Medical Humanities Colloquy 1.0
August 2, 2021

The Medical Humanities Colloquy initiated by Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar is meant to open up dialogues between medicine, humanities and literary and cultural studies by dwelling on their intersections that operate in the cultural field of medicine.  The seminar series encourages discussions on trauma, suffering, loss, grief, recovery, coping mechanisms, transformed identities, and so on. The presentations will cover various sub-disciplines within the rubric of Medical Humanities, such as, medical theatre, medical sociology, clinical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and medical literature. The talks conducted by the respective field-experts and leaders will encounter and accentuate the granular details of clinical communication, clinical care spaces, familial care, written and oral narratives of the patients, etc., that seldom get highlighted in the data-oriented clinical case studies.

 

Title: Illness and Medicine in Theatre: Aesthetic, Disciplinary, and (Inter)personal Crossings

Abstract: This talk aims to stir discussion among medical humanities scholars on the convergence of theatre, health and medicine and its aesthetic, social, and pedagogical aspects. By encompassing a renewed emphasis on the wellbeing of the human and the complexity of care in the 21st century, medical humanities, and theatre and medicine in particular, will also be examined vis-a-vis the —disciplinary as well as personal— challenges it poses to researchers in a rapidly changing world.

 

Bio: Vinia Dakari is Adjunct Lecturer at the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the Greek Representative for the Arts Health Early Career Research Network (ECRN) and regular Working Group member of the Greek Cancer Society’s Centre for Support, Education and Research in Psychosocial Oncology, Athens. She is co-editor of the “Medicine and/in Theatre” issue of Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques, the online journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics. Since the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic, she has facilitated live virtual Narrative Medicine sessions in Greek in collaboration with Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine.

 

Date & Time: August 13, 5:30PM (IST)