northern network for medical humanities research...

Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research Congress

Speaker Abstracts and Biographies

Thursday 14 – Friday 15 September 2017

Funded by the Wellcome Trust and Durham University

Jointly organised by the Centre for Medical Humanities and

Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research

#NNMHR17

NNMHR Inaugural Congress 14-15 September Durham

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Speaker Biographies and Abstracts

Table of Contents Keynote Speakers .................................................................................................................................... 3

Ericka Johnson ..................................................................................................................................... 3

Kristin Zeiler ........................................................................................................................................ 3

Parallel session 1a) Medical Posthumanities: New approaches to illness, disability and care .............. 4

Amelia DeFalco ................................................................................................................................... 4

Beverley Clough .................................................................................................................................. 4

Nick Jenkins ......................................................................................................................................... 5

Parallel Session 1b) Spaces of Madness .................................................................................................. 6

Ute Oswald .......................................................................................................................................... 6

Natalie Mullen ..................................................................................................................................... 6

Cheryl McGeachan .............................................................................................................................. 7

Parallel session 1c) Tracing concepts across the life-course .................................................................. 8

Robbie Duschinsky and Sophie Reijman ............................................................................................. 8

Lesley Anne Gallacher ......................................................................................................................... 8

Rina Knoeff .......................................................................................................................................... 9

Lisa Shaw ............................................................................................................................................. 9

Parallel Session 2a) Historicising bodies and mind ............................................................................... 10

Noelle Dückmann Gallagher ............................................................................................................. 10

Clark Lawlor....................................................................................................................................... 10

Åsa Jansson ....................................................................................................................................... 11

Parallel session 2b) Concepts in Clinical Practice.................................................................................. 12

Ylva Gustafsson ................................................................................................................................. 12

Ian Sabroe ......................................................................................................................................... 12

Jo Winning ......................................................................................................................................... 13

Parallel Session 2c) Environmental factors and affordances ................................................................ 14

Brian Ward ........................................................................................................................................ 14

Arthur Rose ....................................................................................................................................... 14

Benedict Hoff .................................................................................................................................... 15

Parallel Sessions 3a) Shame and multimorbidities ............................................................................... 16

Luna Dolezal and Barry Lyons ........................................................................................................... 16

Fredrik Nyman ................................................................................................................................... 16


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Sarah Atkinson .................................................................................................................................. 17

Parallel session 3b) Lifewriting and Metaphor ..................................................................................... 18

Sue Vice ............................................................................................................................................. 18

Katrina Longhurst .............................................................................................................................. 18

Mimi Huang ....................................................................................................................................... 19

Parallel session 3c) Provocations .......................................................................................................... 20

Natalie Riley ...................................................................................................................................... 20

Diana Beljaars ................................................................................................................................... 20

Louise Mackenzie .............................................................................................................................. 21

Caitlin Stobie ..................................................................................................................................... 21

Lena Wånggren ................................................................................................................................. 22

Marketplace .......................................................................................................................................... 23

Sarah Collins, Libby Jones, Jemma Drake, Gary Thompstone ........................................................... 23

Hilary Powell ..................................................................................................................................... 24

James Stark and Catherine Oakley .................................................................................................... 24

Jane Macnaughton ............................................................................................................................ 25

Anna McFarlane ................................................................................................................................ 25

Stuart Murray .................................................................................................................................... 26

Angela Woods ................................................................................................................................... 26

Annamaria Carusi .............................................................................................................................. 26

Clark Lawlor....................................................................................................................................... 27

Thomas Bray ..................................................................................................................................... 27

Sue Spencer ....................................................................................................................................... 27

Open Space - Friday 15th September 9.30 – 11.00................................................................................ 28

Mary Robson ..................................................................................................................................... 28

Roundtable 1 – When Disability studies met the Medical Humanities and both became critical ....... 28

Lucy Burke ......................................................................................................................................... 28

Julie Anderson ................................................................................................................................... 28

Stuart Murray .................................................................................................................................... 28

Roundtable 2 – What does Global Medical Humanities mean, and does it matter? ........................... 29

Sanjoy Bhattacharya ......................................................................................................................... 29

Anna Elsner ....................................................................................................................................... 29

Steve Reid ......................................................................................................................................... 29

Arthur Rose ....................................................................................................................................... 29


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Speaker Biographies and Abstracts

Keynote Speakers

Ericka Johnson Ericka Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Thematic Studies, Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Sweden. Her research has looked at medical technologies and their relationship to the patient body and gender, with a particular focus on pharmaceuticals. Currently she is working on discursive constructions of the aging prostate. Her publications include Gendering Drugs. Feminst Studies of Pharmaceuticals (2017, Palgrave); Glocal Pharma. International Brands and the Imagination of Local Masculinity (with Ebba Sjögren and Cecilia Åsberg) (2016, Routledge); and the edited volume Technology and Medical Practice: Blood, Guts and Machines (with Boel Berner) (2010, Ashgate).

Kristin Zeiler Kristin Zeiler, Reader, Tema Technology and Social Change, Linköping University. Zeiler’s research examines philosophical, ethical, and socio-cultural aspects of the development and use of medical technology, therapy, and surgery, including how these – as well as experience of pain and illness – can help form our ways of engaging with others and the world and inform our self-understandings. Several of her projects combine philosophical analyses with narrative analysis interviews, and her research contributes to medical humanities, philosophy of medicine, bioethics, empirical philosophy, and feminist theory. Zeiler’s publications include the volumes Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine (eds. Zeiler and Käll, SUNY Press, 2014) and Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing: Perspectives on Giving, Selling and Sharing Bodies (eds. Malmqvist and Zeiler, Routledge, 2016). She is PI of the project A Feminist Analysis of Medical Screening – Normativity as Research Object and as Practice (2017-2023).


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Parallel session 1a) Medical Posthumanities: New approaches to illness, disability

and care Thursday 14th September 11 – 12.30

Amelia DeFalco “Imagining Posthuman Care” This paper will explore the emergence of social robots and how such machine entities might transform the meanings and practices of care. Caregiving robots can reveal, exploit, and even subvert the gendered and racialized affective economies that structure care work in the developed world, economies that depend on the emotional and physical labour of marginalized workers. Fictional speculations about caregiving machines able to affect and be affected draw attention to destructive affective economies based on humanist hierarchies, destabilizing boundaries between human and non-human in ways that invoke the possibility of posthumanist futures of care. This presentation will consider how the imaginary posthuman affects depicted in speculative fiction can assist us in analyzing the political and ethical implications of existing robots designed for care. Amelia DeFalco is University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities in the School of English, University of Leeds. Part of the Wellcome-funded “Augmented Selves: Futures of Posthuman Health” project, her current research investigates representations of non-human care in literary and visual culture.

Beverley Clough “New materialisms and posthumanisms: New directions for mental capacity law” This paper seeks to introduce some of the challenges and opportunities offered by critical insights from emerging new materialist and post humanist theories for law. In particular, it is suggested that these theoretical debates have important and potentially transformative implications for critical disability studies and are increasingly being engaged with by scholars who seek to challenge and move beyond the existing boundaries of the discipline. However, much less attention has been given to the ways in which new materialisms provide an important critical frame for thinking about law and the processes, entanglements and relations that constitute law and legal institutions. In the context of mental capacity law in particular, this exposes many of the normative underpinnings of the legal framework, including the legal subject who inhabits this. In so doing, many of the core concepts, processes and institutions which shape mental capacity law and law more generally, and which are simultaneously shaped by law, its actors and its normative forces, become denaturalised. This opens up the possibilities of different relations, assemblages or entanglements for mental capacity law and our ideas of the role and responsibilities of the state and institutional actors.

