Public Health Private Illness

Public Health, Private Illness is a two-day interdisciplinary medical humanities conference aimed at early career researchers and postgraduate students but open to anyone - patients, practitioners, policy-makers or more established academics are all welcome. 

We live in a climate of public health crises. Debates rage over the future of the NHS. Vaccination has become politicised. Concerns are mounting about emerging infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance in an age of globalisation. At the same time, new ways of conceiving of health and illness at an individual level have emerged. Neoliberal policy focuses on individual risk and lifestyle interventions. Social movements like neurodiversity, mad pride or body positivity challenge medical discourses and rework difference as identity rather than pathology. 

We want to interrogate the public/private distinction within health, medicine and wellbeing, and to examine the many and complex intersections between public health ideals and the individual experience of health, illness, body and mind. We are particularly interested in debating marginalised and non-traditional perspectives on what can sometimes be a well-trodden debate.

Alongside panels, the conference includes a number of optional and less formal sessions on the conference theme. These include: a book-making workshop; a zine handling and discussion workshop, a creative writing workshop, and museum object-handling session, and a death cafe discussion. 

We are also hosting a poetry and fiction reading event on the Wednesday evening (venue TBC). This event is open to the public and will allow us to explore creative responses to the conference theme in a more informal, non-academic context. More information to follow soon for those interested in reading their work at this event.

Keynote: Dr Chisomo Kalinga, University of Edinburgh -  ‘No man is an island’: Understanding Indigenous and African perspectives of personal wellbeingwithin Global Health Studies