In this piece, Claudia Sterbini and Keiran Wilson challenge the medical humanities’ reliance on disciplinary hierarchies and call for a radical rethinking that dismantles, rather than crosses, boundaries. This piece is part of a collection of posts from attendees at the 2024 Medical Humanities International Summer School for PhD researchers in Vadstena, Sweden, coordinated by the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Linköping University, in collaboration with the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University.
We met at the 2024 Medical Humanities Summer School, an event designed to foster connections among PhD researchers from across the medical humanities. As scholars from completely different disciplines, this event provided us with a rare opportunity to connect and critically reflect on our respective positions within the academy. Our conversations naturally led us to express frustration with the medical humanities: a field that, to us, seems determined to reassert its revolutionary ambitions while relying on a narrow model of interdisciplinarity. Within the current disciplinary structure of academia, interdisciplinarity is most often conceptualised as (social) scientists adopting a methodological eclecticism—drawing on theories and methods from another discipline (usually the arts)—while maintaining “a strong disciplinary thrust” in their knowledge production (Klein 2017, 23).
Although there is also a push for interdisciplinarity from within the humanities, this push nonetheless reinforces the primacy of the (social) sciences as the dominant framework of knowledge production, with arts and humanities methods functioning as secondary supplements. In the academy, where scientific knowledge is generally favoured by institutions and funders, the sciences occupy a privileged position in the hierarchy of knowledge production. In the medical humanities, this dynamic is evident in the prioritisation of qualitative research methods that rely on interview-based interactions with patients, occasionally supplemented by creative or arts-based approaches.
These frustrations are not merely personal grievances; they reflect broader structural tensions within the field, with many other scholars in the medical humanities having voiced similar critiques. For instance, the 2016 Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities urged scholars to engage with a plurality of disciplines and, in particular, emphasised the need for more historically grounded work. In this edited volume, Fitzgerald and Callard (2016, 35–49) argued against tying the medical humanities to their “being useful to biomedicine”; instead, they called for “an entangled medical humanities” that challenges the assumed supremacy of scientific knowledge by recognising the mutual benefit of the sciences and humanities.
Since the publication of that collection nine years ago, the field has arguably progressed: it is now more common to see medical humanities scholars collaborating with clinicians to develop a more “entangled” understanding of medical categories. However, many of the structural imbalances remain entrenched: as Scott-Fordsmand (2023, 350) explains, “no matter if it is applied or integrative, critical supportive or reflective, all these articulations manifest a notion of medical humanities as acting mainly through pouring knowledge into medicine.” What remains absent is a model of interdisciplinarity that treats the humanities as epistemologically generative—capable of producing knowledge in their own right—rather than merely interpreting or illustrating biomedical frameworks.
This entrenched disciplinary hierarchy fosters a stark division within medical humanities research culture: you’re either a social scientist who uses arts and humanities methods, or an arts and humanities scholar who engages with medical topics. More often than not, only one group is privileged at a time—and it is the social scientists who usually come out on top. Those conducting contemporaneous, qualitative research occupy a dominant position in the medical humanities, often to the detriment of humanities scholars. In our experience, even in well-intentioned and supportive spaces such as the Medical Humanities Summer School, this disciplinary hierarchy is continually (re)produced. Researchers across fields are left feeling marginalised by a conceptualisation of medical humanities that is shaped by and for scholars committed to disciplinary orthodoxy. As a result, cross-disciplinary conversations about interdisciplinarity often become circular, revolving around vague goals like “breaking boundaries” or other agreeable truisms—rhetoric that seldom leads to an interrogation of the structures of knowledge production.
How, then, can we move forward? We argue that, before the medical humanities can meaningfully evolve, we must interrogate how our efforts to build an interdisciplinary field—one still fundamentally reliant on disciplinary logics—may be inadvertently reinforcing the very hierarchies we seek to challenge. As Mitova (2020, 191) describes it, the “call to dismantle this way of thinking and its self-arrogated hegemonic authority” constitutes a form of epistemic decolonisation. Our goal is no longer boundary-crossing—it is the dismantling of disciplinary hierarchy itself.
Importantly, transforming the dominant structures of knowledge production requires robust historical research into how contemporary disciplinary hierarchies have come to attain their current status. Recognising how the medical field has achieved its status over the last two centuries, and its co-dependence and co-construction at the crossing of the humanities, could provide a productive starting point. Prioritising humanities methods could also help unbalance medical humanities spaces: while this may only be a temporary solution, it could move the scale toward a broader recognition of the value of such research. This re-evaluation is especially urgent amidst increasing cuts to arts and humanities funding in UK higher education—cuts that not only reinforce the disciplinary hierarchy but also insist on deeming humanities methods as less “useful.”
As Valerie Peterson (2008, 42) warns, the current approach to interdisciplinarity risks undermining “more radical projects to reorganize academic study.” Ultimately, we need to view the medical humanities not as a restricted field to which different subjects are granted access through their disciplinary position, but as a broader, transformative project capable of challenging these boundaries, and reshaping our understanding of academia itself.
About the authors
Claudia Sterbini is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Her project, funded by AHRC through SGSAH, explores the construction of pathological asexuality in Victorian fiction. She has published on the challenges of medical humanities methods in The Polyphony and organised methodology exchange workshops. As Medical Humanities Project Assistant, she has helped revive the Edinburgh Health and Medical Humanities Network. She tweets at @ClaudiaSterbini.
Keiran Wilson is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. His research, funded by the AHRC via the Consortium for the Humanities and Arts Southeast England Doctoral Training Partnership (CHASE DTP), examines the role carceral logic plays in shaping contemporary psychiatric systems in the UK, with a particular interest in queer experiences of hospitalisation. He also embodies his critical perspectives toward disciplinary boundaries as an Associate Lecturer in Psychology and Criminology. Find him on X @thekeiranwilson or Bluesky @keiranwilson.bsky.social.
References
Fitzgerald, Des, and Felicity Callard. 2016. “Entangling the Medical Humanities.” In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, 35–49. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0001.
Klein, Julie Thompson. 2017. “Typologies of Interdisciplinarity: The Boundary Work of Definition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 2nd ed., edited by Robert Frodeman, 21–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198733522.013.3.
Mitova, Veli. 2020. “Decolonising Knowledge Here and Now.” Philosophical Papers 49 (2): 191–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/05568641.2020.1779606
Peterson, Valerie V. 2008. “Against Interdisciplinarity.” Women and Language 31 (2): 42–50.
Scott-Fordsmand, Helene. 2023. “Reversing the Medical Humanities.” Medical Humanities 49 (3): 347–60. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2019-011745.
