Atholl Kleinhans reflects on how the Queer Medical Humanities PhD School helped him to find an “epistemological home” that embraced both his research and his multifaceted identity.
One of the author’s original paintings. AI was used to insert the heart and pen & book.
Finding My Academic Home in Queer Medical Humanities
Attending the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School 2025 at Durham University was a life changing experience for me. I had never imagined meeting such a diverse group of people, not only in the sense of our queer identities but also in terms of our geographical locations and the wide range of experience we brought with us. For the first time I felt safe in an academic space, and this was only the beginning.
One of the first questions posed to us during the opening session was “How do we want to be together in this space?”. This question was presented not as a formality, but as a meaningful invitation to co-create a space of care, accountability, and presence. It stayed with me. Later, during a small group discussion, I spoke candidly and perhaps for the first time in an academic setting about how my queerness shapes my research. The quiet affirmation that followed, the absence of discomfort or diversion, signalled something powerful: I didn’t need to fragment myself to be here. That moment was grounding. I felt seen intellectually, emotionally, and politically. I felt at home.
My interest in queer health professions research has both a professional and personal impetus. I am a lecturer in public health with a keen interest in finding ways to strengthen the public healthcare system, and I am also part of the queer community who wants to make healthcare better and fairer for everyone. I am currently reading towards a doctoral degree, and my research looks at what life is like for queer health professions students at South African public universities. I want to understand how they manage their identities in these places where they have come to learn, even as they might find themselves scrutinised or treated unfairly due to those identities.
The project is born out of years of witnessing, both as a student and as a queer academic and researcher, how LGBTIQ+ bodies are misrepresented and LGBTIQ+ topics are either sidelined or totally erased from health professions education, both in curricula and in classroom dynamics. My stake in this research is personal and political; it is about creating the kind of inclusive learning environments I needed as a student and strive to offer now as a lecturer.
Photograph taken by the author.
Coming from psychology, sociology, and global health, I often felt like I was weaving threads from different disciplines without a loom to hold them together. My work sat awkwardly between boxes, too theoretical for clinical audiences, too applied for social theory, and too political for public health. I remember feeling intellectually displaced, unsure where my research truly belonged. When I shared this with my PhD supervisors, they gently suggested I explore the medical humanities, a suggestion that shifted everything.
My knowledge and exposure to medical humanities was minimal before I attended the Queer Medical Humanities PhD School. I had come across the term in passing, often in relation to narrative medicine or ethics, but I hadn’t engaged deeply with it. It felt like a space adjacent to mine, not one I could claim. So, when my supervisors suggested it, I approached it with curiosity, but also uncertainty. I had no idea it would offer not just conceptual tools, but a language, and a community that helped me locate my work and myself.
The PhD School was about more than learning new research methods, it was a moment where I truly felt I belonged. In this space, I discovered an “epistemological home,” where the complex and political nature of my research was embraced rather than questioned. Queer medical humanities gave me fresh ways to think about data, ethics, bodies, and resistance. This experience has transformed how I approach my research and my identity as a scholar.
Queering Health Professions Education
We cannot train future healthcare providers without asking serious questions about who gets to belong, whose bodies and identities are recognised in the curriculum, and whose ways of knowing are centred or left out entirely. My research is driven by a desire to contribute to more inclusive, socially accountable healthcare, not just through adding content about LGBTIQ+ communities into curricula, but by interrogating the deeper norms, exclusions, and silences within our training systems.
I came to the PhD School, searching for tools—better language, sharper methods, perhaps even a way to write more freely. What I found was something deeper: a scholarly refuge. In the workshops, walking seminars, and moments between sessions, I encountered scholars, students, and artists asking questions that resonated with my own—not just about research participants, but about how we write, how we relate, and how we can be in academia. There, I realised that queer medical humanities is not just a field; it’s a space of possibility. It invites us to think otherwise, to honour messy and marginal lives, and to value the affective, the embodied, the incomplete.
When the Personal Becomes Political
South Africa’s 1996 Constitution was a landmark moment, one of the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation. Yet more than three decades later, the lived realities of LGBTIQ+ people in the country are still shaped by exclusion, inequality, and deeply rooted stigma. Universities, often seen as progressive spaces, continue to mirror broader societal prejudices. For many queer students, including those studying to become healthcare providers, campuses are not safe havens but sites of marginalisation.
