EMOTIONS IN MEDICINE, HEALTH AND WELLBEING
Date: 21st August 2025 – In Person
Registration details to follow
This research symposium at the University of Sydney and co-organised with the Shame and Medicine Project critically interrogates the role of self-conscious emotions in health, medicine, and well-being discourse. Emotions are not merely internal states; they are shaped by overlapping structures of power deeply influencing ethical theory and healthcare practice. Social hierarchies such as race, gender, class, caste, disability, and migration status shape how emotions are experienced and expressed. Emotions are not neutral but are entangled with systemic inequities—determining whose pain is taken seriously, whose suffering is medicalized or dismissed, and whose expressions of grief, anger, humor, humiliation, shame, or care are deemed appropriate or disruptive. By examining emotions through this lens, we uncover how they function as both tools of control and acts of resistance, shaping healthcare interactions, ethical norms, and the possibilities for more just and equitable forms of care.
How do emotions mediate moral evaluations and values in healthcare spaces? How do they reinforce or disrupt hierarchies of knowledge, authority, and care? Whose emotions are legitimized, and whose are dismissed as irrational or excessive? Symposium speakers will engage with these questions to uncover the ways emotions shape health outcomes, ethical affordances, and the broader politics of care, calling attention to how emotions operate within systems of power, marginalization, and resistance in healthcare.
Objectives
The symposium’s main objective is to initiate interdisciplinary discussion about emotions and values within healthcare debates, and its significance to ethical theory, practice and ethics education. A symposium such as this one will provide a unique opportunity for humanities, artists, healthcare professionals, and social research scholars to discuss the significance of emotions towards health, wellbeing and in general in medicine discourse.
We will explore the following questions in this symposium:
Confirmed Speakers