Beverley Clough is a lecturer in Law & Social Justice at the University of Leeds. Her research engages with feminist legal theory and critical disability studies with a particular focus on health care law, mental capacity law, social welfare law and disability law.


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Nick Jenkins, Louise Ritchie, Sam Quinn and Barbara Sharp “When Species Meet in Dementia: A critical posthumanist exploration of ‘animal assistance’ for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and associated disorders.” Potential for ‘animal assistance’ to contribute to the wellbeing of people with dementia is increasingly becoming recognised within contemporary dementia care practice. Whilst this is the case, research into the impact of animal assistance in health and social care settings has been underpinned, primarily, by ontological, epistemological and ethical assumptions associated with the liberal humanist tradition; within which animals are positioned as non-persons whose primary role is to enhance the wellbeing of their human companions. Drawing on key perspectives within the contemporary posthumanities, as well as empirical data from the Dementia Dogs pilot in Scotland, this paper explores how ‘animal assistance’ interventions in dementia may be more fruitfully conceptualised as complex entanglements of natureculture, within which exist important opportunities for multi-species co-flourishing and (ultimately) ’autre mondialisation’ (Haraway 2007). As such, the paper will argue that a great deal is at stake for human and non-human agents alike in the promotion of ‘animal assistance’ in 21st century dementia care.

Nicholas Jenkins is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology & Social Policy at the University of the West of Scotland. He is also a co-opted member of the Scottish Dementia Working Group.


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Parallel Session 1b) Spaces of Madness Thursday 14th September 11 – 12.30

Ute Oswald ‘The Pleasure is Intense’: Social Activities in British Asylums c.1800-1890 Our perception of the nineteenth-century asylum has largely been shaped by images of shackles, leeches and padded cells. Yet this obfuscates a very different side of these institutions; as well as non-restraint, proponents of the then pioneering ‘moral treatment’ put a particular emphasis on location, architecture and recreation. The extensive social activities programme for patients and staff included balls, concerts, art classes, creative writing and plays. This paper will shed light on a variety of asylum activities through the presentation and critical analysis of authentic patient voices and reports both in the popular and scientific nineteenth-century press. This will be supplemented with an investigation into the adaptation of exterior and interior spaces at private and pauper institutions such as The Retreat, Crichton, new Bethlem, Colney Hatch and Littlemore. In exposing the impact of recreational activities on the nineteenth-century insane, this paper aims to prompt a discussion around the rehabilitative value of these activities, potentially staking a claim in identifying the forerunners of art, music and drama therapy.

Ute Oswald completed an MA at Hamburg University in Classical Archaeology and Italian and an MSt at Oxford University in Literature and Arts, and is now in the first year of a PhD in the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick.

Natalie Mullen ‘The Geography of License’: Asylum Architecture and Patient Agency in Lancaster’s County Asylum, 1840-1915. In the nineteenth century, treatment of insanity was based on moral treatment, which stressed the curative function of the asylum building itself. This rhetoric was challenged with the Foucauldian turn, with architecture becoming understood as a device through which inmate behaviour could be controlled, observed and regulated. In this paper, however, it will be argued that patients were able to subvert the intentions of designers and use the architecture of the asylum to assist them in exercising agency. Focussing on Lancaster Asylum, patient responses to the built environment will be considered. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s notion of the ‘geography of license’ in the psychiatric hospital, this paper will highlight that patient agency in nineteenth-century asylums also had a distinct spatial pattern. By mapping incidents of patient agency located through patients’ case notes, certain spaces in Lancaster County Asylum are identified as having had a significantly high concentration of incidents of self-assertion. It is suggested that these areas were less open to the surveillance and control of asylum authorities and that asylum patients took advantage of this to regain a degree of autonomy within the institution. Despite having been designed to confine and control, asylum architecture could unwittingly facilitate patient agency. Natalie Mullen is a second year PhD candidate based at Lancaster University. Her research is funded by the AHRC and examines patient agency in the nineteenth-century asylum.


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Cheryl McGeachan Tracking Traces of the Art Extraordinary Collection Archival research into the histories of ‘madness’ has always relied heavily on engaging with shards, fragments, gaps and silences. Yet more needs to be known about the practices involved in tracing the lives, worlds and experiences of individuals experiencing mental (ill)health that remain difficult to uncover. This paper seeks to discuss such practices by highlighting how I have tracked the traces that remain of the lives lived (and died) of the Art Extraordinary Collection. Art Extraordinary refers to visual art forms created by individuals who paint, sculpt or draw due to a compulsion to express. Many of these individuals exist on the edges of society and due to this marginalisation their journeys through a range of (medical) spaces remain unknown. Using three short case-studies from the recreational therapy room of Leverndale Hospital, a gym hall in Barlinnie Prison and an unmarked grave in Montrose I wish to raise questions relating to the practice of uncovering the collection’s stories. In doing so, this paper feeds into debates concerning the need to expand the scope of archival research in the medical humanities beyond bounded walls and into the hearts, minds, bodies and landscapes of those bound up with histories in the making. Cheryl McGeachan is Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Her research explores the historical and cultural geographies of mental (ill)health and asylum spaces with particular interests in R.D. Laing, Scottish art therapy and ‘outsider’ art.


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Parallel session 1c) Tracing concepts across the life-course Thursday 14th September 11 – 12.30

Robbie Duschinsky and Sophie Reijman The disorganised attachment classification as a buzzing boundary object Introduced by Main and Solomon in 1990, the ‘disorganised attachment’ classification is among the most influential assessments of infant mental health. Although comprised of a wide range of phenomenologically distinct behaviours, disorganised attachment has generally been regarded as a unitary construct which reflects the child as being alarmed by the parent. In this paper we analyse how the classification works and what it does, drawing on both archival research and primary research with researchers and clinicians. We document ways in which images of the classification have been shaped and stabilised by lines of power and knowledge between the authors, lead researchers, coders, and clinicians. We propose that this has resulted in both strengths and potential problems for use of the construct. We argue that the disorganised attachment classification has operated as a ‘buzzing boundary object’ – one that magnetises concern and acknowledgement among different groups through creating noise in which each can hear urgent messages, though at the price of reduced understanding and precision between contexts. We propose ways to attenuate issues in the circulation of knowledge about the construct and support the consideration of some more fine-grained questions about disorganised attachment behaviour. Robbie Duschinsky is Head of the Applied Social Science Group within the Primary Care Unit at Cambridge University, and Director of Studies in Sociology at Sidney Sussex College. He holds a New Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust for work on attachment theory and its use in clinical and social welfare practice. Sophie Reijman is a research associate within the Applied Social Science Group at the Primary Care Unit, Cambridge University. Her research focuses on the antecedents and sequelae of disrupted parent-child relationships.

