Translating COVID-19: From Contagion to Containment

Towards a transformative health humanities approach in teaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The adoption of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) marks a significant shift in global political agendas, emphasising sustainability in various fields, including health. To engage meaningfully with sustainability, a transformative educational approach is essential. Lange's concept of transformative learning encompasses three levels: personal and cognitive change (micro level), changes in our interactions with others and the environment (meso level) and societal changes (macro level). This paper posits that applying health humanities approaches, particularly narrative medicine, can enhance transformative education at these three levels, leading to a powerful, transformative health humanities framework for teaching sustainability and the SDGs. This interdisciplinary method, which includes reflective self-assessment, exploration of different relational perspectives and social reality comprehension, facilitates transformative learning. However, implementing this transformative strategy requires a critical reassessment of some core principles and methods within the existing health humanities paradigm.

The future of translational medical humanities: bridging the data/narrative divide

This essay argues that emerging forms of translational work in the field of medical humanities offer valuable methods for engaging with communities outside of academic settings. The first section of the essay provides a synthetic overview of definitions and critical engagements with the concept of 'translation' in the context of medical humanities, a field that, in the wake of the COVID pandemic, can serve as an exemplar for other fields of the humanities. The second section explains the 'data/narrative' divide in medicine and health to demonstrate the need for new translational methodologies that can address this nexus of concern, particularly in collaboration with constituencies outside of academic settings. The third section maps out the sites and infrastructures where digital medical humanities is poised to make significant translational interventions. The final section of the essay considers data privacy and health ecology as conceptual frameworks that are necessary for bridging the data/narrative divide. Examples are drawn from the 'Translational Humanities for Public Health' website, which aggregates projects worldwide to demonstrate these emerging methodologies.