About the conference

                  What is the Modern Screen’s engagement with health, epidemics and illness? Historically, colonial and postcolonial institutions, private and state actors have played a key role in shaping the modern mediascape of health narratives. Representationally, we derive from and ascribe meaning to states of health mediated through cinematic narrative, maps, medical images like the X‑Ray or foetal photography and data visualisation that renders the unseen landscape of bodily interiors visible. Epistemically, ​“viral media”, as recent scholarship has termed it, is the indispensable infrastructure in our time that can apprehend the complex entanglements between human societies, viruses and non-human ecologies. In such a framework, epidemics on screen are not the representation of a biological event but are themselves mediated phenomena. 

This conference hopes to bring about a convergence between the fields of Medical Humanities and Screen Studies, both of which have been interested in a range of visual cultures of medicine: the visual iconography of disease in medical textbooks, the science exhibition and portraiture alongside more contemporary appearances in comics and graphic novels about illness and care. This growing corpus of material has not received much critical attention in either field, especially in the context of India. Given the many contexts in which the visual domain of medicine is embedded, a clear methodological practice can be challenging for the researcher. This conference thus also aims to bring together scholars in various disciplines to forge new frameworks and critical vocabularies that can move academic discourse on medicine’s visual cultures forward within Screen Studies and the Medical Humanities. 

Travel and accommodation 

Conference funds can provide limited support towards travel within India — further details will be communicated to selected participants. 

Selected participants will be provided food and accommodation at our university campus for the conference duration. 

Potential themes for papers include but are not limited to:

• Unseen medical practices (surgical procedures, traditional practices, medical miracles or the normalising of deviant bodies) on the modern screen and their role in informing a 21^st century understanding of bodies and healthcare practices
• Historical continuities or ruptures in hygiene and sanitation practices depicted on the modern Indian screen
• History of medicine/​health on screen and its impact on policy measures or professional practice
• Digital medical practices in India (medical and health apps, their clinical and diagnostic use and codification of bodies) and their modification or continuity with an earlier age of the physical encounter with a medical practitioner/​institution
• Are visually arresting pathologies/​deformities more likely to be routinely documented or do visual cultures enable visibility for little-known conditions?
• Telenovelas and streaming television series about medical practice and prevalent attitudes or cultural notions about such experiences in India
• Medical imaging technologies, modern clinical practice and the formation of patient subjectivities
• Gender/​age/​caste and visual iconographies of health and disease

Kinds/​forms of texts for analysis can include but are not limited to:

• Documentaries by independent/state-sponsored filmmakers
• Autopathographies or graphic stories of health, illness, caregiving, medical practice
• Visual archives of disease and medicine
• Medical textbooks
• Comics — web, print
• Visual print culture (magazines, periodicals, advertisements)
• Celebrity visual culture (a focus on the public documentation of surgical procedures and experiences of childbirth are of special interest)
• Portraiture and the Arts and their engagement with themes of health, illness, disease and medical practice (folk art practices are of special interest)
• Spectacular spaces — physical or digital spaces standing in for the ​“freak show”, inviting and creating specific viewing practices around bodily appearance
• Maps or other indexical representations of disease
• Visual archives of disease ​“events” in India — including but not limited to Cholera, Cancer, Tuberculosis, famine, man-made disasters like the Bhopal Gas Tragedy
• Digital and physical exhibitions of medical practice and/​or their history

Contact us

For any other information, please write to us at visualmedicalcultures@​gmail.​com