Medical Humanities in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: Technology, Medicine, and Death
Time: June 28, 2026 (Sun)
Place: Jonghapgwan 209, 210, 211, 311, College of Medicine, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea
08:00–08:45 Registration
08:45–09:00 Opening Remarks
09:00–09:50 Keynote Address
Professor In-sok Yeo MD PhD (Yonsei) PhD (Paris) Department of Medical History,Yonsei University College of Medicine, Korea
Medicine between Physis and Nomos
09:50–10:00 Break / Room Transition
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Parallel Session 1 (10:00–12:05)
Room A
Technological Promises and Medical Realities (Korean Society for Medical Anthropology)
Kwanwook Kim (Duksung Women’s)* - Health Screening in the AI Era: Technological Advances, Medical Validity, and Ethical Dilemmas
Hyeon Jung Lee (SNU) - Digital Companionship or Technological Surveillance: Godoksa and the Medicalization of Loneliness
Minoh Ko (Daegu Catholic) - Who Watches for Harm? AI and the Transformation of Clinical Vigilance in Medication Safety
Yura Park (SNU) - AI-Based Tuberculosis Screening in Practice: Care, Experience, and Human Interaction in Mongolia
Room B
Biopolitics, Mental Health and Relationality
Yi-Cheng Wu (Mackay Medical)* - Neuro-efficiency Governance: Urban Biopolitics and Mental Health of a Technopole in Taiwan
Im Kyung Hwang (Jeju National) - Immunopolitics in Tension: Between Death and Care in the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond
Momoko Katayama (Keio) - “Is It Me or the Anorexia?”: Navigating Agency and Recovery in Japanese Psychosomatic Medicine
Farid Bin Masood (SIUT, Pakistan) (pre-recorded) - Excavating Local Epistemologies from Two Plague Narratives of Colonial India
Saaya Yokoyama (Tokyo) - Print is Power: How Paperwork Reinvented Japanese Mental Health Peer Support
Room C
Death, Care, and Transformation
Jae-jin Jang (Tongmyong) - Death as Transformation: A Comparative Study of Asian Philosophical Traditions
Seok Joo Youn (Washington U) - Erased at the End of Life: Bureaucratic Care, Legal Kinship, and the Governance of Death in South Korea
Iulia Mihalache (U of Quebec) - Death as a Liminal Space Between Medical Precision and Human Emotion
Bo Hsu (National Dong Hwa) - Relatives in the Cloud: Digital Legacy and the Inquiry into New Forms of Healing
Haejoo Kim (SNU)* - Negotiating Patient Authority in I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
Room D
Medical Knowledge, Ethics, and Critique
Young-Chai Lim (Chonnam National) - Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: A New and Critical Look at Modern Medicine from a Humanistic Perspective
Li Ruixuan (Shandong) - The Codifiability Paradox of Medical Ethics: Sun Simiao’s “Great Physician” Ideal in the Age of AI
Sohee Che (National Museum of Ethnology, Japan)* & Su-ji Choi (Dong-eui) - Diagnosing the Cold Body: Clinical Practice and the Limits of Medicine
Daihun Kang (Ewha Womans) - From a Stab Wound to a Surgical Specialty: The Historical Development of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in Korea, 1884–2026
Yulu Chu (Ritsumeikan) - What Cannot Be Technologized: Tojisha-Kenkyu and Human Relationality in Psychiatry
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Parallel Session 2 (13:20–15:25)
Room A
Beyond Biomedicine: Critical Approaches (Korean Society for Medical Anthropology)
Kihoon You (Kyungpook National) - Making Workplace Suffering Legible: Medicalization and Diagnostic Hesitancy in Adjudicating Occupational Mental Illness in South Korea
Taewoo Kim (Kyung Hee)* - Ontological Politics or Political Ontology: An Examination of “Biomedicalization” with a New Materialist Reading of The Birth of the Clinic
Hyunkoo Kim (Semyung) - Weaving Heart and Mind: Sasang Heart-Mind Studies as an Indigenizing Project
Yeori Park (Hanyang) - Why Do Cancer Patients Hesitate to Ask Questions to Physicians? Factors Contributing to Limited Patient Involvement in Physician–Patient Communication in South Korea
Room B
Ageing, Responsibility, and Social Futures
Sachiko Horiguchi (Temple, Japan)* - Reimagining the Relationships between Family Ideologies, Welfare Policies, and Well-being in Contemporary Japan
Hyun-Chool Lee (Kunkuk) & Yechan Moon (Yonsei) - Aging, Care, and the Limits of AI: Stage–Regime Fit and the Experience of Dying in a Super-Aged Society
