Cogent Arts & Humanities

Public Health Humanities: Power, Narrative, and Social Change

Cogent Arts & Humanities is pleased to welcome you to submit your research to the Article Collection "Public Health Humanities: Power, Narrative, and Social Change".

The public health humanities is an emerging interdisciplinary field that brings together perspectives from the humanities, public health, social sciences, and health professions to examine how cultural meanings, historical forces, narratives, ethics, and structures shape health and well-being. While public health has traditionally emphasized epidemiology, population-level interventions, and health outcomes, the humanities offer complementary approaches for understanding lived experience, social values, collective memory, power relations, and the human consequences of health policy and practice. The public health humanities extends beyond the clinical focus of much medical humanities scholarship by engaging questions of populations, communities, institutions, and social systems. Through this interdisciplinary lens, health is understood not only as a biological phenomenon but also as a social, cultural, ethical, and narrative one. Narratives shape how societies explain illness, assign responsibility, define risk, justify interventions, and imagine pathways toward health, influencing both public understanding and policy responses.

Contemporary public health challenges increasingly demand approaches that move beyond biomedical and technical solutions alone. Global pandemics, climate-related health threats, structural racism, political polarization, migration, health misinformation, and widening inequities have underscored the importance of understanding how culture, history, narrative, and power shape health outcomes and public health responses. Narratives of personal responsibility, medical repair, surveillance, risk, social justice, prevention, and resilience help structure public discourse, often shaping which problems are recognized, who is held accountable, and which interventions are prioritized. At the same time, alternative narratives centered on participation, health promotion, social cohesion, capability, and ambiguity invite more expansive understandings of health and human flourishing. Humanities-informed approaches can deepen understanding of public trust, stigma, resilience, collective action, and the ethical dimensions of public health decision-making, while illuminating how stories and representations influence public perceptions of health, illness, and care.

This Collection invites original research, reviews, perspectives, commentaries, and other article types consistent with the journal’s scope that advance scholarship in the public health humanities. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that draw on humanities methods and traditions to examine how health is shaped, represented, contested, and understood across social, cultural, historical, political, and narrative contexts. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: public health narratives and storytelling; narrative frameworks of responsibility, risk, prevention, surveillance, and social justice; literature, visual culture, film, and the arts as sites of health meaning-making; health communication and rhetoric; history of public health and public health institutions; public memory, collective trauma, and commemoration; disability studies; critical race and postcolonial approaches to health; feminist, queer, and gender-based analyses; environmental and climate humanities; ethics, values, and public life; medicalization and demedicalization; participation, agency, and capability approaches to health; and critical examinations of power, governance, and knowledge production in public health. The Collection particularly encourages scholarship that demonstrates how humanistic inquiry can deepen understanding of health, illuminate lived experience, interrogate dominant narratives, and contribute to more reflective, equitable, and socially responsive public health research, policy, and practice.

Meet the Guest Advisors:

Amanda M. Caleb, PhD, MPH, is Professor of Medical Humanities and Director of the Center for Medical Humanities at Geisinger College of Health Sciences School of Medicine. Her scholarship draws on perspectives from the humanities, public health, and medical education to explore how social, structural, and historical forces shape health, illness, healthcare experiences, and professional identity.

Thomas Hehlmann, PhD, MPH, is a Lecturer of Public Health and Health Communication at the University of Bremen in the Department of Human and Health Sciences. He also serves as a visiting lecturer at the University of Bielefeld, the Leuphana University of Lueneburg, and the University of Hamburg. One of his primary research focuses is on the development of Communication Skills in the healthcare sector, particularly in the field of Palliative Care.