Lesley Anne Gallacher From milestones to wayfaring: Geographic metaphors and iconography of embodied growth and change in infancy and early childhood In both medical practice and everyday life, we tend to think about the changing capacities of infant bodies through a set of curiously geographic metaphors. We think about physical development as a journey (which unfolds in time) that passes by and through a set of significant landmarks. Progress on this journey can be measured with reference to a set of orderly milestones. The milestones metaphor is iconic, both in the sense that it fundamentally shapes our understandings of young children’s bodies and because it is centred around a set of visual representations. This paper considers how we might adapt and alter these metaphors—and create alternative iconographies—in order to denaturalise the dominant developmental discourse. Drawing upon Tim Ingold’s notion of wayfaring and ecological perspectives on developmental systems, the paper considers how we might centre our representations of the changing nature of young children’s bodies and bodily capacities around embodied difference and diversity, and to foreground the interactions between body and environment. Lesley Gallacher is a Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Early Years Studies at Northumbria University. Her research explores the geographies of young children’s embodiment and the cultures and practices that surround child development.


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Rina Knoeff and Miente Pietersma Histories of Healthy Ageing Histories of Healthy Ageing is a project (based at the University of Groningen) that brings the humanities right into the heart of the worldwide problem of healthy ageing. It is built on the observation that today’s healthy ageing problem unwittingly revisits discussions already conducted in premodern medicine and natural philosophy. The central hypothesis is that these premodern discussions can inform the medical and political agenda today. The project is formulated in conversation with medical specialists and policy makers with the aim of identifying new concepts, opportunities and risks in the implementation of healthy ageing policies. The project answers recent calls from WHO as well as medical journals (most notably the 2014 Lancet Commission on Culture and Health) to integrate established medical treatments with new insights in lifestyle medicine. However, although these organisations increasingly accept “culture” as an important factor in the making of health policy, the “use” of history is problematic. In medicine history is often seen in a narrative of progress, whereby old advice and remedies are easily criticized as old-fashioned. In history the project touches upon the tricky question of whether we can learn from the past. Overcoming this interdisciplinary difficulty is one of the challenges of the project. Rina Knoeff is associate professor in history of medicine at the University of Groningen (NL). She has worked on the cultural history of anatomy, physiology and the body in the eighteenth-century Netherlands.

Lisa Shaw "Cinema, memory and well-being: a pilot project for the over-65s in Petrópolis, Brazil" In this presentation I will discuss the methodology and initial results of the 'Cinema, memory and well-being' pilot project conducted between 2015 and 2017 at the Fazenda Inglesa GP's practice in the city of Petrópolis, Brazil, and funded by the University of Liverpool's Knowledge Exchange Voucher programme and HEIF (Higher Education Innovation Funding). I will examine the challenges presented by this project and how I have attempted to overcome these, not least finding suitable tools with which to 'measure' well-being benefits and securing addition funding for the project. I will also discuss the 'best practice' tool kit that I have developed to enable health care and nursing home workers to embed elements of this project into their activities programmes, and future plans for the development of the project in the UK. Lisa Shaw is a Reader in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely on Brazilian popular cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, and is developing a project on how musical comedy films can be used to stimulate reminiscence and well-being benefits among the elderly in the UK and Brazil.


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Parallel Session 2a) Historicising bodies and mind Thursday 14th September 13.30 – 15.00

Noelle Dückmann Gallagher A Study of Noses: The Syphilitic Nose in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Art ‘For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs,I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less.’ Even without its protagonist’s insistence to the contrary, no reader of Sterne’s wildly-popular novel Tristram Shandy (1759-67) could be in doubt that sometimes a nose is not just a nose. While Sterne’s hero often gestures towards a long tradition of jokes that rely on the nose-penis analogy for a punchline, the obsession with noses in Tristram Shandy also encodes a darker meaning: it references a literary and visual culture that used the nose as a gauge of sexual health, and equated the disfigured nose with the threat of venereal infection. In this paper, I examine the weird and wonderful cultural life of the deformed nose in eighteenth-century British literature and art. Surveying works by Shadwell, Hogarth, Fielding, Sterne and others, I argue that this one feature came to assume a powerful metonymic significance, standing in for many of the broader social dangers that venereal disease could represent. Noelle Gallagher is Head of English at the University of Manchester. Her current research focuses on the representation of disease and illness in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Her book on the representation of venereal disease in the eighteenth-century imagination is forthcoming from Yale University Press this spring.

Clark Lawlor ‘On Fashions in Physic’: Discourses of Fashionable Disease in the Romantic Period. This paper uses the satirical articles written by Henry Southern in the London Magazine - “On Fashions” (August 1825), “On Fashions in Physic” (October 1825), and “On Dilettante Physic” (January 1826) and the literature that lead to them – to analyse discourses of fashionable disease in the newly capitalised British early nineteenth century. This was a world characterised by a burgeoning medical market, a periodical and print market that could adequately reflect and promote fashionable diseases and the medical market that spawned them, and the nexus of actors (patients, doctors, apothecaries…) in the whole drama of the production, maintenance and dissolution of fashionable diseases. The interaction of leisure (print or otherwise), culture and medicine was crucial in constructing a role for women and men, but women bore the brunt of the anxiety about the consequences of a world of ‘extraordinary modernity’ and the fashion that was its most obvious sign. I argue also that literary style is an important factor in assessing the framing of fashionable diseases. Fashionable diseases were one crucial aspect of the construction of women as objects of conspicuous consumption and all the ideological contradictions that came with their role. Clark Lawlor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Northumbria University, UK. He is currently Principal Investigator of ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832’ (2013-2016), a major project funded by the Leverhulme Trust.


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Åsa Jansson 'From Self-Help to CBT: Regulating Emotion in a (Neo)Liberal World' In the twenty-first century, ‘emotional regulation’ has become a core strategy of behavioural therapies. It is a way of addressing emotional distress that focuses on the individual’s ability to learn new habits, to self-regulate in order to function in an increasingly stressful society. This paper historicizes this idea of emotional regulation, and argues for the importance of a political perspective in medical humanities research. CBT derives from a model of the emotions as involuntary reactions, which we can learn to regulate through practice. This model has its roots in Victorian medicine, where a biological mind co-existed with ideas of moral responsibility and self-help. Disorders of affect were seen to develop over time, and could be prevented, paused, and reversed through habitual wilful effort to modify one’s conduct. By framing habit as a learned skill that restored the individual’s capacity for agency, Victorian physicians retained a moral quality to a model of the mind presented as scientific and objective. The idea of emotional regulation was a bound up with Victorian values of ‘self-help’ and ‘industriousness’, reinforcing the relationship between Protestant ethics and a capitalist economy. It is no coincidence, then, that the behavioural therapies and a biological, internal model of mental illness dominate in twenty-first-century neoliberal society built on visions of self-sufficiency and independence. However, locating psychiatric illness solely within the individual obscures its socio-economic context. This ensures that questions about collective responsibility for psychological well-being are foreclosed, simultaneously marginalising alternative treatment models and arguments for radical economic and social reform. Åsa Jansson is a Junior Research Fellow at the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Her current research maps the history of delusions and hallucinations in modern psychiatry, and forms part of Durham's interdisciplinary project Hearing the Voice.


