Call for Articles
The Learned Online Journal
Il Pietrisco
Poetry – Prose – Cinema
invites articles for its Second Issue (2025)
Facets of the Health Humanities
“There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced—of passion, of hunger, of love—bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats.” (Kalanithi, 2016, p. 39) Thus does American physician Paul Kalanithi in When Breath Becomes Air hypothesise a powerful correspondence of the biological language of the human body, the very functioning and orchestration of its vital processes, and his attempt to find a narrative voice to linguistically and artistically record and recount one’s subjective experience of life with its repertoire of feelings, needs and challenges. His work, completed by his wife Lucy after his death, moves between three main phases of the author’s path through his terminal illness and poetically traces a journey of endurance, hope and legacy — a true phenomenology of his experience of writing his way through terminal illness. Whilst Kalanithi’s literary exploration shows the strength of auto-pathography written in prose, in a parallel manner another author, the English poet Myra Schneider, shows the efficacy of using an autopathography written in verse. Using her poetic voice to support herself emotionally, mentally and physically through therapeutic writing during the treatment of cancer, Schneider deposits in her autobiographical Writing My Way Through Cancer (2003) a collection of diary entries and verses, which was accompanied the following year by the publication of Multiplying the Moon (2004), a volume collecting the poems that were born out of the diary. Finally an example from Film Studies, Sur l’Adamant (2023) is a documentary where film director Nicolas Philibert observes through his camera how powerfully art therapy, community cooking and conversation sharing groups may change the life of vulnerable people who attend the barge on the Seine, purposely built in 2010 to host sessions and activities to support and validate the most fragile suffering from mental illness or trauma.
Il Pietrisco Prose launched a project which ran between March 2021 and April 2022 on the Facets of the Health Humanities, in collaboration with many expert researchers in various countries and universities. On researching the rich and variegated transdisciplinary field of the Health Humanities, which has emerged in the last twenty years, our project has explored a plethora of works and intersecting genres that pertain to the relationship between Corporeality, the Humanities, Sociology of Health and Illness, and Philosophy of Healthcare. Other unsuspected areas of interest and study have come to the fore next to poetry, prose and cinema: comics and graphic novels, theatre and performing arts, new models of medical architecture, disability and children’s literature, visual culture, palliative care and end of life care. And potentially there is a lot more to explore in connection with culture and identity areas such as class, gender, sexuality, migration, health care structures. All recordings of the seminars and lectures are available on the Il Pietrisco platform at the following link (scrolling down to works completed in 2022): http://pietrisco.net/Recordings-of-Events/.
In order to continue with the next phase of this project, the team has now decided to launch a call for academic articles to corroborate and create a strong basis to uphold the tenets of further research in the area of the Health Humanities in Anglophone, Francophone and Italian artistic expression (e.g. poetry, prose, cinema, theatre, visual arts, the performing arts) writing on the human condition and its intersection with illness, healing and healthcare. In this way the transdisciplinary field of the Health Humanities can reveal all its facets which still need to be researched in greater depth reaching wider echoes on what it means for a person to meet with the medical world, following also current methods and theories including gender and identity, adding also potentially a transnational dimension. This call will run parallel to a Call for Texts due to come out in late summer 2024, where we will welcome the submission of artistic work spanning various artistic, cinematic and literary genres.
For its Second Issue, Facets of the Health Humanities, Il Pietrisco invites scholars (both established, early career and doctoral students) to submit proposals for academic articles in any of the following Anglophone, Francophone and Italian genres (children’s literature, film — both fiction film and documentary—, graphic novel, poetry and prose in the Twenty-First century, in response to these research questions:
- corporeality and the encounter with the medical institution;
- the intersection between disability and the effects of identity;
- the perspective of doctors or patients on their own illness (also terminal);
- the formation of the new empathetic medical generation and new forms of medicine (also digital);
- the development of new hospital or hospice spaces to accommodate children, non binary persons, migrants and the elderly in the 21st century;
- the representation of disability and inequality in theatre and the performing arts.
Proposals in the form of an abstract must be sent to journal@pietrisco.net by 10th January 2025 and must be no longer than 300 words. Do include also a short biographical note (200 words).
Full articles must be received by 15th July 2025.
Articles will go, as normal, through a double-blind peer review and acceptance for publication will be received by 30th September 2025.
The Issue will be published on 30th December 2025.