London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: Call for Chapter Contributions

Call for chapter contributions:

Public Health Humanities: tools for learning and practice

We invite proposals for contributions to a new ‘toolkit’ (or textbook) for learning and practice in the field of public health humanities. The toolkit will contain guidance for practical activities that develop or deploy humanities skills for public health, and will be published as an interactive e-book and in print.

Public health humanities brings the theories, methods, and resources of humanities, social sciences and arts disciplines into conversation with the core activities and frameworks associated with public health. This means that approaches from fields including literature, creative writing, visual arts, history, anthropology, sociology and philosophy engage with public health concepts including health promotion, disease prevention, health protection, emergency preparedness, population health assessment, screening, social determinants of health, and health inequities.

This toolkit will provide ideas and resources for public health researchers, practitioners, educators, and learners who want to integrate the humanities into their work. Suitable for those with little or no background in the humanities, it will share exercises and activities for readers to deploy in their daily public health practice, or to incorporate into more formal learning spaces for public health training. It will also signpost resources for deeper engagement with specific topics. The aim is to equip current and future public health experts with skills, strategies, and ways of knowing from the humanities to apply to their work.

One-page proposals for contributionsare welcomed from scholars, teachers, or practitioners anywhere in the world, with backgrounds in arts, humanities, social sciences or public health. Proposals should include:

• a brief summary of the activity/ies or exercise(s)
• whether it works best ‘in the field’, in the classroom, or both,
• and an indication of the skills that it will develop.

When submitting, you will also be asked to select from a list of options to indicate which area(s) of arts/humanities/social sciences your contribution deploys; and which area(s) of public health it engages with. You can see the options here on the submission form.

Innovative formats or modes of presentation (such as graphic treatments) for the one-page proposal are welcome and encouraged. Please submit your proposals via this form. If you have any problems submitting the form, please get in touch.

Deadline for proposals: September 30th, 2025.

Provisional deadline for full drafts: May 29th, 2026.

We envision that each final contribution in the toolkit will include information about the skills or competencies that the activity will develop; the time, resources, and pre-existing knowledge required; the context in which the activity could be applied; suggestions for further reading or deeper engagement; as well as an easy-to-follow account of the activity itself. As with the initial proposal, innovative modes of presentation are encouraged, and there is therefore some flexibility as to length and format of each final contribution.

Informal enquiries are very welcome: please email savita.rani@usask.ca and/or janet.weston@lshtm.ac.uk

Public health humanities reading group

Are you interested in joining an informal reading group, to discuss new or key texts and to meet other folks interested in public health and the humanities?

All welcome to join our new reading group, which launched in May 2024. Spring 2025 meetings will be held on:

• Tuesday 18 February (for discussion: episode 1, What The Pox)
• Tuesday 1 April (for discussion: Pointing the Finger by Jacqueline Rose

Meetings will take place online at 16.00-17.00 UK time. To find out more, please get in touch with Conor Macis and Gabriel Lawson.

Teaching arts and humanities in public health: working groups

Small working groups are developing resources for arts and humanities education in public health. If you’re interested in this, please email Janet Weston. 

If you’d like to stay up to date with news of future activities and events, please join our mailing list!

Conferences and networking

We held a wonderful two day conference in 2024 in partnership with the Danish Institute of Advanced Study (and you can read more about that here). We would love to follow this up with more opportunities for meeting and sharing ideas and research in future. If your institution would be interested in hosting a meeting, or if you would like to organise something similar, please do get in touch via email: janet.weston@lshtm.ac.uk.