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Parallel session 2b) Concepts in Clinical Practice Thursday 14th September 13.30 – 15.00

Ylva Gustafsson " Reflections on the increasingly scientific research on empathy in medicine" The aim in this paper is to study the current increase in writings on empathy in health care. More precisely, the aim is to investigate whether and how certain philosophical conceptions of interpersonal understanding influence how empathy is conceived of in medical ethics. The purpose is also to consider whether this philosophical influence reflects certain economic and societal changes. Today’s increase in writings on empathy in medical ethics gives the impression that there is a growing moral awareness of the importance of attending to the patient’s perspective. The aim of the paper is to investigate this impression of a growing moral awareness towards patients. It will be suggested that today's writings on empathy may in fact lead to a decreasing attention towards individual patients. Does the increase in writings on empathy in medicine reflect an interest in patient narratives? Or, does today’s research on empathy, on the contrary, reflect a decreasing interest in patient narratives? Does the increasing pressure for cost efficiency in health care make quantifiable and generalizable research on empathy appealing? Is this one reason why cognitive conceptions of empathy have become popular in health care? Ylva Gustafsson is a post doctoral researcher at the department of philosophy at Åbo Akademi University.

Ian Sabroe Uncertainty in clinical practice Uncertainty is intrinsic to clinical practice. The experience of uncertainty by those suffering from illness has been well described. In contrast, the nature of uncertainty as experienced by clinicians is rarely examined. Frameworks exploring the nature of uncertainty in diagnosis and the place of expert practice in transcending or managing uncertainty to reach a management plan have been explored. However, the impact of uncertainty on a clinical practitioner, and the place of uncertainty in the fashioning of an expert clinician, are largely ignored. How uncertainty impacts on the development, practice and experience of clinicians, and the potential consequences for the patients of clinicians, is relatively unknown. I will explore the frameworks of uncertainty that apply to clinicians, and through the writings of clinicians and the fictional accounts of clinical encounters will begin to identity the sources and nature of uncertainty in the making and practice of people delivering healthcare. The impact of uncertainty, and how this relates to perceived successes and failures in case management on the experience of the clinician, their practice, and their own health will also be explored. Ian Sabroe works at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. He is a practising clinician in respiratory medicine, a biomedical scientist, and co-founder of Medical Humanities Sheffield.


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Jo Winning Putting theory into practice: embedding a practice-based medical humanities paradigm into the

Clinical Assessment of Skills & Competencies examination, Royal College of Psychiatrists

The aim of this paper is to examine the nature of the practice-based medical humanities as a field in

which medical humanities is deployed in real-life clinical, social and medical educational settings.

The shape and future of medical education and practice has been under increasing scrutiny and

continuing government and legislative intervention in the past 5-10 years, with a particular push

towards standardising undergraduate and postgraduate medical curricula, as well as restructuring

the NHS in an endless bid for ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability.’ In particular, the articulation of the

driver of ‘professionalism’, as outlined most succinctly in the GMC’s ‘Gold Guide’ 2016 (the

document which maps postgraduate medical speciality training), rolls humanistic and psycho-social

skills and understandings into the requirements of clinical training and practice. Neither biomedical

education, nor the biomedicine practised within the systems of the NHS, are well equipped to teach

or support these skills, since both domains lack the vocabulary or conceptual frameworks with which

we work within the humanities and social sciences (most especially psycho-social studies). This

paper will explore the specific example of the work I have undertaken since 2010 with the Royal

College of Psychiatrists to embed notions of reflexivity, communication and diversity into their

training and assessment of clinical skills. Using the specific example of the RCPsych CASC

examination, I will consider the challenges of working at the interface between the humanities and

medicine, and the potentials of the transformative transdisciplinary conversation that emerges

when common ground is reached over time.

Jo Winning is Reader in Modern Literature & Critical Theory in the Dept of English & Humanities,

Birkbeck, University of London. She is Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Birkbeck and

leads on the MA and MPhil/PhD Medical Humanities Programmes for clinicians and healthcare

practitioners. Her research interests span practice-based medical humanities and the interfaces

between clinical practice, medical education and critical theory; theories and practices of gender and

sexuality and early 20C modernism in literature and the arts. She is currently completing the

monograph Beyond the Confusion of Tongues: Illness, Affect, Meaning.


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Parallel Session 2c) Environmental factors and affordances Thursday 14th September 13.30 – 15.00

Brian Ward In Search of the Sick South: Exploring Disease, Disability, Dying and Death in the US South This paper introduces key themes in a fledgling project to explore how and why the US South has been defined, in reality and in imagination, by various physical, intellectual, and moral maladies—as well as by a counter-narrative of a healthy, rejuvenating sub-tropical South. Rooted in history, but with links to literature, cultural studies, film studies, music, politics, sociology, economics, religion, disability studies, ecocriticism, and visual culture, as well as epidemiology, social psychology and medical practices, the project argues that medical phenomena and medicalised discourses have been crucial in shaping the history and global perceptions of the South since the Colonial era. After discussing the emerging parameters and wider significance of the project, the paper will offer a brief case study, focusing on how the language of disease and contagion has critically informed official and popular southern opposition to various forms of popular music, notably jazz in the 1920s, rock and roll in the 1950s, and the British invasion of the 1960s. This language reveals much about the interaction of medical, racial, gender and class coordinates in southern history and culture, both real and imagined. Brian Ward is Professor in American Studies at Northumbria University and currently Chair of the

British Association for American Studies. He has published seven books, most of them concerned

with the history and cultures of the US South, the African American experience, and Anglo-American

cultural relations.

Arthur Rose Histories of a Killer Dust This paper considers asbestos’s use, and abuse, against the backdrop of a wide range of historical material about the asbestos industry. Two genres emerge in the historiography of this material: the good conspiracy theory, understood through Murray Rothbard’s account of good conspiracy theories (theories whose conspiratorial hypothesis is confirmed by painstaking research), and the technological apology, explored via Andrew Pickering’s ‘mangle of practice’ (whereby human and technological agencies become enmeshed in a dialectic of resistance and accommodation). These genres overlap in their reliance on particular approaches to asbestos’s affordances, the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs. In the good conspiracy theory, asbestos’s toxic affordances do not hinder the industry from using the material to make money (Geoffrey Tweedale, Jock McCulloch); in the technological apology, asbestos’s protective affordances balance out the relative risk of its toxicity with a more immediate advantage over fire (Rachel Maines). My paper considers how these affordances might relate to 20th century genre fiction about asbestos: for early 20th century Sci-Fi (Stephen Leacock), asbestos affords a pragmatic material of the future; by the end of the 20th century, it has become the basis for industry-related detective novels (Louise Penny). Arthur Rose is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies and the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. He is affiliated to the Wellcome Trust Funded Life of Breath project, based at Durham and Bristol Universities.


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Benedict Hoff Taking Notice as Therapeutic Practice: Urban Mindfulness, Curiosity and Wellbeing. An NEF report on ‘Mental Capital’ in 2008 advocated five ‘ways to wellbeing’. One of these – ‘Take Notice’ – drew on mindfulness principles by encouraging more curiosity towards everyday geographies and practices without actually prescribing any formal meditation. This reflects a wider trend whereby a ‘mindful attitude’ is encouraged in relation to, say, eating, photography, walking, running – without necessarily including (less sexy) practice of formal meditation. This is despite evidence suggesting that the cultivation of focused attention on the cushion is essential to developing the sort of sensory attunement required for more mindful engagement with activities and places off the cushion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘Take Notice’ was the hardest of the strands to implement (Phillips et al. 2015). Drawing on a series of ‘Mindfulness in the City’ workshops, this paper explores what happens when mindful exploration of the city is combined with formal meditation practice. How might meditation act as a catalyst for participants to be curious about and ‘take notice’ of their city? What shifts occur in their relationship with urban space and their overall wellbeing? The paper argues for better engagement with these questions in the current scaling-up of mindfulness within public health policy. Benedict Hoff is Visiting Researcher in Cultural Geography at the University of Sheffield and an associate mindfulness teacher with Breathworks CIC; he also works as an integrative counsellor in private practice. Benedict has previously published on cinematic cities, film geography and urban cultures and is currently researching on therapeutic landscapes and the practice of urban mindfulness.


