The PJMH: The Postgraduate Journal of Medical Humanities 

Call for Abstracts 2024

Mental Health, Medicine, and Meaning: Insights from the Medical Humanities

The PJMH: The Postgraduate Journal of Medical Humanities, based at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Medical History, is accepting abstract submissions for articles and book reviews for its tenth edition ‘Mental Health, Medicine, and Meaning: Insights from the Medical Humanities’. We welcome original articles and book reviews that engage with any aspect or interpretation of this theme. In recent years, discussions surrounding mental health have rightfully become more open and frequent both inside and outside of academia. This timely edition of the journal proposes to use the lens of the Medical Humanities to explore how – to use modern terminology – ‘mental health’ has been/is experienced, understood, and treated in the past and present day.

Topics of interest might include, but are not restricted to:

• Ageing and Loneliness
• Anti-Blackness and Racial Equity
• Beyond Institutionalisation
• Border and Boundaries
• Care Work
• Climate Crisis
• ‘Critical Caste Studies’
• Disability
• Embodiment
• Experimental Poetry
• Hearing Voices
• History of Emotions
• Indigenous Studies and Decolonial Thought
• Mad Studies and Mad Pride
• Memoir and Autobiography
• Migrant, Displacement and Migration Studies
• Neurodiversity
• Patient Voices / Approaches ‘from below’
• Psychoanalysis
• ‘Recovery’ Narratives and Temporality
• Shame, Stigma, Sanism • Social Media / Digitisation
• Space and Place
• Spirituality and Alternative Medicine
• Visual and Material Culture

Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. Successful abstracts will form the basis for original articles/book reviews which will be due for submission in mid-February 2025.  Articles should be between 5000 and 8000 words, including footnotes and bibliography, and book reviews should be between 500 and 1000 words. Please refer to the MHRA Style Guide for style requirements and use British spellings except for direct quotations that use alternative spellings. Please email any questions or submissions as Word attachments to pgmedhums@gmail.com.

The deadline for abstract submissions is Friday 13th December 2024 at noon.