Cogent Arts & Humanities

Towards a Material Medical and Health Humanities

Cogent Arts & Humanities is pleased to welcome you to submit your research to the Article Collection "Towards a Material Medical and Health Humanities".

This Article Collection investigates the relationships between materiality - understood in the widest possible sense - and the medical and health humanities. Taking objects, environments, infrastructures, technologies, and material practices seriously as sites of knowledge, the articles collectively open up a conversation about what might be called a material medical humanities: not a settled field, but an emerging constellation of questions, sensibilities, and experimental approaches.

The Collection invites readers to think across and beyond disciplinary boundaries, and speculate on how material medical humanities approaches might critically and creatively reconfigure existing theory, methods, and applications in clinical, public, and policy-facing contexts. Together, contributors explore what material approaches offer for understanding lived experience in health, illness, and care, and how these approaches differ from, extend, or unsettle more familiar narrative, textual, or representational frameworks.

The arts and humanities have long recognised embodied and sensory phenomena as central to human experience, with thinkers from Descartes to Haraway examining the epistemological complexity of material bodies, objects, and settings in interaction with one another. More recently, the material turn has generated rich explorations of hospital design, the often-fraught power of medical objects to shape the self, and the potential for artistic, design and sensory approaches to articulate health experiences that can otherwise be hard to represent and access. Yet these strands of work have rarely been brought together as part of a shared intellectual project. This collection offers in-depth analyses of material experiences of health and medicine across disciplines, advancing a shared conceptual and applied agenda under the banner of a material medical humanities. In doing so, it shapes new ways of understanding, researching, and practically engaging with experiences of health, illness, disability and care.

Our pursuit of a material medical humanities encompasses not only medical and health humanities and material culture, but also adjacent fields concerned with the relationship between bodies, objects, technologies, and environments, including sensory studies, science and technology studies, philosophy, post-phenomenology, psychosocial studies, architecture, and art and design research practice. We are interested in both emerging theoretical frameworks and practice-based approaches for understanding material experience in health and medicine. We welcome original research articles, review articles, and essays that critically engage visual, material, sensory, or immersive research methods, where these align with the journal’s image and media policies. Topics may include invisible, immaterial or imagined materialities; the instability of bodies and objects as categories; and how the unfixed nature of boundaries between bodies, things, technologies and environments actively shape experiences of health, illness and care. We particularly welcome contributions that explore how these relationships vary across intellectual, cultural and historical contexts, illuminate the workings of past and future temporalities in the present, challenge dominant understandings of embodiment, advance speculative and creative-critical approaches, and contribute to decolonising approaches to health and care.

Meet the Guest Advisors

Dr. Suzannah Biernoff is Professor of Visual Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. Her work focuses on histories of the body, face and visuality, and includes the books Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2002) and Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement (University of Michigan Press, 2017). She is co-director of Birkbeck's Centre for Medical and Health Humanities and teaches on the cross-disciplinary MA Medical Humanities: Bodies, Cultures and Ideas. Suzannah is also co-lead of a new Material Medical Humanities network led by Durham and Birkbeck.

Dr. Fiona Johnstone is an art historian, specialising in the intersections between art history and medical humanities. She is Lead of the Visual and Material Lab at the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, and co-lead of a new Material Medical Humanities network led by Durham and Birkbeck. From 2021–23, she co-directed the series Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities; this led to the field-defining edited volume, Art and the Critical Medical Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2026). She is now working on a new monographic project, provisionally entitled Critical Interlopers: artists as researchers and collaborators in healthcare and medicine.

Dr. Harriet Barratt is a Postdoctoral Research Associate (2025-29) in the Visual & Material Lab at the Discovery Research Platform for the Medical Humanities (Institute for Medical Humanities), and co-lead of a new Material Medical Humanities network led by Durham and Birkbeck. She researches the material cultures, patient narratives and psychosocial contexts of medicine, taking an object relations theory approach; her current project explores patients’ material and sensory experiences of fertility treatment using donor conception. Previous projects and collaborations include a Research England-funded evaluation of the Converge mental health outreach programme, the Wellcome-funded Sensing Spaces of Healthcare Research Collective, and the UKRI-funded ART/DATA/HEALTH project.

The Guest Advisors declare no conflict of interest regarding this work.