Statement of Purpose

Dósis is an online blog and magazine dedicated to exploring the intersection of medical humanities and social justice. The web-only publication offers three issues annually featuring essays, commentary, and reviews clustered around a particular theme. In addition, the blog will run news and notes on relevant current trends in medical humanities and social justice.

About Us

Who are we? Brandy Schillace, founding editor, works in public engagement and outreach for museums, inviting a diverse audience to see themselves as partners  in a wider community. She also serves as Editor for BMJ’s Medical Humanities journal. The remaining staff come from varied backgrounds, but each of us have a commitment to issues of access.

Our authors and audience? We welcome submissions from students, volunteers, social justice warriors, queer theorists, public health policymakers, teachers, scholars, practitioners, patients, artists and Jane Q Public whose research or experience speaks to the relationship between medical humanities and social justice. We welcome every background, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation and creed. Though we welcome academic inquiry, we intend this magazine for a general reading public.  Contributors do not need an institutional affiliation or degree  to be considered.

What we offer? We created this platform to provide a space for voices not always heard in academic medical humanities, and further, to bring the discussion beyond the university and into lived experience. While Dósis is currently unable to pay its contributors, writers are given a byline and retain copyright and republication rights to all of their content. We welcome you, also, to be part of how we shape this project and our process.

Submissions

Dósis puts out three calls annually for contributions to our Winter/Spring, Summer, and Fall issues. These calls outline the theme for a given issue and provide specific deadlines for essay and commentary pitches as well as suggestions for works to review. Read Dósis online.

Dósis considers three types of submissions:

Essays are between 1000-1500 words in length and grounded in the writer’s area of scholarly expertise, work in the field, or experience as an activist. Essays may also be in conversation or interview format with a scholar or practitioner.

Commentary pieces are 300-500 words in length and are more informal opinion pieces that speak to current events and the issue’s specific theme. Commentary may also be reflection on an event such as a conference session or public lecture that is relevant to the issue’s focus.

Reviews are expected to be 500-750 words in length, providing an overview of the work, its goals, and the reviewer’s estimation of its success.

Cover Art submissions in all visual art formats are considered.

CFP: Health, Gender, and Embodiment

Thank you for your interest in writing for Dósis! The CFP for Summer 2018 is now CLOSED. Please stay tuned for a midsummer announcement of our theme for Fall 2018.

Did you enjoy this inaugural issue of Dósis? Please consider becoming a contributor! The theme for our Summer 2018 issue will be health, gender, and embodiment. To be embodied selves, tied to our human form in sickness and in health, offers unique challenges, physically, socially, psychologically, and culturally. Dósis seeks engagement across disciplines on topics concerning health, gender, and embodiment, but also on other aspects of embodied experience. Of particular interest: issues of access, acceptance, justice, and human rights.

We invite essays, commentary, reviews, and visual art that meditate on these themes. Our expectations are as follows:

Essays are between 1000-1500 words in length and grounded in the writer’s area of scholarly expertise, work in the field, or experience as an activist. Essays may also be in conversation or interview format with a scholar or practitioner.

Commentary pieces are 300-500 words in length and are more informal opinion pieces that speak to current events and the issue’s specific theme. Commentary may also be reflection on an event such as a conference session or public lecture that is relevant to the issue’s focus.

Reviews are expected to be 500-750 words in length, providing an overview of the work, its goals, and the reviewer’s estimation of its success.

Pitches for essays, commentary, and reviews will be considered on a rolling basis between now and 10 April 2018. Unless otherwise communicated by the assignment editor, first drafts will be due to your editor by 1 May 2018, editorial feedback will be provided by 15 May 2018 and final drafts will be due by 1 June 2018.

To pitch essays and commentary, please use our query form or contact our managing editor Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook at submissions@medhumdosis.com.

To pitch reviews of fiction, nonfiction, digital resources, and film/television works, please use our query form or contact our review editor Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook at reviews@medhumdosis.com.

We also seek art! If you are a visual artist, or know artists whose work may speak to this theme, please submit a reference image of your work to our managing editor Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook at submissions@medhumdosis.com.

And finally, we have a Patreon! Dósis is a blog and web magazine dedicated to marginalized voices in the medical humanities, we are committed to paying our contributors.  Patreon support will allow us to begin paying our contributors for their work while off-setting current operating costs, currently funded out of pocket by our editor-in-chief. Each successive goal in our Patreon campaign will offset a little more of our operating expenses while giving contributors a raise! We want to ensure Dósis a sustainable future. Become a patron of Dósis for as little as $1.00/month and help us pay our writers!