Kategorie: Narratives of Health and Illness: Care and Power Within, Against and Beyond Medicine
“Narratives of Health and Illness: Care and Power Within, Against and Beyond Medicine” aims to bring together the multitude of discussions and expressive models of health and illness in order to explore interdisciplinary encounters and contestations related to agency, discourse, and power structures. The series seeks critical engagements within the framework of medical humanities for a more inclusive conception of health care and well-being that opens up a space for personal accounts of medicalized subjects on the margins of the medical establishment. “Narratives of Health and Illness” emphasizes that embodiedness of health and illness belongs to the realm of narrativity both as personal experience and as part of medical epistemology. We are interested in contributions from different disciplines, including but not limited to literature, anthropology, history, sociology, art history, and medicine to address not only the ways in which modern medicine narrates itself but also how postcolonial, Marxist, feminist, and queer critiques contribute to the repositioning of modern medical discourses. Content-related, we are interested in contributions on the construction of agency, discourse, and power structures, as well as various modalities of perception and stigmatization in the matters of health and illness. The pieces may also critically engage with the concept of narrativity and question underlying assumptions regarding subjectivity and expressions of health and illness at an epistemological level. As pseudoscientific and pseudoskeptical challenges to modern medicine and other antagonistic narratives that position themselves against its scientific underpinnings have become particularly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, we would also like to include discussions that transcend such superficial polarizations and unpack their entanglements with politics of race, colonialism, and uneven global circuits of misinformation.
We expect the pieces to be 1000-3000 words. If you are interested in contributing to this series, contact Burcu Alkan at burcualkan@gmail.com. The series is edited by her, Ezgi Sarıtaş, Şima İmşir.
By Dalia Said Mostafa. Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021) was a renowned Egyptian feminist activist, physician, writer, and novelist. But she was also a controversial figure who caused much disturbance to authorities in Egypt. This article focuses on her first short fictional work Memoirs of a Woman Doctor.
By Nihan Bozok. This essay, which is based on a letter written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 – 1762), tells the story of a group of elderly women who collaborated to vaccinate their communities against smallpox in the 17th century in the Ottoman Empire.
By Burcu Alkan. This article examines the self-in-crisis in the Turkish novel, more specifically the origins and functions of “the psychiatric turn” in representations of madness in contemporary Turkish novels. It examines how the novelists engage with psychiatric medicine and discusses why such an engagement has become prominent in exploring existential crises in the novelistic imagination in recent years.
By Burcu Alkan, Ezgi Sarıtaş, Şima İmşir. The encounters of health and illness begin with narrative. The series “Narratives of Health and Illness: Care and Power Within, Against, and Beyond Medicine” explores diverse perspectives on health and illness by fostering interdisciplinary discussions around the concept of narrative through a critical engagement with the fields of medical and health humanities.