The Polyphony publishes the most exciting work in the medical and health humanities: our aim is to capture, celebrate and extend the diversity of voices which together make up this interdisciplinary field of research, creative and clinical practice.  

The broader community of practitioners, researchers, and experts by experience who gravitate around the medical humanities are invited to help make this platform a site of discussion and dissent, enquiry and engagement, collaboration and critique.  

We welcome the political and passionate alongside the scholarly and contemplative; the review alongside the provocation; the podcast, fragment or graphic intervention alongside more traditional essays and posts. 

There are a number of different ways to get involved:


Short articles and blog posts

We welcome articles written in clear English which make stimulating and rigorous medical humanities perspectives available to a wide readership.  

We invite articles on an topics relevant to the medical humanities, especially in the form of case studies, conceptual overviews, project findings, reflective practice, and critical readings. 

We also encourage submissions that align with our emerging themes:

1) MedHums 101
Exploring foundational concepts within critical medical humanities scholarship

2) Polyphony Meets China
Exchanging intercultural medical humanities between China and the UK

3) Multilingual MedHums
Creating space(s) for medical humanities across language(s) and linguistic structures

4) Environment, Ecology and Climate Crisis
Attending to the intersection(s) of global climate crisis and the medical humanities

 

Reviews

We regularly post reviews of books, conferences, exhibitions and workshops that fall within the broad remit of the medical humanities, and we are always on the lookout for new reviewers and recommendations.

We retain a small number of books which are available for review. In addition, we actively encourage contributors to suggest books, exhibitions or events which they could then review for us on The Polyphony. We have strong connections with various academic presses, and we are often able to source complimentary review copies of books for contributors. 

We are also happy to happy to consider any book that falls within the broad remit of the medical humanities for review on The Polyphony. Our selection of reviewers aims to solicit opinions from within and beyond the authors’ own academic discipline. If you are an author or publisher would like to propose a book of your own for review, please contact our Reviews Editor or get in touch through our online form.


Alternative formats, podcasts and multi-media

We actively encourage alternative blog formats: in addition to single-authored essays and reviews, we also publish interviews and conversations, curated collections of themed-content (in the form of Polyphony ‘takeovers’), and audio and multimedia posts. Our editors will be happy to discuss your ideas with you.


Republishing

Content on The Polyphony is produced under a CC BY 4.0 license. This means you are free to copy and redistribute the material on The Polyphony in any medium or format, as long as you:

  • Credit The Polyphony and the author (including a link to the page where the content was originally published)
  • Note if you have made any changes to the original content
  • Provide a link to the CC BY 4.0 license

Example:

Dan Goodley and Kirsty Liddiard, ‘Disability Matters: Thinking critically about equality, diversity and inclusion’, The Polyphony, March 2023. Content available under a CC BY 4.0 license.

To help us keep track of the use of our content, if you republish a post from The Polyphony it would be great if you could email us to let us know.


Lived Experience Contributors

We warmly invite contributions to The Polyphony from people with lived experience of complex health conditions and small bursaries are available to support those who might not otherwise be able to contribute. For more information on this scheme, please contact Victoria Patton.


If you would like to contribute to The Polyphony please first read our Guidelines for Contributors and then submit your ideas using our contact form.