Staying Local, Thinking Global
The moment I jotted down this title, I realized how it appeared to jar against the backdrop of a world increasingly marked by regional conflicts, widespread distrust, and extreme conservatism.
Yet this is how I felt during my 6-week stay at Ghent as the CHARM chair in 2025.
CHARM stands for the Consortium for Health Humanities, Arts, Reading and Medicine, a delightful acronym that also doubles as a mission statement. It signals a global network committed to bridging humanities, medicine and care through an interdisciplinary lens, with a particular emphasis on ‘reading,’ the signature strength of Ghent’s Health Humanities group and, indeed, the fundamental method of the humanities in general.
My honor to be appointed as the CHARM chair allowed me firsthand insight into the network, its organizational processes, and the vibrant events held in Ghent and beyond. I met the CHARM team, had some lovely conversations, joined a few reading sessions, but the centerpiece was undoubtedly the Annual Season School in August. This three-day session, entitled ‘Literature and Culture as Practices of Care,’ was held at Museum Dr. Guislain, built on Belgium’s first insane asylum in 1857–in short, a perfect site for a health humanities gathering.
Each day featured two keynote speeches by distinguished scholars in the field and two panels of presentations from early-career researchers. Each keynote speech lasted about one hour, followed by a 30-min discussion. In the panels, each presenter had ten minutes to outline their work-in-progress project, followed by 30-min feedback from two experts, along with comments and questions from the group.
The program mirrored the trends shaping health humanities today. Long-standing themes from literature, philosophy, narrative, and reading were joined by emerging topics in graphic medicine, neurodiversity, media studies, digital storytelling, comparative linguistics, and more. All converged on a vision of care as a collaborative, lived, and creative act rather than merely a clinical prescription. Yet the medical voice was never sidelined. One practitioner’s testimony underscored the imperative for health humanities to forge bridges between the clinic and the academy.
This major event in August spoke eloquently to CHARM’s global outreach as it drew participants and speakers from institutions across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. Looking ahead, I was told that CHARM will continue to deepen partnerships around the world and particularly in the Global South. With the rise of medical/health humanities in the past decades, regional institutions have emerged to represent context-specific cases while also speaking to the broader human condition. Independent initiatives may be self-sufficient, but new ideas, creative projects, and interdisciplinary collaborations often arise from deep, in-person, committed exchanges. Although the age of AI promises barrier-free communication, the information cocoon it weaves can become yet another box that’s hard to escape. I suppose this is the meaning of CHARM: to build a network that becomes a hub for alternative possibilities.
Perhaps this is the true charm of CHARM. How did it affect me, then? There are many memorable moments, but one stands out when I felt ‘local’ in Ghent for the first time, tracing the city’s medieval landscape on a rented bike. The saying is that everyone in this third-most populous city in Belgium owns at least one bike. Even the Uber driver who took me to the train station proudly shared stories of his three bikes and the heroic wounds and injuries from his cycling adventures. This, and many other specific episodes, blended into my lived experience in Ghent. They reminded me that health is something daily, tactile, and communal, and that even amid global turbulence, the local pulse can set the pace for change.
What I’ve described above are abstract reflections. It is the concrete people here who turn ideas into actual presence. I want to thank the CHARM ‘gang’ in Ghent: Zeynep and Luna, I wish your projects all the success; Zoë and Jürgen, I know I’ve thanked you many times already but here is another one for bringing CHARM to life.