Cultural Studies and Media Studies / Interdisciplinary Humanities

Virtual Only: All presentations will be delivered via Zoom regardless of whether the presenters are in-person.

Majda Atieh (Sultan Qaboos University)

Recent scholarship on increasing global conflicts and ensuing health crises urgently demands an intercultural and interdisciplinary re-inscription of the the intersection of medical humanities with arts and cultures. Such growing interest evinces how artistic and cultural forms reshape the diagnosis of traumas and pathologies and propel new forms of narrative engagement that fosters deeper connections, communal care, and collective empowerment. As a pertinent example, graphic and narrative medicine diverts from the standardized language of established medicine discourse and clinical frameworks whose limitation eclipses the “collective experience” and “mutual recognition” (Charon et al., 2016) of pathologies, whether psychological, physical, social, cultural, or ecological.

Graphic narratives are exceptionally committed to the reconceptualization of accessibility and care as communal practices that depart from individualized framings of clinical guidance or neutralized or centralized resilience. In particular, the implementation of visual narration moves beyond the abstraction or exclusive rhetoric of clinical diagnosis to develop the aesthetics of somatic-experiential embodiment that aligns with a decentralized experience.

Graphic medicine then corroborates a multimodal intervention in clinical medicine narrative that anchors categorization and measurement as standardized indicators for the diagnosis of illness or its remission. Ultimately, graphic narration unsettles the opacity of biomedical discourse and its exclusive language, and reclaims an experiential or relational language that fosters deeper connections, promotes care, and advances responsibility toward whole and multispecies communities.

In this regard, we invite papers that particularly address the perspectives of Asian and Arab graphic narratives on decentering healthcare discourse and transferring authority to embodied and collective experiences of pathology. The invited papers may illustrate how the shared experiences that underpin Asian and Arab graphic medicine mobilize an inclusive healthcare culture that advocates the agency of decentralized access and collective production of knowledge, and contribute to future formation.

Possible topics can include, but are not limited to:

- Breaking collective stigma and silence around pathology

- Promoting affinities around pathology

- Posthuman graphic narration and multispecies cooperation and survival

- Graphic narration and multilingual accessibility

- Graphic narratives on ecological precarity and possibility

- Comics and climate change traumas

- Graphic narratives and war traumas

- Graphic access and medical education

- Graphic narration and Empathy Building

-Clinicians/caregivers and patients’ solidarity via visual storytelling

-Graphic narration and remission societies

- Visual storytelling and health literacy

- Recuperating patients’ voices as story-tellers and story-listeners

- Visibility and inclusion of migrant storytelling of trauma

-Solarpunk and digital graphic narratives

This panel focuses on Asian and Arab graphic narratives that disrupt the opacity of biomedical discourse and reclaim a relational language that fosters deeper connections, promotes care, and advances future responsibility toward whole and multispecies communities.