Current Projects
Health Humanities Collaborative
Building a transdisciplinary Health Humanities community at UCalgary
Health Humanities is an emerging transdisciplinary field that brings together the humanities, arts, social sciences, health professions, and community knowledge to better understand the human experience of health, illness, caregiving, and wellbeing. Rather than focusing solely on the biological dimensions of health, Health Humanities examines how meaning, identity, culture, ethics, narrative, relationships, and power shape experiences of care and healing. Through approaches such as storytelling, literature, philosophy, ethics, visual arts, film, history, and creative practice, the field seeks to cultivate more reflective, compassionate, and socially responsive health systems while creating space for multiple ways of knowing to inform one another.
At the University of Calgary, the Healing Lens Research Lab provides a central organizing hub for Health Humanities scholarship by bringing together researchers, clinicians, educators, artists, trainees, and community partners who share an interest in understanding health and wellbeing through humanistic and creative approaches.
The Lab is actively helping to build this emerging field through the coordination of monthly Health Humanities meetings, the development of collaborative grant applications, the organization of symposiums and scholarly events, and the cultivation of new transdisciplinary partnerships across Nursing, Medicine, Arts, Social Work, and community organizations.
Through these activities, the Healing Lens Research Lab serves as a convener and catalyst, creating the conditions for diverse forms of knowledge to enter into meaningful dialogue and generate new avenues for research, education, and practice.