This interdisciplinary workshop seeks to challenge and reimagine the ways we approach health, illness, and the body across academic and artistic disciplines. We are interested in the diverse ways that medical health is conceptualized, narrated, and embodied, with a particular focus on how methodologies from the humanities and social sciences might inform, resist, or transform biomedical paradigms. The workshop will explore methodological experimentation and the politics of storytelling.

Bringing together scholars and practitioners from oral history, translation studies, and the anthropology of the body, we ask:

How might oral history provoke alternative understandings of disease, especially from voices historically marginalized in clinical narratives?
In what ways can the translation of illness — across languages and cultures — create affective spaces that foster new communities?
Can intersemiotic translations, such as dance, challenge the disciplinary boundaries of medical discourse and act as subversive responses to biopower?