Workshop on Health Futures

12 Oct 2026

Benjamin Dalton (University of Lancaster): “Do hospital futures need to include hospitals?”

AND

Lauren Dyll (University of KwaZulu-Natal): “Communicative Antifragility: Designing Futures That Grow Stronger from Disruption”

Tuesday 20 October 2026, 10-12

ORB, 1.24 or online via Teams

“Do hospital futures need to include hospitals?”

Benjamin Dalton, University of Lancaster

The hospital has occupied an intimate and highly ambivalent place within French thought. Michel Foucault, famous for his work on institutions and the power structures they inaugurate and maintain, painted a portrait of the hospital as a disciplinary mechanism of surveillance and control. Decades later, while not losing sight of the Foucauldian critique, contemporary French philosophers have glimpsed the other side of the coin: the hospital is a necessarily wild and untamed object which can also be a sight of transformation, resistance, even pleasure and joy. I have sought to demonstrate this elsewhere in tracing philosophical encounter with the hospital in the work of Catherine Malabou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paul B. Preciado, Anne Dufourmantelle, and others (Dalton 2021; 2023; 2024; 2025).

      This talk mobilises representations of hospitals across French thought, literature and film to ask the questions: what is the future of the hospital, and what if the hospital of the hospital is a future without hospitals? At what point in the transformation of the hospital does the hospital stop being a hospital? Why do we find it so hard to move beyond pervasive cultural and socio-political ideas of what a hospital looks like; and will we ever escape our addictions to the hospital? We will explore peri- and post-hospital futures in works from the documentaries of Nicolas Philibert to Natassja Martin’s Coire aux fauves (2019).

Dr Benjamin Dalton is Lecturer in French Studies in the School of Global Affairs at Lancaster University. His current research focuses on hospitals and hospital design, as approached through French and Francophone philosophy, literature, film; the medical and health humanities; and research in architecture and design relating to hospital pasts, presents, and futures. He has published multiple articles on the subject, including on clinical spaces in the work of Catherine Malabou (Essays in French Literature and Culture, 2021); on approaches to the hospital in the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Nottingham French Studies, 2023); queering hospital spaces in the work of Paul B. Preciado (Senses & Society, 2024); representations of transplant in French film, literature and theory (Film-Philosophy, 2024); the role of ‘gentleness’ in healthcare environment (Paragraph, 2024); and the use of bricolage and speculative design in hospital futures research (L’Esprit Créateur 2025, co-written with Madeleine Chalmers and Naomi Jacobs). He is currently working on a monograph on the subject. His co-edited book, with Áine Larkin, The Hospital in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures: Reimagining Healthcare Environments is under contract with Bloomsbury (expected 2027). He is also the author of Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

Communicative Antifragility: Designing Futures That Grow Stronger from Disruption

Prof Lauren Dyll, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Health futures are usually framed as prediction (forecasting the next crisis) or engineered change (designing the intervention that will fix it). This paper proposes Communicative Antifragility as a third approach. It is located within Communication for Social Change, where health communication is a significant strand, and it grows from my questioning of what "change" implies as the field's measure of success. Adapted from Nassim Taleb and developed through two decades of participatory action research with Indigenous and local communities in southern Africa, the concept asks whether a communication process leaves a community's wellbeing stronger than before, rather than merely restoring it or steering it toward a predetermined outcome. From Taleb, it takes the distinction between fragile systems (harmed by shocks), robust systems (unchanged by them) and antifragile systems (improved by them), and translates his mechanisms into design principles for communication: optionality and redundancy that keep multiple pathways open, participants with real stakes (skin in the game), and the removal of extractive practices (via negativa). This makes for improvised, speculative design that is multivocal, and that treats disruption as potentially generative rather than only damaging. The Mashishing Marking Memories Project shows this at work. COVID-19 produced digital training and wider community ownership because of the pandemic shock, not despite it, with durable gains in community wellbeing and knowledge resilience. By locating health in communities' own communicative practices rather than in institutions alone, the paper asks what health futures look like when communication is designed for strengthening rather than fixing or changing.

Professor Lauren Dyll is an NRF-rated Associate Professor in Cultural Studies, Media and Fine Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her research examines participatory social change communication, critical Indigenous methodologies, and the links between identity, knowledge production and cultural heritage, using a power-focused cultural studies lens. She contributes to the Rethinking Indigeneity project and leads Mashishing Marking Memories in Mpumalanga. From 2020 to 2022 she advised South Africa's health authorities on COVID-19 communication, and has published on Indigenous knowledge in health communication, including HIV prevention. She is South Africa's Country Leader for the Horizon Europe-funded REACT project on youth activism, Co-chair of IAMCR's Participatory Communication Research Section, and Co-editor of Critical Arts.

For more on this story contact:

caroline.williamsonsinalo@ucc.ie