As a queer academic working in public health and health professions education, I have long been aware of these tensions. My doctoral research is shaped by a broader political context: from apartheid-era laws that criminalised homosexuality, to the post-apartheid promises of transformation that remain unfulfilled. The 2009 Soudien Report (Soudien, 2008), the 2013 White Paper (Department of Education, 2013), and the 2015 #Fallist movements (Alves, 2017) all highlight how universities have struggled and often failed to create inclusive, socially just spaces. These efforts have focused mainly on race, language, and financial access while questions of gender and sexuality have been sidelined.
I was moved by the queer methodologies introduced to me at the PhD School, particularly autoethnography, which offered me a space to imagine as well as reclaim my voice within my research. Autoethnography is a way of doing research where the writer uses their own personal experiences to explore wider social, cultural, or political issues. It combines storytelling with academic analysis, allowing the researcher to reflect on their life in relation to the world around them.
Author’s original painting.
Among fellow critical scholars and creative thinkers, I discovered the “I” and the use of personal experience to understand cultural phenomena. For example, I wrote about my own discomfort sitting in faculty board meetings where “inclusion” was spoken of in abstract terms, yet no one in the room looked like me or shared my concerns. By reflecting on my own unease, silences, and moments of disconnection, I began to better understand how institutional cultures reproduce exclusion, even while ostensibly using the right language. Employing the “I” helped me turn those feelings into data, not just about myself, but about the structures we inhabit. I found a home where storytelling, vulnerability, and critique could sit alongside rigour. This helped me name the unease I have often felt in traditional public health spaces and offered a language for imagining an alternative where lived experience mattered.
Discovering the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School felt serendipitous. I remember reading the call and thinking, “This is it. This is what I’ve been searching for.” Attending the PhD school opened a new chapter in my research and academic identity. The sessions were deeply engaging, and I found myself particularly drawn to Queer Medical Humanities (QMH) a bold and emerging field that seeks to challenge the norms and binaries that structure medical knowledge and practice (Dalton & Ledin, 2024).
QMH offers a critical lens for understanding how identity, power, and pedagogy intersect in health professions education (Dalton & Ledin, 2024). It centres the lived realities and knowledges of those historically marginalised, including LGBTIQ+ students, and asks us to rethink what we teach, how we teach, and who is seen as belonging. It gave me not just a framework, but a sense of home.
Situating my work within QMH
When exploring the experiences of health professions students who self-define as LGBTIQ+, through a QMH frame, their experiences are not viewed as outliers but rather as the basis for understanding how medical knowledge is produced, embodied, and resisted. My experience of the QMH PhD School offered me an opportunity to sharpen the focus of my research. I am no longer just exploring curriculum gaps or discriminatory practices. I am asking: What kind of knowledge do queer students bring into the training of healthcare professionals? What would it mean to centre that knowledge not as an add-on, but as a legitimate way of knowing, teaching, and healing? Incorporating QMH into my PhD study allows me to explore how LGBTIQ+ students navigate their training environment, not merely as learners, but as active agents of epistemic change.The lived realities and stories of these participants allows us to reimagine health professions education as a space of critical engagement, care, and justice.
Photograph taken by the author.
About the author
Atholl Kleinhans is a health professions educationalist, public health practitioner, and health systems and policy specialist who teaches at the postgraduate level. His work is driven by a strong commitment to health equity, with a particular focus on how marginalised communities — including LGBTIQ+ populations — experience access to and exclusion from healthcare systems. @Athollk
References
Alves, SM. (2017). Exploring the development and implementation of health and support services in five South African higher education institutions for a key population, men who have sex with men. Doctoral dissertation. University of the Free State.
Benjamin, Dand & Ledin, C. (2024). “16 Queer Medical Humanities.” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 32, no. 1 (2024): 280-296.
Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). (2013). White Paper for Post-School Education and Training: Building an expanded, effective and integrated post-school system (As approved by Cabinet on 20 November 2013). Pretoria: DHET.
Soudien, C. (2008). Report of the Ministerial Committee on Transformation and Social Cohesion and Elimination of Discrimination in Public Higher Education Institutions. Department of Education, 2008. Ministerial Committee on Transformation and Social Cohesion and Elimination of Discrimination in Public Higher Education Institutions.
South African government. (1996). “Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996.” As adopted 704 (2020): 705.
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