Kyusung Kim (SNU Hospital) - The Politics of the Body in Occupational Health: Worker Health Examinations in South Korea
Hiroto Hayashi (Kyoto) - The Making of Responsibility in Care: An Anthropological Perspective on Buurtzorg
Jeongin Lee (USC) - The Last Sense: Hearing, Care, and the Possibility of Being Heard at the Edge of Death
Room C
Bodies, Markets and Medicine
Etsuko Matsuoka (Nara Women’s), Keie Sou (Nara Women’s) & Setsuko Kamiya (Aichi Prefectural) - FemTech and Technological Birth: Women’s Choice under Neoliberalism in Japan
Chun Wang (Berkeley) - “Trans” Medicine: Gender-Affirming Medicine across Borders
Seonsam Na (Yonsei) & Hyunho Kim (Havest) - LLM Against the Market: Exploring the Use of AI-Based LLM Platforms Among Korean Medicine Physicians in South Korea
Kyoim Yun (Kansas) * - Templestay at the Intersection of Buddhism, Business, and Science in South Korea
Park Yunjae (Kyung Hee) - Not Only a Drink But Also a Medicine - Dual Identity Behind the Popularity of the Restorative Drink "Bacchus" in Twentieth-Century Korea
Room D
Algorithms, Care, and Humanity
SunHa Ahn (WHO)* - When Care Becomes Algorithmic: AI-Mediated Relationality and the Limits of Care
Paul M. W. Hackett (Suffolk) (pre-recorded) - Living with Bladder Failure in the Age of AI: An Autoethnographic Account of Embodied Medicine Beyond the Algorithm
Seong-gyoon Jeong (Yonsei) - AI Medicine and The Irreducibility of Death
Huixian Liu (Arizona), Huiyi Wang (Independent researcher) & Yanchen Zhang (Arizona) - Governing Breath on the Edge: Automated Respiratory Monitoring, Risk, and Care at High Altitude
Dongyue Xue (Renmin) - Algorithmic Reason and the Politics of Survival: Rereading Zhouhou Beiji Fang in the AI Age
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Parallel Session 3 (15:55–18:00)
Room A
Technologies and Rituals for (Self-)Management
Panel Chair: Makoto Nishi (Hiroshima)*
Zhang Xiaoqing (Hiroshima) - Reinterpreting the Body: Discursive Contestation and Body Politics in the Contemporary Manchu Shuìbiǎntóu Custom
Mariko Sakuragi (Sapporo Medical) - Sensing Sleep: The Expansion of the Realm of Self-Care through Wearable Monitoring Technologies
Yuki Tsujimoto (Shizuoka) - Toward a Medical Humanities of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Yuto Ikehara (Hokkaido) - Synesthesia, Laboratory, and a Novel: A Collaborative Research on More-than-scientific Inquiries
Room B
Resonant Care and Mediated Agency (Taiwan Society for Medical Anthropology)
Yi-Tsun Chen (TAIWAN Inc.) - Risks of AI Care: Eroding Humanity, Culture, and History of Human Intelligence and Societies in East Asia
Chia-hui Lu (Academia Sinica) - The Sensory Art of Attunement: Realigning Well-being through Taiwanese Spirit-Possessed Healing
Yueh-po Huang (Academia, Sinica) - Pilgrimage as a Cultural Form and Practice of Healing: The Lessons from Shikoku Henro in Contemporary Japan
Shao-hua Liu (Academia Sinica)* - The Ontological Turn in Later Life: Nature-Oriented Spirituality and Aging in Taiwan
Pin Wang (National Taipei) - Healing and Art Revealing: Artistic Interventions within Taiwan’s Community Aged Care
Room C
Agency, Mediation, and Personhood
Ryoko Takagi (Institute of Science, Tokyo) - The Paradox of Imperfection: AI Deadbots, “Subtractive Design,” and the Agency of the Bereaved in East Asia
Darren Tsz-Hin Fung (CUHK) - Graphic Ideology and Blind People’s Digital Literacy Practices in Hong Kong
Hosanna Fukuzawa (Johns Hopkins) - Learning to Become: Navigating Healthcare in Colonial Hokkaido, Japan
Youngsoo Kim (Kyung Hee)* - Scientizing Death: Forensic Medicine, Authority, and the Age of AI in Korea
Mitsuho Ikeda (Osaka) - Against Necropolitics II: Anthropological Zombie or Anthropology as Zombie Existence
Room D
Technology, Disability and Human Futures
Miyuki Suzuki (Institute of Science, Tokyo) - Navigating Long COVID during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan
Tegu Joe (Kyung Hee) - Can AI Authenticate End-of-Life Autonomy? Euthanasia, Life-Long Monitoring, and the Limits of Algorithmic Judgment
Hsuan-Ying Huang (National Yang Ming)* - Reading Emerging Adulthood on a Chinese Digital Platform
Kim Fernandes (Brown) - The Disabled Body as Technology
Noh Mi-Jung (Pusan National) - Signing for Another at the Edge of Risk: Surrogate Consent, Communication, and the Limits of Medical Decision-Making
