TY - JOUR T1 - Workfare and the medical humanities: a response to Lynne Friedli and Robert Stearn JF - Medical Humanities JO - J Med Humanit SP - 48 LP - 49 DO - 10.1136/medhum-2015-010701 VL - 41 IS - 1 AU - Sarah Atkinson Y1 - 2015/06/01 UR - http://mh.bmj.com/content/41/1/48.abstract N2 - Interdisciplinary engagements of medical humanities have done much to expand our understanding of ill-health and the promotion of good health beyond the purview of a biomedical gaze. Nonetheless, the field has tended predominantly to speak back to the practices of medicine and the policies of public health. The emergence of a ‘critical’ medical humanities that is reflected through the papers in this special issue opens a broader field of enquiry that can interrogate how those mobilisations of evidence, practice and therapy inherent to a biomedical gaze infuse and inform aspects of life well beyond the formal reach of the health sector. Such aspects include the social norms that shape our understanding of ourselves and where we locate responsibility for our bodies and our lives, which, in this powerful paper by Lynne Friedli and Robert Stearn,1 include the self-management of attitudes constituting a distinctive politics of personality and well-being.Well-being is one of those terms, like motherhood and apple pie, imbued with a sense of being always and uncontestably a good thing, a condition of some sort that is inherently the desire and pursuit of humanity. The last decade has witnessed … ER -