This year saw the launch of our AI and Medical Humanities research theme. In 2025/2026, we built an interdisciplinary network of humanities, social sciences, and computer science researchers, beginning locally at Durham before expanding to a multi-institutional and international community—reflected in our upcoming event, AI World-building and the Medical Humanities.
We began with a research generator event at the IMH, drawing colleagues from Geography, Philosophy, Anthropology, Religion, and Data Science. This identified key cross-cutting areas: AI ethics and health inequalities, how humanities approaches can illuminate health archives and stories shared with language models, and new forms of AI-enabled diagnosis and prognosis.
Building on this, we ran four online sessions with Durham-based and international colleagues to identify research sites and objects, covering the use of synthetic data in healthcare, the history of accuracy in medical imaging, benchmarks guiding AI diagnostic models, and healthcare products by leading AI labs, such as OpenAI's ‘ChatGPT Health.’
These conversations helped forge links with research centres at Linköping University and the University of Edinburgh, culminating in our conference on September 16th, AI World-building and the Medical Humanities, featuring a keynote from Ericka Johnson and panels including Durham members Angela Woods, Shauna Concannon, and Rebecca Jackson.
Beyond our own events, members contributed to related Durham research groups: attending the Measurement Heretics Workshop, which led to presenting original research on AI models for Alzheimer's Disease prognosis at the "Measurement and Models" symposium in Classics and Ancient History; and giving a talk to the AIHS group in Computer Science, "From Proxies to Replacements: Synthetic Data as Medical World-building," sparking discussion on the epistemology of generative AI models and practical tool-building approaches to help address for ethical concerns.
Having established this Durham-centred network, next year we aim to focus on supporting and generating research outputs on AI, Health, and Medicine—supporting our own publications alongside works-in-progress meetings where feedback and new collaborations can be explored.
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