkan “‘Freudism’ and Modernity: Transcultural Impact of Psychoanalysis in the Modern Turkish Novel” looks at ‘Freudism’ as an intellectual contact zone in the discussions of Turkish modernisation as represented in two novels: Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (1949, The Armchair of Mademoiselle Noralia) and Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (1962, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014). […]

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Reversing the Medical Humanities

Article Summary by Helene Scott-Fordsmand In the article “Reversing the Medical Humanities” I make the argument that humanities scholars engaging in medical humanities have tended to think about how they might help improve medicine in different ways – for example by training doctors in empathy and communication, or by acting as a critic that keeps […]

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