Autobiographical accounts of advanced cancer (Stages 3–4, local and/or distant spread) authored by humanities scholars blend experiential narrative with documentation, theoretically informed analysis, and cultural critique. Autobiographical writing about cancer has proven particularly valuable for documenting distinct challenges and resiliencies faced by minoritized cancer patients for whom “the clinic” is rarely culturally attuned or neutral. For minoritized humanities scholars, cancer pathographies become critical sites of resistance, pedagogy, and public health activism.

Oncologists refer to “dirty margins” to signal the persistence of cancer cells beyond a defined boundary. Advanced cancer patients often feel out of place in cancer cultures symbolically organized around a cure. Accordingly, we ask: within what might be construed as the catastrophic conditions advanced cancers confer on scholarly work, what value remains in the humanities methods - deep reading, documentation, critique and analysis? Do these cartographic, pathographic methods hold specific utility for minoritized scholars, who, over a lifetime, have honed critical toolkits aimed at rewriting the world and rethinking the unjust algorithms that define alterity?

Minoritized scholars (race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or other intersecting structures of marginalization) frequently navigate epistemic exclusion—where our ways of knowing and being remain unrecognized in both academic and clinical settings. As scholars, we often inhabit what might be termed the “dirty margins” of institutional life, paying a high cost for affirming knowledge generated from cultural peripheries.

This themed issue features autobiographical accounts authored by minoritized humanities scholars living and working with advanced cancer; pathographies that invite deeper exploration of critical epistemic counterpoints to dominant clinical paradigms, complicate biomedical discourses, and open space for reimagining how illness, identity, power, and care are conceptualized and practiced.

Potential themes include (but are not limited to):

·       Embodied Knowledge and Insider-Outsider Tensions

·       Structural Violence and Cancer Care

·       Aesthetics of the Margins

·       Care Beyond the Clinic

·       Queering Cancer, Cripping the Clinic

·       Temporalities of Illness and Death

·       Decolonizing the Oncological Gaze

·       Cancer, Academia, and Labor

·       Witnessing, Archiving, and Narrative Ethics

·       Technologies of (In)visibility

We welcome diverse contributions, including creative and poetic formats. Please contact us to discuss innovative submissions (mary.bryson@ubc.ca).

Submission Guidelines

Abstract submission

We invite the submission of abstracts, which will be reviewed as the first stage of the process. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be invited to submit a full article.

Please submit your abstracts to mary.bryson@ubc.ca by October 1 2025.

Full paper/article submission

The deadline for submissions (final articles) is March 1 2026.

Submissions should be written in accessible language for a wide readership across and beyond the humanities. Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style. Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal. 

All submissions should be made through the Public Humanities online peer review system. 

Authors should consult the journal’s Author Instructions prior to submission.

All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission. See the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information.  

Contacts

Dr. Mary Bryson, mary.bryson@ubc.ca & Dr. Bryant Lin, bylin@stanford.edu

Questions regarding peer review can be sent to the Public Humanities inbox at publichumanities@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com.

Guest Editors

Dr. Mary K. Bryson is Professor, Department of Language and Literacy Education, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, and most recently, Academic Director of UBC’s Public Humanities Hub. Dr. Bryson’s scholarly trajectory aims to advance knowledge concerning OncoHumanities, biographical knowledge and critical literary theory, academic freedom and collegial governance, queer and trans theory and posthumanist digital ontologies. At present, their advanced lung cancer diagnosis has inspired a critical engagement with reading humanistically, various models of cancer education, including in particular, their own letters written to members of their cancer-care team, reports and episodes of the first cancer-focused educational television series, Tactic, produced by the American Cancer Society (1959). 

Dr. Bryant Lin, MD, is Professor, Med/Primary Care and Population Health, Stanford University. Dr. Lin is a primary care physician, researcher, educator, and humanist at heart. At Stanford, Dr. Lin co-founded the Center for Asian Health Research and Education (CARE), directs the Medical Humanities and Arts program, and leads innovative courses like "Storytelling in Medicine" and "Generative AI and Medicine." While living with Stage 4 lung cancer, Dr. Lin recently created and taught a humanities-based course shaped and infused with his own experiences of advanced cancer both as a patient and as a physician.