Developing Disability-Focused Pre-Health and Health Professions Curricula.

People with disabilities (PWD) comprise a significant part of the population yet experience some of the most profound health disparities. Among the greatest barriers to quality care are inadequate health professions education related to caring for PWD. Drawing upon the expertise of health professions educators in medicine, public health, nursing, social work, and physician assistant programs, this forum showcases innovative methods for teaching core disability skills and concepts grounded in disability studies and the health humanities.

Centering Patients, Revealing Structures: The Health Humanities Portrait Approach.

This paper introduces an innovative curricular approach-the Health Humanities Portrait Approach (Portrait Approach)-and its pedagogical tool-the Health Humanities Portrait (HHP). Both enable health professions learners to examine pressing social issues that shape, and are shaped by, experiences of health and illness. The Portrait Approach is grounded in a set of "critical portraiture" principles that foster humanities-driven analytical skills.

Critical Healing: Queering Diagnosis and Public Health through the Health Humanities.

This introduction provides an overview to a special issue on Critical Healing, which draws on queer theory, disability studies, postcolonial theory, and literary studies to theorize productive engagements between the clinical and cultural aspects of biomedical knowledge and practice. The essays in this issue historicize and theorize diagnosis, particularly diagnosis that impacts trans health and sexuality, homosexuality, and HIV/AIDS transmission. The essays also address racialization, disability, and colonialism through discussions of fiction, film, theoretical memoir, and comics, as well as biomedical discourse and knowledge.