Project Title: Creating a Critical Disabilities and Medical Humanities Hub and Symposium: Access, Equality and Inclusion in Health
Dates: 1 December 2020 – 31 December 2024
Email: Chisomo.Kalinga@ed.ac.uk
Project Description:
As a Medical Humanities Fellow at IASH, Chisomo will be working on a new project to build an international platform for collaboration and exchange between individuals and institutions within critical disabilities and health and medical humanities studies. Using the existing platform at IASH’s Medical and Health Humanities research hub, her aim is to build a sustainable research network, which will culminate with the first of three international 2-day symposium on access, equality and inclusion in critical disabilities and medical humanities research, hosted by the University of Edinburgh. In addition to hosting a symposium, the space will facilitate the development of an exchange programme across the inter-related fields of health, medical and disability studies and position IASH and University of Edinburgh to pursue further interdisciplinary partnerships in the fields of study. In addition to foregrounding medical humanities research at IASH, the network and symposium will assemble a technical working group of leading advisors and investigators within global disability and health humanities studies. Invited guests will represent Europe, North and Central America, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Middle East, Asia and Australasia, with specific inclusion objectives for indigenous and marginalized communities across the world.
Biography:
Dr Chisomo Kalinga is a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Her current research project is titled ‘Ulimbaso ‘You will be strong again’: How literary aesthetics and storytelling inform concepts of health and wellbeing in Malawi’, which engages how indigenous literary practices (performance, form and aesthetics) are used to address community health. Her research interests are disease (specifically sexually transmitted infections), illness and wellbeing, biomedicine, traditional healing and witchcraft and their narrative representation in African oral and print literatures. She is currently collaborating with her colleagues at the University of Malawi and the Malawi University of Science and Technology to launch the Malawi Medical Humanities Network (MMHN), an interdisciplinary network for Malawiana researchers around the world to share events, programmes, projects and exhibitions that explore the link between health and the humanities.
Social media:
University Profile: http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/people/teaching_and_research_fellows/chisomo_kalinga
Academia.edu: https://edinburgh.academia.edu/ChisomoKalinga
Twitter: www.twitter.com/misschisomo
Instagram: www.instagram.com/misschisomo
Medical Humanities in Malawi:
Malawi Medical Humanities Network: https://malawimedhumsnetwork.com
Malawian (Hi)Stories and the Medical Humanities: A Digital Repository for Arts, Humanities and Health Resources: https://malawi-medhums.sps.ed.ac.uk
Medical Humanities in Africa:
Medical and Health Humanities Network Africa: https://www.medicalandhealthhumanities.africa