Concept note · August 2026
Taking seriously what medicine cannot re:solve.
existentials/ˌeɡzəˈstenCH(ə)lz/
plural noun. After the German Existenzialien. The basic structures through which a human life is lived and understood.
01 — The lab
existentials:LAB is an international scholarly collective for existential inquiry in healthcare and health professions education, affiliated with the Wilson Centre and The Institute for Education Research (TIER).
We study how clinicians make meaning of problems that cannot be re:solved, only worked with: finitude, uncertainty, freedom, and belonging. We bring phenomenology, critical theory, and existential psychoanalysis to bear on how practitioners are formed, on how institutions absorb what they cannot resolve, and on the interpretive methods this work requires.
02 — Our goals
I — Our core research
Advance knowledge about how meaning is made
In the face of finitude, uncertainty, freedom, and belonging.
II — Our core practice
Develop and legitimate interpretive methods
Adequate to existential phenomena in health professions education.
III — Our core value
Take seriously what medicine cannot re:solve
The conditions that shape illness and care most cannot be re:solved. They can only be worked with.
03 — Our starting point
Clinical medicine is organised around problems that can be solved, and its education, its metrics, and its pathways of escalation are built with great care for that purpose. Alongside those solvable problems sit the conditions that most shape how illness and care are experienced: finitude, irreducible uncertainty, the burden of freedom and responsibility, and the threat to belonging. These conditions cannot be re:solved. They can only be worked with.
Practitioners work with these conditions every day, and they do so by making meaning of them. This meaning-making is continuous, deeply skilled, and consequential for how care is given and how clinical lives are sustained.
Several rich traditions already illuminate it. Communication scholarship shows how it is spoken, the wellbeing literature shows what it costs, ethics shows how it is deliberated, and palliative care has developed the most refined language we have for accompanying people through what cannot be fixed. Each of these traditions has taught the field something essential.
existentials:LAB takes the meaning-making itself as its object of study. We ask how it is learned, where it happens, and what it makes possible, and we build the interpretive methods that allow it to be studied directly. In doing so we work alongside these traditions and contribute a perspective that complements them.
04 — The question
How do healthcare professionals make meaning of problems that cannot be re:solved, only worked with?
05 — The object of study
Meaning-making in the face of the unsolvable, understood as a practice that is learned and enacted within institutions.
It is treated neither as a psychological trait of individuals nor as subjective residue left over after the medicine is done. The lab studies what practitioners actually do with finitude, uncertainty, freedom, and belonging when these cannot be re:solved.
06 — Three lines of inquiry
See the projectsI — Formation
How the capacity is acquired, suppressed, or deformed
Across training and professional socialisation. What learners are taught to notice, what they learn to stop noticing, and at what point.
II — Enactment
Where meaning is made, deflected, or foreclosed
In clinical and organisational life, and the routines through which the unsolvable is converted into the procedural: protocol, referral, documentation, escalation, incident reporting.
III — Method
Interpretive methods adequate to meaning-making
Which self-report instruments systematically miss. These include psychoanalytically informed observation, narrative analysis, and visual and documentary inquiry treated as research method in its own right.
07 — Intellectual architecture
The architecture below defines how the lab thinks. The three lines of inquiry define what it studies. The two axes are distinct, and any project can be located on a single five-level hierarchy.
Epistemology
Constructivism and phenomenology. Meaning is constructed through social, cultural, and relational context and grounded in lived, first-person experience. A critical-realist register may be adopted where the aim is to move policy or practice.
Field of study
Interdisciplinary Existential Studies within the Health Humanities. Work requiring a value-neutral or purely quantitative lens falls outside scope.
Theory — three pillars
Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
Describing lived experience and interpreting its meaning, after Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur.
Critical Theory
Power, ideology, structure, and inequality in health and care.
Sub-theory: Queer Theory
Existential Psychoanalysis
Unconscious process, defence, and relational dynamics held together with freedom, choice, and mortality.
Sub-theory: Terror Management Theory
Methodology
Qualitative and interpretive inquiry, interpretive phenomenological analysis, narrative analysis, policy analysis.
Methods
First-person interview, observation, narrative and thematic analysis, document and policy review, visual and documentary analysis.
The three pillars operate as a conversation and are ordered by depth of interpretation. Phenomenology describes the experience as it is lived, critical theory situates it within the structures that shape it, and existential psychoanalysis reads what remains unspoken within it. Each theorises meaning-making differently, and each continually informs the others.
Phenomenology appears deliberately at two levels, as epistemological stance and as the first pillar with its own methods, which is why the sequence begins there.
08 — Where we sit
Meaning-making is learned. The question therefore concerns how practitioners are formed, what their training renders unspeakable, and how institutions learn — which places the lab in health professions education research and not in a clinical service or a humanities department. The Wilson Centre and TIER provide that setting, and the lab's work speaks in particular to the study of the societies, systems, and structures within which health professionals are educated and practise.
We propose our contribution is distinct. Existential inquiry has appeared in health professions education as a theme inside other people's programs and rarely as a program with its own object and standards of evidence. We bring phenomenology, critical theory, and existential psychoanalysis together within a health-humanities frame and apply them to how clinicians make meaning of the unsolvable.
09 — On the colon
The colon carries the argument of the lab, reduced to its smallest legible unit.
A colon is a rhetorical figure consisting of a clause that is grammatically complete but not logically complete: a unit of sense that stands on its own and still requires what follows to be understood. This is a formal description of a punctuation mark, and it is also a precise description of what the lab studies. Meaning-making in the face of finitude, uncertainty, freedom, and belonging takes exactly this form: complete enough to be lived, never closed. The mark enacts this claim rather than illustrating it.
What the mark does that a period cannot
Historically, the colon marked a kôlon, from the Greek for limb or member: a clause “which does not express the entire thought, but is in turn supplemented by another colon,” set against the period, “a unit of discourse that is complete in itself.”
A period resolves. A colon holds open and hands forward. This is the distinction the concept note makes about clinical work: some problems can be solved and are properly closed off; others, finitude and irreducible uncertainty among them, cannot be solved, only worked with. A period would have been the wrong mark for that claim; a colon withholds resolution as a matter of grammatical principle.
Strunk and White's plainer formulation is useful for anyone hearing this for the first time: “a colon tells the reader that what follows is closely related to the preceding clause.” The lab's stance toward the unsolvable takes the same form: sustained address between terms that remain distinct from one another and related to one another at once.
In one breath
The colon is the one piece of grammar that is allowed to be finished and unfinished at once, which is what the lab studies and what it is asking its readers to sit inside.
Design note
The mark also earns its place as a standalone graphic on practical grounds: two points and one interval, legible at favicon scale, non-figurative, and readable across scripts that use Latin punctuation without translation. The argument above is the justification for the mark; these practical qualities are its conveniences.
The lab forms by invitation. If this describes work you are already doing, we would like to hear from you.