2025 Health Humanities
Consortium Conference
Jefferson Humanities & Health
Thomas Jefferson University
Philadelphia, PA— April 2-5
The Call for Proposals for the 2025 Health Humanities Consortium Conference is now open. Deadline: October 8, 11:59 p.m. EDT.
We welcome your proposals for individual and flash presentations, complete panels, roundtables and workshops. Proposals may respond to the conference theme of “Healing Institutions,” detailed below, or contribute to the broader project of the health humanities. Find additional details on our conference webpage under “Call for Proposals.”
Health Humanities Consortium Annual Conference 2025
“Healing Institutions”
Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA
April 2-5, 2025
Our theme highlights the complex and often ambivalent role of institutions—from hospitals and universities to established organizations, customs, laws, practices and people—in health and healthcare. Inviting consideration of institutions as agents of care, the theme also acknowledges their role in exclusion, extraction and injustice. How do institutions function as mediators of health and healing? When institutions have enabled harm, what forms of redress can be brought to bear? How can we reimagine and actualize the institutional change needed to face urgent challenges to health across individual, collective and planetary scales?
Since the 1960s, the prevailing biomedical definition of health—an understanding of wellness and illness framed in terms of physical disease and its presence or absence—has been called into question. Broader definitions acknowledge the entanglements of body, psyche and society, emphasizing social, structural and cultural drivers of health including marginalization. Current understandings of health consider how social forces materialize in physical and physiological forms across objects, technology, institutions and embodiment. With the conference theme as a springboard and provocation, we invite presentations that explore and rethink issues such as:
- Key institutions of health and healthcare, from hospitals, insurers and universities to established organizations, customs, laws, practices and people.
- Rhetorics and practices of institutional repair and redress, particularly regarding histories of legally- and socially-sanctioned medical discrimination.
- Boundaries and borders that mediate institutions, communities and the body.
- Community responses and resistance to institutional power.
- Underrepresented patient, caregiver, worker and learner/trainee voices in health and healthcare.
- Self-institutionalizing projects such as alternative schools and clinics.
- Curricular innovations and reform in health professions education.
- The Philadelphia community’s historic roots in medicine and the arts and present-day efforts to achieve health equity.
Learn more and submit your proposal: Jefferson.edu/HHC2025
Deadline: Tuesday, October 8, 11:59 p.m. EDT. Please note: This deadline will not be extended.
Expected notification date: Late December 2024
Please consider becoming a proposal reviewer. Reviewers are sought across wide-ranging areas of expertise/experience and career stages. You will be asked to read and score up to 25 conference proposals during October-November 2024. Please sign up using our brief survey. Thank you to those who have already volunteered!
