The Leuven Center for Health Humanities fourth lecture series (2021-2022) on Patient Agency.

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The Leuven Center for Health Humanities is now an official KU Leuven interdisciplinary research center, and we proudly present our fourth lecture series (2021-2022).

The focus of this year’s series is on patient agency. To be a patient, it seems, is to be passive – ‘to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, as Hamlet had it. But that is not the whole story. Patients cope with their conditions and contribute to their recovery process; they dispute and help change medical knowledge and therapies; they form patient organizations; and they make sense of their diagnosis through personal stories and narratives. In doing so, patients exercise their agency.

Join us on campus and online for six interesting talks on this topic:

18 November 2021: anthropologist Patrick Devlieger on patient agency in a Congolese leprosarium.

9 December 2021: historian Rebecca Ayako Bennette on agency in traumatized German soldiers during World War I.

24 February 2022: religious health expert Deborah Lycett on agency and obesity.

17 March 2022: philosopher Lisa Bortolotti on epistemic agency in mental health care for young people.

21 April 2022: historian Ylva Söderfeldt on how patient organizations have contributed to medicine.

12 May 2022: literary theorist and neurodiversity expert Anna Stenning on narrative agency and autism.

All talks are held on Thursdays, from 4-5.30pm (CET – Central European Time). Please check the series website for more information – location, abstract, and speaker biography: https://ghum.kuleuven.be/LCHH All talks are free, but registration is required: https://ghum.kuleuven.be/LCHH/registration-lecture-series-2021-2022 If you attend the lecture online, you will be sent a Zoom-link some days before the event.

All welcome!

Pieter R. Adriaens, on behalf of the LCH² steering committee