Hospital Encounters: Mobilities of Care and its Literary and Visual Cultures across Turkey, Europe, and north America
Video Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Merve Sen
Exhibition Number 526
Abstract
In this presentation, I’m introducing and giving an overview of my dissertation project titled Hospital Encounters: Mobilities of Care and its Literary and Visual Cultures Across Turkey, Europe and North America. In the dissertation, putting literary, film, and visual studies in conversation with health humanities and technology studies, I examine literary and visual materials from the late 1960s to the early 2020s that consider and experiment with the hospital as a sensory and material environment. The axis of the dissertation is Turkey, but Europe and North America are the two adjacent areas. The engagement with the hospital from an aesthetic perspective complicates the conventional reliance on objectivity and medical gaze, questions the boundaries between medical, literary, and cinematic genres, reveals how medicine is a social phenomenon, and helps to imagine an ethics of care which is distinct from today’s biopolitical management of health and the neoliberal dicta of individuality and efficiency.
Importance
This dissertation aims to contribute to the global health humanities scholarship and complicate the divide across medicine, literary, and film studies. Firstly, bringing Turkey into scholarship complicates the North-South and East-West paradigms embedded in Global Health Humanities scholarship. I work towards uncovering the neglected contributions of Turkish writers and artists to Western literatures of health during the late Cold War era. Given the radical transformation of Turkey since the 1990s, the project also offers a contribution to histories of neoliberalization and healthcare. Although hospitals and medical technologies are among the research interests of medical history, anthropology, and sociology, in film and literary studies, their consideration is limited to setting, plot, or theme. Acknowledging the existent literary scholarship, this project gestures towards an understudied area: a hospital-oriented literary criticism and visual cultural study. I also offer The Hospital Genre in order to reconfigure the hospital in visual culture.