Register now for the culminating event of the 2014-2017 Mellon Grant at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Humanities Futures! The capstone conference, titled Health Humanities & Social Justice: Breath, Body, Voice, will focus on the health humanities. We define health on a continuum from the health sciences to states of health, and focus on social justice to bridge the lived experiences of health and wellness in both our academic and non-academic communities. Furthermore, in 2017, we ask: how are the humanities transforming health, and how is health transforming the humanities? And what do these mutual influences suggest concerning the health of the humanities?

This conference will address the emergent field of health humanities through keynotes, panels, interactive workshops, and performances across a spectrum of arts - literary, theatrical, documentary, musical. (Read more at healthhumanitiesandsocialjustice.com.)

Through keynotes, panels, interactive workshops, and performances, the conference will engage with four central areas of concern: 

• arts, humanities, and healing: narrative medicine, graphic medicine, medical/health memoirs, and other practices bridging humanities, arts, and health; health humanities and the de-centering of the clinic in relation to individuals and communities; therapeutic models of humanities pedagogy and research
• access and voice: the politics of expertise in medicine and in humanities; non-western, non-biomedical genealogies and practices of health; social inequities and health disparities; patient-powered research and advocacy; medicine / health and race, gender, and sexuality
• health and its environments: environmental justice; food systems; pollution and toxicity; dis/ability and the built environment; the internalization of the environment through physiological processes such as breathing
• unsettling/resettling the human: health humanities as dissensus; cultivation/tolerance of discomfort; phenomenology of health and illness; genetics and the post-human; neurodiversity

The conference will open on the evening of Thursday, September 14, with a keynote poetry reading by Nikky Finney at the Hayti Heritage Center in downtown Durham.

Friday and Saturday events will take place in the Rubenstein, Perkins, and Bostock Libraries on Duke’s West Campus, and will feature additional keynotes by Alan Bleakley and Jonathan Metzl; panels on topics such as race and medicine, and biotech and its representations in popular culture (with members of the creative team behind the series Orphan Black); interactive workshops, on topics such as graphic medicine and documentary theatre; and performances, including "The Elephant's Walk," a puppetry performance by Marina Tsaplina of The Betes, and a health education workshop by Emmy winner Anita Woodley.

The conference will close on Saturday evening on East Campus with an exhibition of artwork by visiting artist Libia Posada in the Fredric Jameson Gallery in the Friedl Building, and a free concert in Baldwin Auditorium called Songs of Journey, featuring the premiere of Duke Music faculty member Stephen Jaffe’s Migrations.