Health Humanities workshop

Health Humanities in a Time of Extractivist Aftermaths and Ecological Damage:
Southern African Literary and Cultural Perspectives

WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research),
University of the Witwatersrand

This workshop is situated at the intersection of the health humanities and the environmental humanities with a focus on Southern Africa. It explores how contemporary African literatures and cultures engage with illness in the face of rising inequalities, the afterlives of extractive capitalist processes and growing ecological damage. We welcome abstracts that address emergent forms of bodily illness in these and related contexts, at the nexus of interwoven twenty-first century crises, from southern African vantage points.  The workshop aims to address the following questions, amongst others:

• How do crises of inequality, resource extraction and ecological ruin shape experiences of illness with Southern African contexts?
• What literary and artistic forms best capture the rise of epidemics, outbreaks and pandemics, both emergent and futural, in and across southern African regions?
• In what ways do contemporary Southern African writers and artists generate approaches to contemporary illness, including in the aftermaths of  epidemics and pandemics such as HIV/Aids and Covid-19? How do experiences of extreme heat, drought or flooding shape the way we think about illness now?
• How do African writers and artists engage with historical forms of individual/collective trauma and /as forms of illness in contexts of loss, degradation, depletion and extinction cultures in these Southern context and regions?
• How do all of the above questions - and many more - reshape and re-orient both health and environmental humanities in Africa today?
   

Dates:

• 17/18 February 2027 – Seminar Room at WiSER
   

Submission guidelines and deadlines:

• Abstract submission deadline: October 31^st 2026
• Notification of acceptance: November 15^th 2026

Please, submit an abstract of 100-150 words (MS Word), briefly outlining your proposed topic, main argument, and theoretical framework. Include a (provisional) title for your presentation. Along with the abstract, please attach a short bio-note and use the subject line ‘Workshop: Health Humanities in a Time of Extractivist Aftermaths and Ecological Damage.’ Online presentations from overseas are welcome. E-mail your abstract to Oscar.Ortega@wits.ac.za