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Parallel Sessions 3a) Shame and multimorbidities Thursday 14

th September 15.30 – 17.00

Luna Dolezal and Barry Lyons 'Health-Related Shame: An Affective Determinant of Health?' Despite shame being recognised as a powerful force in the clinical encounter, it is under -acknowledged, -researched and -theorized in the contexts of health and medicine. In this paper we make two claims. The first is that emotional or affective states, in particular shame, can have a significant impact upon health, illness and health-related behaviours. We outline four possible processes through which this might occur: 1. Acute Shame Avoidance Behaviour; 2. Chronic Shame Health-Related Behaviours; 3. Stigma and Social Status Threat; and 4. Biological Mechanisms. Secondly, we postulate that shame’s influence is so insidious, pervasive, and pernicious, and so critical to clinical and political discourse around health, that it is imperative that its vital role in health, health-related behaviours and illness be recognised and assimilated into medical, social and political consciousness and practice. In essence, we argue that its impact is sufficiently powerful for it to be considered an affective determinant of health, and provide three justifications for this. We conclude with a proposal for a research agenda that aims to extend the state of knowledge of health-related shame. Luna Dolezal is a lecturer in Medical Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Exeter. Barry Lyons is a lecturer in Bioethics, School of Medicine, TCD and practices medicine in the Department of Anaesthesia & Critical Care Medicine at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital.

Fredrik Nyman Taking sociality and locality as seriously as we do ‘bio’: Early thoughts on the biosocial aspects of support groups for people with chronic breathlessness in northern England “Breathing is something we all do, day in, day out, every day of our lives. It is so innate that most of us rarely stop to think about it. We think less of breathing than of the life it sustains. For millions of people across the UK, breathing is something they have had to think about. These are people for whom the beautiful but delicate organs with which we breathe – the lungs – do not work as they should.” (Marmot, 2016: 3)

Breathing may be a basic physiological process, but its bodily function exceeds the lay and biomedical discourses and clinical paradigms that define it. It is a very personal experience that contains deep cultural and spiritual significance, which goes beyond the simple act of keeping us alive. Yet, although being resonant and urgent topics, breath and breathing have never been the subjects of any systematic cultural or literary study. This paper will discuss early findings from a PhD study in anthropology, conducted as part of the Life of Breath project. The study focuses on support groups for people with chronic breathlessness in northern England, and investigates how the members make use of these biosocial gatherings to self-manage their respiratory conditions. Fredrik Nyman is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology/Centre for Medical Humanities

at Durham University.


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Sarah Atkinson, Lindsay-Ann Coyle

Not Fitting In: Experiences of Living with Multiple Morbidity

Multimorbidity brings several challenges to how contemporary medicine is practised. Knowledge of

the experiences of living with multimorbidity is limited but essential for public health in order to

address the wide-ranging difficulties routinely faced by those seeking diagnosis and treatment. Our

own work privileges such embodied experiences as interpreted through the specificities of particular

times and places and details the extent to which people see themselves as simply not fitting in. The

first-hand accounts of those living with so-called ‘multimorbidity’ document this as an integrated

embodied experience rather than as a set of discrete conditions. As such, the embodied experiences

of those living with ‘multimorbidity’ breach and blur the boundaries and categories that are

fundamental to diagnosis. In dealing with the health services, they must continually rework their

experiences into acceptable formats for presentation. Clinicians’ specific aim to try to isolate

particular diagnoses from other diagnoses leave people feeling excluded from some diagnoses and

treatment processes and some no longer engage at all with mainstream medical care. Even in the

more open and supportive environment of a mental health resource centre, the medical

understanding of multimorbidity as a set of diagnostic categories intrudes and sustains an

experience of isolation.

Sarah Atkinson is Professor of Geography and Medical Humanities at Durham University and a

member of the Durham Centre for Medical Humanities. She is a member of the WHO European

Office Expert Group on Cultural Contexts of Health and a co-investigator on the ESRC funded What

Works Wellbeing Centre, Community Wellbeing.


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Parallel session 3b) Lifewriting and Metaphor Thursday 14th September 15.30 – 17.00

Sue Vice Dementia as Cultural Metaphor in Holocaust Narratives

In this paper, I will consider the significance for Holocaust studies and education of the

contemporary cultural discourses surrounding survivors who develop dementia.

Holocaust survivors are so closely associated with the importance of memory that the concept of a survivor who cannot remember, or whose suppressed memories resurface as if in present time, is troubling and fascinating. The representation of dementia prompts ontological questions about personhood and communication, while also demanding experimentation with narrative form. In Holocaust art, dementia has even greater significance. It allows for the emergence of different temporalities, locations and languages in a single moment; raises questions about the relationship between trauma and memory; complicates second- and third-generation postmemory; and exaggerates the notion of an incommunicable or secret past. The material I will discuss includes such works as David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love, Ruth Kluger’s memoir Landscapes of Memory and Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead, as well as more recent examples: Michel Laub’s autofictional Diary of the Fall, Atom Egoyan’s 2015 film Remember and Michael Lavigne’s novel Not Me. I will conclude that concern with dementia among survivors generates a specifically Holocaust-related ‘cultural metaphor’, to adapt Hannah Zeilig’s phrase.

Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her books include Holocaust

Fiction (2000), Children Writing the Holocaust (2004), and Shoah (2011), as well as publications

exploring unusual states of memory, as evident in the co-edited volume Representing Perpetrators in

Holocaust Literature and Film (2013) and Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in

the Contemporary Era (2014).

Katrina Longhurst Collaborative Telling and Interactive Memory in Contemporary Mental Health Life Writing

Lauren Slater’s second memoir, Welcome to my Country (1996) is a compilation of tales, each centred on the relationship between Slater, in her role as clinical psychologist, and a patient. Whilst each tale focuses on the experiences of a patient, Slater argues that the text is a memoir on the basis that so much of her exploration of self emerges through the connections with another in the therapeutic encounter. She therefore uses her patients’ stories, and the narrative of her relationship with them, as vehicles by which to indirectly tell her own history of mental illness and abuse. By emphasising moments of reciprocity, identification, and interconnection Slater foregrounds relationships as spaces from which life writing emerges. Through performing close textual analysis and drawing upon theory by Nancy K Miller and Susanna Egan, this paper will think through some of the ethical and aesthetic implications of the versions of coproduction illustrated in this memoir. Making parallels between Slater’s relationships with her patients, and the reader’s connective bond to the narrator, it will argue that the structure of Slater’s text mimics and enacts the processes of reading autobiography. Katrina Longhurst is a second year PhD student in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Situated across literary studies and the medical humanities, her thesis explores critical strategies by which writers with experiences of mental illness assert difference in life writing.


