Artists, academics and practitioners in conversation about pressing South African health questions. 

The study of health and illness raises questions at the very heart of our humanity: questions of how we live and die. Health is neither a purely medical, nor a purely biological question. Instead, it holds profound implications for our social lives, surfacing patterns of power and privilege, puzzles of mind and body, as well as practices of care and healing. Studies of health and illness have significant instrumental value for us all: helping us to advance justice, improve lives, inform policy, and stave off suffering. But they also hold intrinsic importance. To investigate illness is to force a confrontation with human fragility: it is to wrestle with the fact that human life, with all its ingenuity and imagination, is lived within the constraints of a body.

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Despite the importance of biomedicine and clinical innovation, there is growing acknowledgement that technical solutions alone cannot address health questions. South Africa’s ‘quadruple burden of disease’ is characterised by colliding epidemics, each rooted in social conditions, and with profound social implications: HIV/TB, maternal and child mortality, noncommunicable diseases and violent injury. Health workers bemoan the limitations of their interventions, biological data leaves many questions unanswered, and addressing health systems has become an increasingly salient focus. A holistic understanding of the conditions that produce ill-health, or support healing, will yield more significant (and more lasting) gains.

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Although interdisciplinarity is increasingly sought after in fields of health and illness, there are reasons researchers find it difficult to achieve: from how research is valued and evaluated, to the ways in which funding is structured, and incentives to specialise early. More so, attempts at interdisciplinarity have often stopped at multidisciplinary — involving a series of disconnected contributions from different disciplines. This JIAS workshop provides an opportunity for researchers, practitioners, artists and the public to engage in genuine collaboration, that combines and transcends disciplines.