Welcome to the Health Humanities Journal of UNC-Chapel Hill!

Announcements:

⭐ WE ARE LOOKING FOR NEW EDITORIAL STAFF MEMBERS! If you are interested fill out the following form

Submissions for the Spring 2024 Journal are OPEN until February 8 @ 11:59pm

⭐ Applicable submissions include: 🗒️Poetry 📸Photography 🔬Research 🎨Visual Art and more! Submit your story exploring ideas related to health, caregiving, illness, and medicine here. Written submissions must not exceed 1,000 words.

What is The HHJ at UNC?

Health humanities is one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields, bridging the gap between the medical sciences and the social sciences. This journal is an opportunity for students to publish original creative work, research, essays, and artwork that explores the intersection of literature/arts and healing. Our focus is on health humanities work from UNC-Chapel Hill students, but we do consider submissions from faculty and students nationally and internationally.

Our Mission Statement

The main purpose of this journal is to inspire, encourage, and facilitate interdisciplinary thinking and collaborative work while exploring ideas that relate to health, illness, caregiving, and medicine. We hope to spark discussions across UNC’s campus and beyond in order to holistically approach medical topics. This publication allows for dialogue, meaning-making and multiple representations of the body, health, mind, wellness, and experiences with the medical system.

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us–through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives–we are each of us unique.” – Oliver Sacks[1]

Health Humanities uses lived experiences to understand medicine, patients, doctors, and healthcare. It provides an avenue for healthcare providers and patients to travel beyond the surface of a disease in order to contextualize the factors that comprise and affect the human condition. This field of study helps give meaning to experiences of health and disability, voices to patients, history to procedures and practices, and empathy to actions.

[1] Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York: Summit Books, 1985. Print.