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Mimi Huang Narrative modulation and metaphors in the storytelling of women with breast cancer

Recent studies on breast cancer survivorship reveal the complex natures and processes involved in the transitional periods between cancer diagnosis, treatment and survivorship. First-hand accounts of breast cancer survivors’ experiences in going through the transitional periods provide us with valuable insights into the ways individuals perceive, conceptualize and negotiate life-changing events in their life journeys. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks from narrative inquiry, conceptual metaphors and social cognition, this paper investigates the process of storytelling in breast cancer survivors’ written narratives. With a focus on meaning construction, this paper proposes a notion of “narrative modulation” that functions to regulate, adjust and advance storylines and their associated themes. One conceptual device that can serve to modulate storytelling is conceptual metaphors. Based on a case study that examines written narratives by women with breast cancer, this paper presents a working example of how conceptual metaphors modulate and advance a series of interweaving storylines that contribute to the narrators’ complex transitional experiences. The discussion will also consider the performative stance of storytelling and the sensitive contexts surrounding the narrative events and the social agents involved.

Mimi Huang is a senior lecturer at Northumbria University. Building upon a research background on cognitive poetics, metaphor studies and narrative stylistics, Mimi adopts a cognitive and narrative-based approach to the exploration of patient experience, healthcare communication and community wellbeing.


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Parallel session 3c) Provocations Thursday 14th September 15.30 – 17.00

Natalie Riley Cognition and Theoria

When Claire Colebrook adopted the term ‘vitalism’ to describe the cognitive turn, she was drawing on a notion that recent intellectual attention to matter, affect, and life, marked part of a broader ‘post-theory’ moment in the humanities. In need of a way to overcome theory’s pernicious blindness to embodiment and living systems, she argues, contemporary accounts of the emergence of mind from life have been seduced by a return to the bounded organism. Not only is such an organicist retreat anthropocentric, Colebrook alleges, but – and more importantly – it opposes theory; precluding any necessary assumption of distance between thinking and what is given. In this short provocation, I contest Colebrook’s claim that work between the cognitive sciences and the humanities comprises a simple appeal to legitimating biological truths. Rather, I suggest that her 2014 essay is doubly problematic: omitting both the extent to which cognitive studies has been critical of such naturalization, and also obscuring how the medical humanities plays a central role in this process. Colebrook’s intervention does, however, offer one important corrective to the present field: highlighting the importance of a broader dialogue with other branches of critical theory – a note on which I will end. Natalie Riley is a first-year doctoral candidate at the University of Durham. Funded by a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Doctoral Studentship, her research looks at the Anglophone novel and consciousness in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Diana Beljaars A vitalist ethics and spatial imagination of compulsivity?

This provocation explores the idea of imagining compulsivity as both producer and product of an

emergent relationship between the human body and its surroundings. Compulsivity can be

understood as the performance of an act with an unknown origin: a response to an urge which is

felt, and experienced as beyond rationality, purpose, meaning and even reflexivity; an act that feels

as witnessed rather than as intended. What if we think compulsivity as the enactment of a vital force

that does not only happen in the brain and the nervous system, but in a violent assemblage that also

enlaces the remainder of the body and its constituencies. Can we analyse compulsivity on its own

terms and as a sensibility in itself, outside the rigid categories of medical pathologies, and beyond

immediately imposing an ethics of suffering? Can we instead adopt a vitalist ethics to trace the

elements that drive this compulsive assemblage? Would it be helpful to shift the focus from the

compulsive human being to the compulsive act, to render the bodily surroundings knowable anew

and as emergent from the compulsive act assemblage? Herewith, this provocation hopes to incite

new ways of understanding and alleviating the suffering purported by compulsivity.

Diana Beljaars is PhD Researcher at the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University, and

her project situates on the intersection of human geography, medical humanities, health and

disability geography, and the medical and clinical sciences of Tourette syndrome. In studying and

reimagining compulsive behaviours from a poststructuralist and postphenomenological perspective,

she has worked with people with a Tourette syndrome diagnosis, and aims to expand to other

mental health conditions.


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Louise Mackenzie Art Practice in the Laboratory: Imposition as Methodology

I use this paper to introduce the idea of ‘imposition’ as research methodology within collaborative

art practice. In my research I use synthetic biology techniques to understand more deeply the

implications of biotechnology as a form of art practice – a ‘thinking through making’ (Ingold, 2013).

The research situates artistic practice within a UK genetics laboratory, where I have developed

experience in molecular and synthetic biology in order to place a thought physically within the body

of the living organism, Escherichia coli (E. coli). I frame my actions towards the E. coli as an

‘imposition’ upon the body of the organism, much as my situation within the laboratory is an

imposition upon the norms of laboratory practice. Thus the appropriation of the methodological

norms of laboratory practice to pose unorthodox questions is explored in this paper as a form of

‘constructive imposition’.

The work sits within the Cultural Negotiation of Science (CNoS) research group based at

Northumbria University. The group takes a performative approach to the production of knowledge

that actively challenges the use of art as an instrumental or illustrative device to interpret science.

Louise Mackenzie is an artist and practice-led PhD candidate at Northumbria University creating

installation, sculpture and film works. Recent works include Genocentric at Edinburgh International

Science Festival, 2017 and A Less Familiar History at PhotoEspaña 2016, Madrid.

Caitlin Stobie White Elephants in the Room, or, New Materialism and Abortion Narratives

In this paper, I trace how abortion is an unresolved issue at the heart of new materialism, and argue

that such reproductive issues should be addressed by interdisciplinary and intersectional research.

The abortion debate revolves around issues of personhood – specifically, establishing when a foetus

(or foetal tissue) can be said to have gained personal agency. Rhetoric used by pro-life activists often

draws attention away from the physical capabilities of the zygote in the present, and focuses instead

on its future potential as an autonomous human being. Simultaneously, the abortion debate

highlights the agency – or lack thereof – of the person who is pregnant. Indeed, the word ‘choice’

has become emblematic for abortion law reform activists, who stress how a woman’s reproductive

health is personal. This provocation, however, is not concerned with persons – or, rather, it does not

adhere to the typical conflation of humanity with personhood, which often leads to a stalemate

between pro-lifers and pro-choice activists. Instead, it suggests that we should reconceive of the

very notion of agency. To best represent this, and the transformative potential of a truly feminist

new materialism, I refer to a range of literary abortions: from American writer Ernest Hemingway to

Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera.

Caitlin Stobie is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds working on representations of abortion, embodiment, and agency in southern African fiction. She is a research intern on the AHRC-funded research network "The Risks of Childbirth in Historical Perspective" and co-director of the Leeds Animal Studies Network.


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Lena Wånggren Working conditions, health, and illness in the contemporary university

While the medical humanities opens up new areas of enquiry for academics and health

professionals, the working conditions of contemporary academia is endangering some of this

research and practice. Focusing on the contemporary university’s increased productivity measures

and use of precarious employment, this paper asks the question: how do the working conditions,

and the health problems they cause, impact on medical humanities scholars themselves? In 2013

nearly three-quarters of UK academics found their job stressful, and more than half indicated high

levels of stress (UCU 2013). Noting that increasing workloads and performativity measures and

precarious employment impact academics’ health negatively (Gill 2010; UCU 2015; Lopes and Dewan

2015), some scholars noting a collective ‘depression’ among academics (Pereira 2017), the paper

considers the impact on academics’ embodied subjectivities and scholarship. Where do our own

experiences of health and illness come into the medical humanities impetus to better understand

these issues? Sharing findings regarding stress and insecurity in the contemporary university, this

provocation urges colleagues to consider the working conditions in which we produce our

scholarship, and consider how medical humanities scholars can find time to care for their own health

as well as that of others.

Lena Wånggren is a Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where she

also teaches. She works on questions of gender in nineteenth-century literature and culture, with a

specific interest in feminist theory and the medical humanities.


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Marketplace Thursday 14th September 17.30 – 19.30

Stalls will be set up in the dining room showcasing major medical humanities initiatives from across

the Northern Network and beyond. In an imaginative twist on the conventional conference poster

session, the stalls will make use of objects, artefacts and interactive displays to engage congress

participants in a discussion of how research is brought to life through collaborative endeavour.

Drinks and canapés will be served, with the generous sponsorship of the Wellcome Trust.

Sarah Collins, Libby Jones, Jemma Drake, Gary Thompstone Box of tricks!*&@*!: adventures in patient-centred consulting

Combining our diverse expertise (drama, juggling, creative writing, singing, drawing, story-telling…)

we have developed our “Box of tricks!*&@*!”. These include breathing techniques and singing

exercises to promote fluency and confidence; drama to explore intention and attitude; poems to

explore patient perspectives and the power of language and silence; creative writing exercises to

free the mind from stereotypes; inheritance tracks as 90 second narratives reflecting personal

experience of health and illness, juggling coloured scarves to focus the mind.

With a few activities "up our sleeves", we can:

lift the mood or change the tone or pace;

tackle a topic (e.g. ‘listening to the patient’) from new angles;

energise the group or alleviate a difficult dynamic;

encourage everyone's active, equal participation;

promote responsive, empathic communication;

connect different dimensions of patient-centred care.

For “tricks” to foster learning, they should:

be no more than 5-10 minutes long

be produced collaboratively (actor – student; patient – health professional)

be rolled out across different communities of healthcare practice and service users

include an element of surprise

promote trust, commitment and experimentation

We will perform a sequence of tricks and demonstrate their impact by encouraging audience

participation and critical, creative responses, reflecting our aim to promote holistic, patient-centred

care.

Sarah Collins is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Co-Director of the MSc Medical Humanities in

the Division of Medical Education, University of Manchester; Jemma Drake is an actor and simulated

patient; Libby Jones is a medical student at Keele, beginning an MSc Medical Humanities at

Manchester, with interests in drama and visual arts; Gary Thompstone is a circus performer and

simulated patient.


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Hilary Powell The Game of Monastic Life: Mind-Wandering in the Middle Ages

"Come roll the dice, spin the spinner and see if you are a spiritual winner!" This stall offers delegates

an innovative and heuristic introduction to how the experience of daydreaming was negotiated

within the Western monastic tradition during the High Middle Ages. Visitors to the stall will be

invited to take part in a short board game based on the research undertaken by Dr Hilary Powell as

part of her involvement in two Wellcome-funded projects based at Durham University - 'Hearing the

Voice' and 'Hubbub'. As players move around the board, they will be introduced to the idea of

monasticism as a skilled craft requiring sustained effort and to which evagatio mentis ('a wandering

of mind') represented the greatest threat. As play progresses, the players acquire skills and

strategies for suppressing wayward thoughts, allowing them to proceed on their path to

contemplatio. Every throw of the dice or spin of the spinner brings the player into contact with the

archival materials upon which the game is based - saints' lives, mystical writings and theological

treatises. The game offers the opportunity for contextual discussion of this material and reflection

on more recent approaches to mind-wandering.

Hilary Powell is an Early Career Research Fellow on the Wellcome-funded project 'Hearing the Voice'

and a member of the Department of English Studies and Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham

University.

James Stark and Catherine Oakley “The Rejuvenation Emporium”

Human beings have always worried about ageing and have sought methods to try and achieve

“rejuvenation”: the state of renewed youth or the appearance of youth. The everyday methods with

which we are perhaps most familiar - skin care products and dietary or exercise regimes - have long

histories, but were transformed in the decades following the First World War, when new scientific

research and commercial innovations appeared to promise effective means of prolonging or

restoring youthfulness, fertility, and vitality.

“The Rejuvenation Emporium” will showcase the work and findings of the two-year AHRC Leadership

Award-funded project “Endless Possibilities of Rejuvenation: Defying Ageing, Defining Youth in

Britain, 1919-1948” at its mid-way point. The stall will present archival materials collated so far,

including clinical case notes, photographs, advertising, silent film footage and literary fiction, in

conjunction with contextual information and critical analysis. These items will offer stimulating entry

points into interdisciplinary discussions surrounding the history of such diverse rejuvenation options

as electrotherapy, hormone injections, radium treatments, and cosmeceuticals – and their biosocial

and cultural dimensions.

Jamie Stark is University Academic Fellow in the Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds and Principal Investigator on the AHRC Leadership Fellow Award-funded project "Endless Possibilities of Rejuvenation: Defying Ageing, Defining Youth in Britain, 1919-1948". Catherine Oakley is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Engagement Fellow on the project. Working with partners at the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds, the Boots Company Archive in Nottingham and National Trust in Devon, the project is examining diverse practices and approaches to rejuvenation at the intersection of the scientific and the commercial. It aims to examine historical and contemporary medical perspectives on ageing and their relationship to advertising and marketing strategies for anti-ageing products, procedures and lifestyles.


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Jane Macnaughton and members of Durham Life of Breath team

Life of Breath: An interdisciplinary exploration of breath, breathing and breathlessness

What does breathlessness feel like? How do thoughts, emotions and beliefs affect our breathing?

How is breath represented in literature, art, film and music? Would new ways of describing

breathlessness help patients and doctors? Life of Breath is trying to answer these questions and

others to open out understanding, challenge stigma and contribute new ideas to therapy. Visit our

stand to explore and reflect on your relationship with your breath. Take part in a breath-holding

challenge, experience what it is like to have restricted breathing, listen to different breath sounds

and chat to the team about their research and our interdisciplinary approach. Then contribute your

thoughts to our Respiratory Tree or Encyclopaedia of Breath.

Jane Macnaughton is Professor of Medical Humanities and leads the Wellcome Trust-funded Life of

Breath project at Durham University. Life of Breath is an interdisciplinary exploration of breath,

breathing and breathlessness from the perspectives of philosophy, literary studies, history,

anthropology, clinical medicine and clinical science which is run jointly with the University of Bristol.

Anna McFarlane Boldly Going Beyond the Tricorder: Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities For the last few years Dr Gavin Miller (PI) and Dr Anna McFarlane (RA) have developed the Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project, thanks to a Wellcome Trust Seed Award. Working on science fiction means engaging with fans and writers in the particularly close-knit community, and at this stall Anna McFarlane will showcase the ways in which the project engaged these groups through an innovative online database of medical science fiction and an international short story competition that saw entries from every continent bar the poles, resulting in a short story collection, A Practical Guide to the Resurrected: 21 Short Stories of Science Fiction and Medicine (Freight Books, 2017). Through images and artefacts from science fiction and speculative design, visitors can consider how science fiction continues to shape the technoscientific imaginary by challenging the horizons of technological expectation, interrogating the borderlines of disability, and considering what it means to augment or medically treat a human being, whether in the future or in the present day.

