Launch Workshop – The Material Medical Humanities Collective

This is a call for collaborators to join a new ‘material medical humanities’ research collective led by Durham University and Birkbeck, University of London.
The collective seeks to investigate the relationships between materiality – understood in the widest possible sense – and the medical and health humanities. Taking objects, environments, infrastructures, technologies, and material practices seriously as sites of health-related knowledge, we hope to explore together what might be called a material medical humanities: not a settled field, but an emerging constellation of questions, sensibilities, and experimental approaches.
We warmly invite researchers, curators and other interested professionals from across the globe to express your interest in joining the launch workshop of the Material Medical Humanities Collective on Monday 14th December 2026, 11:00 – 14:00 GMT (application deadline: Wednesday 14th October 2026). At this collaborative online event, we will work together to identify key themes and build on synergies across disciplines and regions. Collaborators from low- and middle-income countries are particularly welcome – while the collective’s co-leads are based in the UK, our events will be scheduled to maximise attendance from other time zones.
In order to support in-depth collaborative discussion, workshop spaces are limited; we will let you know if we are able to offer you a space by Monday 26th October at the latest.
If you can’t make the online workshop, please do still express your interest in collaboration, using this form, and we will keep you informed about future plans.
For more details, please see Material Medical Humanities Collective | The Platform. If you have any questions, please contact Dr Harriet Barratt, Visual & Material Lab, Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, Durham University at harriet.b.barratt@durham.ac.uk.
A brightly-coloured artwork featuring the microscopic detail of a mitochondrial network, a series of oval shapes with yellow dots in the middle
Date
December 14, 2026
Time
11:30 am - 2:00 pm
Location
Zoom
Organiser
The Visual & Material Lab

Website
Register

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