Call for Papers: Special Issue of the Journal Humanities: "Literature and Health in the 21st Century"

This Special Issue focuses on the European region and invites papers that explore current challenges in health, well-being, and healthcare as represented in literature. The challenges, we see, are plenty: growing social inequality and political polarization with effects on public health, including various kinds of addiction; decreasing trust in science and institutions impacting vaccination programs; the multiple causes of migration, which require new competences in culture and language; a focus on fertility and the care of older citizens in response to demographic changes; fast-paced lives and unattainable ideals on social media that have been correlated with mental stress and psychiatric illnesses; the ethics of using artificial intelligence in health care; the increasingly tangible impact of climate change; and, last but not least, a present risk of new pandemics. By literature, we understand reading and writing, visible in book form, on walls and screens, in academia, in the clinic, and with vulnerable people. How have European writers in the 21st century explored these contemporary challenges as they impact health, well-being, and health care, and can facilitated activities of creative writing and shared reading in some ways support those solutions? Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Stigma and stereotypes (e.g., migrants, ethnic minorities, transgendered persons);
• Empathy, compassion, and justice in healthcare;
• Access to public health care;
• Psychiatric diagnosis (e.g., autism, depression, schizophrenia);
• Mental health of adolescents;
• Dependency (e.g., alcohol, drugs);
• Vaccination programs;
• Reproductive health and aging;
• Suicide related to A.I.;
• Climate anxiety;
• Pandemics (e.g., COVID-19)

Read more about submission information here: Humanities  

About the Journal

Message from the Editor-in-Chief:

We welcome contributions that address fundamental issues in the Humanities from any meaningful perspective, combining past and present concerns in order to blaze a path toward the future. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. All submissions will be critically reviewed by peers, aiming for the highest possible scholarly level. Being an online journal, the published papers will reach their desired audiences faster, more reliably, and much more easily than traditional print versions, while upholding the same, if not even higher, scholarly standards.

Editor-in-Chief

Prof. Dr. Albrecht Classen

Department of German Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA