‘Cultural Crossings of Care – an Appeal to the Medical Humanities’ is an upcoming conference to be held at the University of Oslo on the 26th-27th October 2018. The university will welcome keynote speakers Professor Julia Kristeva and Professor Marie Rose Moro. The conference aims to build upon the work already done in a position paper by Kristeva, Moro, John Ødemark, and Eivind Engebretsen which was recently published in BMJ Medical Humanities and which argues that modern medicine is confronted with cultural crossings in various forms; in facing these challenges, Kristeva et al. argue that it is not enough to simply increase our insight into the cultural dimensions of health and well-being. We must, more radically, question the conventional distinction between the ‘objectivity of science’ and the ‘subjectivity of culture’. This obligation creates an urgent call for the medical humanities but also for a fundamental rethinking of their grounding assumptions.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. A transcultural approach to medicine.
2. A deconstruction of the difference between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ science.
3. The medical cultures behind the production and construal of evidence.

Abstracts are due on the 15th of May 2018 and can be submitted through the conference’s website, where you will also find a more detailed CfP.