Anna McFarlane is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She has

worked on the Wellcome Trust-funded Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project and has

researched Naomi Mitchison’s science fiction in a project funded by a Wellcome Trust Small Grant

Award.


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Stuart Murray Augmented Selves: Posthuman Futures of Health From caring robots to prosthetic limbs, practices of augmenting the self raise pressing questions about what it means to be human. This research project—a collaboration between engineering, philosophy, medical, and arts and humanities researchers at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, Warwick and Exeter—asks how contemporary experiences and representations of augmentation technologies are changing ideas about care, disability and selfhood. As part of the project, we want to bring patients, medical practitioners, philosophers, engineers, and cultural critics together to think about how the design and representation of assistive and rehabilitation technologies can be improved to more accurately reflect experiences of living with them. Media obsessions with high-tech robots and designer prosthetic limbs disguise a world of everyday experience that often goes undiscussed in debates about technological advancements. Our project aims to make connections between the engineers who design augmentation technologies, the people who live with them, their representation in contemporary cultural narratives, and the ideas of embodiment and enhancement they communicate. Augmented Selves is funded by a Wellcome Trust Seed Award and a Royal Society/British Academy/Royal Academy of Engineering APEX Award. Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English at the

University of Leeds, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities. Along with

Clare Barker, he has just edited the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability.

Angela Woods Hearing the Voice Hearing the Voice (HtV) is an eight-year research project which combines insights from cognitive

science, cultural studies, English literature, medical humanities, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology

and theology in order to create a new kind of investigation into voice-hearing – one that moves

away from the idea that hearing voices is only ever a symptom of pathology and instead asks what

the experience is like, how it arises, and what it means. Funded by a Wellcome Trust Collaborative

Award in Humanities and Social Sciences, our international research team works closely with

clinicians, voice-hearers and other experts by experience. Join us at the HtV stall to meet some of

the team, explore our recent work and find out more about our innovative interdisciplinary

approach.

Angela Woods is an Associate Professor of Medical Humanities now based in the Department of

English Studies at Durham University. She is Deputy Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities

and Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, an eight-year interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing currently

funded by a Wellcome Trust Humanities and Social Sciences Collaborative Award.

Annamaria Carusi, Nicolas Salazar Sutil, Boris Wiseman, Claudia Mazzà, Lisa Alcock

Moving Bodies: interdisciplinary perspectives This stall will present two pilot projects to explore humanities-engineering collaboration on human

movement. The first sees a choreography exploring pain performed by wheelchair users and

dancers; the second tries to understand how dancers and others experience the movement in a

sculpture, Degas’ Little Dancer, through eye and motion tracking. Both of these pilot projects what

new avenues of research and which new questions are opened through bringing together the

different perspectives of humanities and engineering, and will show a range of pictures and videos

from the pilot experiments.

Annamaria Carusi is Reader in Medical Humanities at the University of Sheffield. Her research

focuses on the interface between technologies and human experience.

http://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/hearingthevoice/


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Clark Lawlor ‘On Fashions in Physic’: Discourses of Fashionable Disease in the Romantic Period. This paper uses the satirical articles written by Henry Southern in the London Magazine - “On Fashions” (August 1825), “On Fashions in Physic” (October 1825), and “On Dilettante Physic” (January 1826) and the literature that lead to them – to analyse discourses of fashionable disease in the newly capitalised British early nineteenth century. This was a world characterised by a burgeoning medical market, a periodical and print market that could adequately reflect and promote fashionable diseases and the medical market that spawned them, and the nexus of actors (patients, doctors, apothecaries…) in the whole drama of the production, maintenance and dissolution of fashionable diseases. The interaction of leisure (print or otherwise), culture and medicine was crucial in constructing a role for women and men, but women bore the brunt of the anxiety about the consequences of a world of ‘extraordinary modernity’ and the fashion that was its most obvious sign. I argue also that literary style is an important factor in assessing the framing of fashionable diseases. Fashionable diseases were one crucial aspect of the construction of women as objects of conspicuous consumption and all the ideological contradictions that came with their role.

Clark Lawlor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Northumbria University, UK. He is

currently Principal Investigator of ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-

1832’ (2013-2016), a major project funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Thomas Bray Thomas Bray is a Portfolio Developer in the Humanities & Social Science team at Wellcome. He is the

point of contact for those who are applying for doctoral or post-doctoral grants in the medical

humanities, and also supports early career researchers who are leading or who are employed on

Wellcome-funded projects in the arts and humanities. Tom joined Wellcome in February 2016, after

completing a PhD on post-war English social work. Please feel free to ask Thomas any questions you

may have about applying for grants at the Marketplace Stall, or informally during the Congress.

Sue Spencer Sue Spencer is a member of the editorial team for the BMJ Medical Humanities journal.


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Open Space - Friday 15th September 9.30 – 11.00 and continued 11.30 – 12.30

The Open Space session will provide a structured but informal context for participants to have the

conversations they want to have. Whether you are interested in finding collaborators for your next

project, exploring key concepts in the medical humanities, or working through the methodological

conundrums of health-related research, this session will enable you to connect to the people who

share your interests.

Mary Robson Mary Robson trained as a theatre designer, has extensive experience in the field of Arts and Health

and is a creative facilitator – she works with people to make things. She is Creative Facilitator on two

Wellcome Trust–funded research projects at Durham University – Hearing the Voice and The Life of

Breath. Her pioneering role there is to build the community of the researchers, with a particular

emphasis on interdisciplinarity and transferable methodology.

Roundtable 1 – When Disability studies met the Medical Humanities and both

became critical Friday 15th September 13.30 -14.30

Lucy Burke Lucy Burke is principal lecturer in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research explores contemporary cultural representations of dementia, ageing and learning disability.

Julie Anderson Julie Anderson is a Reader in Medical History at the University of Kent. She has written on the history of disability, in particular, physical and sensory impairments. Her current work centres on the history of visual impairment and she is publishing a monograph called the Science of Seeing with Manchester University Press in 2018.

Stuart Murray Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English at the

University of Leeds, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities. Along with

Clare Barker, he has just edited the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability.


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Roundtable 2 – What does Global Medical Humanities mean, and does it matter? Friday 15th September 15.00 – 16.00

Sanjoy Bhattacharya Sanjoy Bhattacharya is Professor of History of Medicine and Director of the Centre for Global Health

Histories for the History Department at the University of York, UK. He also heads the WHO

Collaborating Centre for Global Health Histories at York. Sanjoy is currently completing books on the

World Health Organization, Primary Health Care and Smallpox Eradication.

Anna Elsner Anna Magdalena Elsner is Marie Heim-Vögtlin Research Fellow at the Center for Medical Humanities at the University of Zurich. In her current research project, Anna analyses the philosophy of palliative care in contemporary French writing. She was previously based at the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King's College of London as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow working on the clinical encounter in modern French literature.

Steve Reid Steve Reid is a family physician with a background in rural health in South Africa. He is the Chair of

Primary Health Care at the University of Cape Town where he is promoting the development of the

medical and health humanities.

Arthur Rose

Arthur Rose is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies and the Centre

for Medical Humanities at Durham University. He is affiliated to the Wellcome Trust Funded Life of

Breath project, based at Durham and Bristol Universities.

northern network for medical humanities research...

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