From the organisers:

Healing/Arts: Health Activism, Creative Practice, and the Medical Humanities

Thursday, May 14, 2020 1:00pm-6:30pm PST via Zoom
Hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara

Today, the integration of the arts into medical practice is becoming more common as a way to improve patient quality of life within healthcare institutions. But while this leads to a more holistic approach than the traditional biomedical model, one which works to mitigate some of the most dehumanizing effects of contemporary healthcare spaces for the individual patient, it largely fails to engage in spaces beyond the hospital, or to address the social determinants of health by challenging the underlying institutionalized structures of racism, classism, sexism, and ableism that determine what lives are worth living and what forms of care are given in response to human anguish.  

Healing/Arts is a free, virtual symposium that brings together creative practitioners from literary studies, medical humanities, disability justice, and performance for a series of talks and workshops on the relationship between the arts and health activism. In sessions led by Kelly Gluckman, Leora Fridman, Johanna Hedva, and Patty Berne we will together interrogate the implications, for both medical practice and the humanities, of treating the arts as technologies of care. The featured facilitators will examine the role the creative arts might play in critiquing the institutional configurations of American healthcare and the normative imperatives underlying idealized notions of health. And they will explore the arts’ capacity to help us reimagine and produce individual and collective well-being. Crucial here will be a consideration of how marginalized communities develop arts of knowing and doing health in conversation with and contestation of dominant biomedical models and institutions.  

Attendees must register before the event. More information can be found here: https://healingartssymposium.wordpress.com/

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