Tucson Humanities Festival Will Explore Well-Being
In health and medicine, the humanities have a crucial role to play in cultivating wholeness for people, their families and their communities.
With a theme of "well-being," the University of Arizona College of Humanities' annual Tucson Humanities Festival in October will explore areas in which medicine and the humanities overlap.
"There are numerous areas for the humanities to collaborate with the health sciences, and we see the constant conversation between these disciplines as fundamental for fostering human flourishing," said Alain-Philippe Durand, Dorrance Dean of the College of Humanities. "Just as the body and the mind cannot be separated, nor can storytelling, culture and language be ignored for their influences on how we feel. The Humanities Festival will also consider broader contexts, like community and environmental well-being."
The festival will feature presentations by Dr. Andrew Weil, founding director of the University of Arizona Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Brandon Som, as well as a salon discussing faculty research and a student-oriented health humanities fair.
Coinciding with National Arts and Humanities Month, the Tucson Humanities Festival began in 2009 as Humanities Week and has grown into a monthlong series of guest speakers and special events.
"The humanities provide us with the perfect lens to examine all aspects of culture and lifestyle, and we know health and wellness is a topic that concerns everyone," Durand said. "We're pleased to continue this thought-provoking series with a theme that can address the breakthroughs of modern medicine, ancient rituals and traditions, and everything in between."