The expertise of humanities researchers has been especially useful for investigating the Cultural Contexts of Health, demonstrating how history and culture are intertwined with behavioural factors and social determinants to undermine or promote wellbeing. The global movement of Arts & Culture for Health is also generating mounting evidence of the benefits of arts on prescription and the uses of culture and heritage in medical education, preventive health, and patient care. Such activities draw on novel partnerships and will transform practice as well as professional roles – in healthcare but also far beyond.

Strategy

Health Humanities researchers collaborate with colleagues across the university and with societal partners to examine the experiences of patients and practitioners, investigate emerging models and their impact, and contribute to new strategies for improving healthcare and public health. Despite decades of valuable work in Science and Technology Studies and the Medical Humanities, useful insights from these fields have not always been taken up within medical education, medicine, nor public health. This has led to recurring cycles of research and practice repeating problematic approaches (e.g. overly focused on individualistic rational actor models) without critical self-reflection on disciplinary conventions and embedded social values.

Advocates of Behavioural and Cultural Insights in Health have called for greater “humility” within health research and policy in order to benefit from the findings from other fields, while instigators of the “Critical Medical Humanities” and the “Health Humanities” have proposed deeper collaboration between the Humanities, Social Sciences, Public Health and Medicine to ensure that the questions researched are relevant for practice and policy, and to increase likelihood of the implementation of findings. For these reasons, Health Humanities researchers at UvA prioritise collaborative projects with partners in healthcare, health advocacy, or health policy and focus on research with contemporary relevance. 

Activities

Researchers in the Medical and Health Humanities are engaged in a range of activities with an array of external partners. Humanities researchers are involved in 3 of the 5 seed grants awarded in the first round, and 1 of the 2 midsize, on topics including reducing meat consumption; the cultural memory of AIDS and (mis)remembering public health policy around HIV; and the uses of art to address healthcare worker stress in emergency medicine departments.

Major clusters of relevant research include disability studies;  neuroscience, psychiatry & mental health; Arts for Health/Culture, Health & Wellbeing; food and nutrition; (social) media; and care & nursing.

Partners include colleagues in Amsterdam UMC, the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, the Faculty of Law and external partners including:

• Amsterdam Public Health Service
• WHO Europe; and
• organisations led by disability advocates and mental health service users.

The research groups PULSE Network (ASH) and Critical Health Humanities (ASCA) have merged activities, and members are involved in international consortia for research exchanges, funding applications, and joint projects, including the Public Health Humanities Network recently founded at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the US Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and the Behavioural and Cultural Insights Unit at WHO Europe.