Poetics as Bioethics

The symposium “Poetics as Bioethics” takes place at Ito Campus, Kyushu University from 16 to 18 September 2026. The symposium brings together an interdisciplinary group of seventeen scholars and practitioners to explore how poetic and creative practices function as forms of ethical engagement with life, health, and relational care. Across diverse institutional contexts—including universities, hospitals, community programs, and arts initiatives from Australia, Belgium, South Korea, the United States and Japan—the contributions collectively argue that poetics is not merely aesthetic, but materially implicated in processes of wellbeing, healing, and ethical reflection.
Several presentations highlight applied arts and health contexts, showing how poetry writing, shared reading, and collaborative authorship support wellbeing in rehabilitation, defence, and community settings. These practices enable participants to articulate memory, process trauma, and rebuild identity, often extending care beyond clinical frameworks into collective, creative spaces.
A second strand rethinks authorship and narrative authority. Contributions emphasize distributed and assisted writing, as well as autobiographical and translanguaging practices that give voice to marginalized experiences. These approaches reveal how ethical understanding is shaped through embodied, affective, and socially situated narratives, particularly in contexts of illness, inequality, or legal struggle.
Further perspectives address aging, grief, crisis, and multispecies relations, demonstrating how creative engagement fosters cognitive health, resilience, and expanded ethical awareness. Intercultural studies underline the value of interpretive diversity as a resource for dialogue and learning.
Overall, the symposium positions poetics as a vital, practice-based bioethics—one that redefines care and ethical responsibility through creative, relational, and transformative acts.