In literary studies, setting is never merely backdrop. Think of 124, the house where Morrison’s Beloved opens: “it was spiteful, full of a baby’s venom.” We are set almost before anything else. Setting might be a character, a history, a view, a texture, an ambience, a vibe—location, zip code, geography, home, a literary or figurative time and place, scene, emotional terrain, memory, environment, experience. The word conjures a seemingly infinite variety of thoughts, feelings, and ways of connecting to our individual selves, family, friends, colleagues, wider communities, other species, and the planet we call home. We can set down roots and feel uprooted by political or social upheaval. We can set goals and be beset by obstacles. We can feel set in our ways or satisfied and settled in our place, history, and culture. We can reach a settlement in a dispute, or we can reach and set out to forge new ground. 

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Setting is a constitutive force—shaping perception, organizing experience, structuring narrative possibility, and distributing power. It is a geographical location with a topography that has historically determined what can be grown or caught, thus influencing our labor and diet. As the famous phrase from As You Like It goes, “All the world’s a stage,” in its ubiquity, suggests that when we set the stage, we are setting the stage for life, individually and collectively, a social network, a place where dramas unfold, experiences are collected, lives are lived and lost. How do we find our place, a setting that feels right? Does it find us? And how does our setting in the world influence health outcomes and disparities? And how might the right kind of attention to setting help enact health justice?  

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Through practices of close reading and historical analysis, attention to form, and sensitivity to voice and perspective, literary scholarship reveals how places are made legible, contested, and felt. The critical medical humanities, in turn, gains from these methods a richer account of how health and illness are narrated, spatialized, and governed. 

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Who is authorized to describe a place? From what vantage point? By what language, genre, or archive is that place produced? Literary scholarship attends to the ways environments—clinical, domestic, carceral, digital, ecological—are mediated through narrative form. It illuminates how metaphors of place (“home,” “border,” “frontier,” “zone”) condition what can be known about bodies, communities, and care, and how those metaphors travel across policy, medicine, and everyday life. Setting names both a material geography and a narrative construction. Literary analysis foregrounds how these layers accumulate: how a neighborhood appears differently across genres; how displacement alters not only location but narrative voice; how archival silences and repetitions mark the limits of representation. Such work helps us see how wellness and illness are not only measured but storied—and how those stories can naturalize inequity, on the one hand, or make it newly visible on the other. 

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Across the medical humanities, attention to setting clarifies how environments shape exposure, risk, and care. Yet understanding the literary function of place contributes something distinctive: a refined account of mediation. It asks how the clinic works as setting, how a CT scan is an embodied experience in space, how health information means different things in different places, how digital technology creates settings both universal and intensely particular, how epidemiological maps script populations, and how zip codes determine health outcomes. It tracks the rhetoric of “place” in policy documents, and in how we feel and describe our bodies and the poetics of place in memoir, fiction, poetry, and drama—revealing the interpretive frames that organize our understanding of health justice. 

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People have always lived in particular settings, and have always moved—voluntarily or not—to new ones. With such travel or flight, physical, mental, and emotional settings shift over short and long spans of time. As we examine displacement, with more refugees on the planet now than at any other moment in human history, we must reckon with the local, national, and international conditions that drive people from their homes, and with their efforts to find stability somewhere new. In a climate of cutbacks to health and human services, we must weigh the cost to those already most marginalized, and ask how literary and humanistic attention might help countervail such threats. 

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This year’s theme connects our first, “Lore,” to its successor, “Networks”: setting is central to the stories we tell, and the networks through which we communicate furnish the context—the setting—in which those stories unfold. We remain particularly concerned with how healthcare is disseminated and accessed across this diverse, disparate urban setting—Washington, DC and its surrounding cities—for displaced people who find themselves here and for marginalized communities that have called this place home for generations. What is it about this setting that roots us? How does it nourish us, the source of our nutritional and spiritual sustenance? 

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This theme invites work that reads settings as active sites of meaning-making and struggle. We are particularly interested in discourses that engage the following: 

• Narrative form and spatial imagination: How do genre, voice, temporality, focalization, and scale shape the representation of health and place? 

• Archives, testimony, and counter-narratives: How do literary texts and methods recover, contest, or reconfigure marginalized histories of place, including those shaped by displacement, migration, and environmental injustice? 

• Rhetorics of care and governance: How do policy discourses, clinical documentation, and public health communications construct “settings” and populations—and with what consequences? 

• Embodied environments: How do texts render the entanglement of body and place—through disability, chronic illness, toxicity, climate crisis, and multispecies relations? 

• Digital and virtual spaces: What kinds of care, surveillance, or community emerge in online medical settings, and how do literary forms help us interpret them? 

 

To consider setting as a verb is to attend to agency: how are research questions framed, how are stories positioned, how are publics addressed? Where do we place our analytic attention, and to what ends? How might literary scholarship help set new terms for health justice—by reframing narratives, re-scaling attention, and amplifying voices too often excluded? 

 

As a Center based in Washington, DC, we are also attentive to the city as a layered text—an urban setting marked by profound inequities in health outcomes across neighborhoods, the concentration of federal power, and the presence of migrants and refugees. Literary approaches can help us read these conditions as data points and as narratives with histories, genres, and audiences that are open to critique and transformation and, ultimately, help us deepen, complicate, and reorient the study of health, illness, and care.  

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