The Humanities Center Announces Health as Its Annual Theme for 2022-2023

The Humanities Center aims to foster conversations around what it means to 'be healthy' and to care for health in a global sense. Throughout the year, speakers, roundtable discussions, podcasts, film screenings, and public exhibitions, and other events will invite people to grapple with issues of critical contemporary relevance, including the power dynamics at play in modern medical practice, the social and environmental determinants of health, and how individuals and communities seek to define and manage their own health in response to the circumstances they confront in their daily lives. The Humanities Center also hopes to bring people together around questions of how humanities disciplines might intersect with social and hard sciences to develop more humane and efficacious public health policy and practice.   

By fostering conversations around these topics, the Humanities Center hopes to encourage critical reflection on what it means to do a good and honest job caring for health at home in the Texas Tech community, and across the globe. Together, faculty and students will extend the humanities across campus and to the wider community and challenge the public to see health not simply as a technical problem in need of biomedical solutions, but also as a social process made and given meaning by people. Ultimately, the Humanities Center hopes this effort will empower people to reclaim (or perhaps claim for the first time) some agency over their own health and the health of their communities. As we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, this task seems especially urgent.