Keynote Speaker

Dr Chisomo Kalinga

Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Fellow, University of Edinburgh

Chisomo was unable to give her keynote talk during the main conference due to being locked down on a different continent to her research documents. However, she will be recording her talk in time for a Q+A session at 5pm on Thursday 12th November. Register using the button above.

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Abstract:

In this keynote address, I will introduce the ‘natural marriage between literature and medicine’ in an African context; these are written and performed literary practices that engage epistemologies, ideologies and discourses of health and wellbeing in Southern Africa. Starting with Professor Steve Chimomobo’s work on HIV & AIDS in Malawian literature, I will discuss the ways in which literary representation in African spoken and written forms have engaged the illness narrative–discourses of personal health and indigenous communitarian philosophies in the healing process. From representations of the body, the aesthetics of representing health and well-being, this paper puts forward ideas and philosophies of illness from a variety of regional perspectives. It aims to encourage better informed discourses about diverse medical cultures and understand the realities of medical pluralism in the face of an increasingly globalised health care agenda.

Bio:

Dr Chisomo Kalinga is a Wellcome-funded postdoctoral fellow in the medical humanities at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her current Wellcome-funded 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.