The Culture, Health and Illness (CHaI) community is a living, breathing collective of thinkers, researchers, health practitioners, students, artists, and collaborators—brought together by a shared curiosity about how people experience health, illness, care, and healing in all their cultural and social complexity. 

We believe that illness is never experienced in isolation from the world around it. Culture—understood broadly as the values, language, practices, beliefs, histories, and social structures that shape our lives—is central to how people interpret symptoms, seek help, deliver care, and make sense of suffering. CHaI is shaped by the understanding that culture is not a side note in health—it is the context in which health and illness unfold. We explore questions that cut across disciplines and experiences: How is the body understood differently across societies? What are the cultural expressions of pain, suffering, and distress? How do people seek care, and how are they heard—or not—by the systems designed to help them? How does gender shape the experience of reproduction? How does migration complicate access to care? What does healing mean in a time of global pandemics, or under systems of neglect? 

Founded and led by Professor Lisa Dikomitis, CHaI is more than a network—it is a space of thoughtful exchange, of intellectual generosity, and of deep attention to the human experiences that are so often flattened in policy, practice, and statistics. At the heart of CHaI is a belief that research should not only interpret the world but walk with it—rooted in the voices, textures, and everyday realities of the communities it seeks to serve.  

We come together around a shared conviction: that health is never only biological, and that illness is always lived in context—shaped by histories, relationships, environments, and inequalities. In that spirit, CHaI was formed to create space for critical reflection, collaboration, and creativity between disciplines and beyond institutions. Our community is grounded in dialogue between the medical and the cultural, the clinical and the everyday, the local and the global. Whether exploring how pain is expressed, how suffering is named, how care is delivered—or denied—we aim to deepen our understanding of what it means to be well or unwell across different places and times. 

CHaI grew organically out of long-standing partnerships—formed in the field, the classroom, the clinic, and across a range of interdisciplinary research programmes, including ECLIPSE, SOLACE, ORI and INTERACT. Across these projects, students, early-career researchers, and collaborators from a range of backgrounds came together—and CHaI became the natural next step: a community for ongoing connection, reflection, and shared learning. Our members work at the crossroads of medicine, social sciences, health humanities, medical anthropology, psychiatry, public and global health. We are especially interested in how these disciplines can be in meaningful conversation—how anthropologists, clinicians, artists, and community partners can co-create knowledge that is not only rigorous, but rooted in lived experience and committed to social justice. 

CHaI exists to hold space for critical, creative and collaborative conversations and offers a home for those working on a wide range of themes: from cultural understandings of the body and doctor–patient relationships, to gender, reproduction, and cross-cultural psychiatry; from experiences of migration and global health inequity, to the rituals that accompany misfortune, and the politics of care. We are equally concerned with contemporary challenges—pandemics, neglected diseases, decolonisation, and the development of new and ethically engaged research methods. 

CHaI is not just a research group. It is a community of practice. We read together. We reflect. We co-create. We write across disciplines, teach across methods, and build bridges between theory and practice. It is a place for listening before speaking, for working across boundaries, for nurturing ethical and creative approaches to health and illness. We welcome those at all stages of their journey—students, seasoned scholars, healthcare workers, activists, artists, and all who care about the social and cultural lives of medicine.