Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Dr Gavin Miller and Dr Anna McFarlane about their work on science fiction and the medical humanities. Gavin and Anna explain what science fiction has to offer the medical humanities, and how science fiction shapes our understanding of the future of healthcare, when the line between healthcare and biological enhancement could become increasingly blurry. They also share what they have learned in the process of editing The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities with Dr Donna McCormack.

Gavin Miller is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow. His recent publications include Science Fiction and Psychology (LUP, 2020) and Miracles of Healing: Psychotherapy and Religion in Twentieth-Century Scotland (EUP, 2020). He is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities, and his latest project is an investigation of UFO practices in post-war Scotland.

Anna McFarlane is a Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds and author of the monograph Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades (2021). Her current research was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and focuses on traumatic pregnancy and its expression in fantastika. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, and the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Anne and Jenn about writing and personal stories in the context of medical and health humanities. Anne discusses how she combined the personal and the critical in writing her monograph Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Reflection. Jenn shares her experience of how care providers can integrate creative practices with healthcare and how such practices may support well-being.

Prof Anne Whitehead is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University UK. She was a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and has recently published the monographs Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Reflection (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

Jennifer H Pien is a Clinical Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and is the Director of The Pegasus Physician Writers and Editor-in-Chief of The Pegasus Review. Her interests include physician well-being and the intersection of creative writing and medicine. Sea of Souls, her forthcoming novel, is represented by Lisa Grubka, United Talent Agency.

Ian and Dieter talk with Prof Angela Woods (Durham University) about moving from Australia to the UK to develop her research in medical humanities, and about how the field has grown and changed over the last 10 years. They also discuss some of the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration and about what we can do to identify and address barriers to the further evolution of the medical and health humanities, especially for early career researchers.

Angela Woods is Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, and since 2012 has been Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, an ambitious interdisciplinary research project on the experience of hearing voices. Her research focuses on experiences and frameworks for understanding psychosis and voice-hearing, and on 'critical concepts’ within the medical humanities. Angela is the founding editor of The Polyphony and a series editor of Bloomsbury’s Critical Interventions in the Medical and Humanities series, as well as a former Associate Editor of the BMJ’s Medical Humanities Journal.

Dieter and Ian talk with Sue Foster and Dr Matt Jennings about their work with Health Action Training, a project combining techniques drawn from actor training and applied drama to help improve person-centred communication and resilience for nurses and other health and social care professionals.

Sue Foster is a Lecturer in Nursing. As a nurse of more than 30 years standing, she has worked in a variety of settings.  The early part of her career was firmly rooted in the clinical setting before moving into nurse education. She is passionate about person-centred Palliative and End of Life Care and has specialised in this field for 23 years, a practice that’s holds central the personhood of everyone involved in health and social care - staff, service users and care partners.

Dr Matt Jennings has been Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Drama at Edge Hill University, Northumbria University and Ulster University. Since the 1980s, Matt has worked as an actor, musician and arts facilitator in many countries and contexts. Originally from Sydney, he moved to Northern Ireland in 2001. In 2010, Matt completed a PhD on applied drama and conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. He is co-founder of Health Action Training.

Dieter and Ian talk with Dr Sayantani DasGupta about her work in health humanities/narrative medicine, particularly her work at the intersection of narrative, health and social justice. Sayantani will discuss the importance of pedagogy in her scholarly work, and the impact of her identity as a children's and YA author to her scholarship, and vice versa.

Click here for the article by Maria Sachiko Cecire that Sayantani discusses at 22:30.

Dr. Sayantani DasGupta is Senior Lecturer in the Master’s Program in Narrative Medicine, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, all at Columbia University. Originally trained in pediatrics and public health, she is the author or co-author of several academic books including The Principles and Practices of Narrative Medicine. Her work has appeared in The Lancet, JAMA, Pediatrics, The Hastings Center Report, Teaching and Learning in Medicine, and the Journal of Medical Humanities, and other venues. Her current interests are in issues of abolition medicine, racial justice and health, diaspora studies, and science fiction/health futurities. She is also a New York Times bestselling children’s author, and you can learn more about her work at www.sayantanidasgupta.com.

Ian and Dieter talk with Prof Margarita Saona (University of Illinois Chicago) about her experience as a literary scholar trying to find her way through the labyrinth of the health humanities. You'll also hear about Margarita’s experience of being a heart transplant patient, and how this impacted her writing and her thinking.

Prof Margarita Saona teaches literature at the University of Illinois Chicago. She studied linguistics and literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Columbia University in New York. She is interested in issues of memory, cognition, empathy, and representation in literature and the arts. She has published numerous articles, two books on literary and cultural criticism, Novelas familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Rosario, 2004) and Memory Matters in Transitional Perú (London, 2014), three books of short fiction, Comehoras (Lima, 2008) Objeto perdido (Lima, 2012), and La ciudad en que no estás (Lima, 2021) and a book of poems, Corazón de hojalata/Tin Heart (Chicago, 2017). Her new book of cultural and literary studies, Despadre: La masculinidad y la crisis de la identidad en la cultura peruana which examines the way representations of men in Peruvian literature and film reveal deep fractures in the country’s imaginary, will appear later this year. She is currently working on a non-fiction book entitled Corazón en trance.

Prof Ian Sabroe and Dr Dieter Declercq talk to Dr Keisha Ray about her ground-breaking work in Black bioethics, her journey to studying Black people's health, and what she wants the world to know about Black health.

Keisha Ray, PhD received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Utah and is currently an assistant professor with the McGovern Center for Humanities & Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Most of Dr. Ray’s work focuses on the social and cultural determinants of Black people’s health, integrating race education into medical school curricula, and the ethics of biomedical enhancement. She has contributed to peer-reviewed journals like Journal of Medical Humanities and Pediatrics, as well as edited volumes, and textbooks. She currently has a monograph in progress on Black people’s health contracted with Oxford University Press. Dr. Ray also serves as an associate editor of the American Journal of Bioethics blog site to which she is a regular contributor.

Prof Ian Sabroe and Dr Dieter Declercq talk to Prof Paul Crawford about his ground-breaking work as the world's first professor of health humanities and his research into how creative practices advance health and mental well-being.

Check out 'What's Up With Everyone?' Paul's recent campaign with the animation studio Aardman.

Paul Crawford is Professor of Health Humanities at the School of Health Sciences and Director of the Centre for Social Futures at the Institute of Mental Health, University of Nottingham, UK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (FRSPH). As founding father of the global and rapidly developing field of health humanities, Professor Crawford leads a large program of research in applying the arts and humanities to inform and transform healthcare, health and wellbeing. He is the author of over 140 peer-reviewed articles or chapters and 13 books, most recently The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities (Palgrave), Florence Nightingale at Home (Palgrave) and Cabin Fever: Surviving Lockdown in the Coronavirus Pandemic (Emerald). He is the commissioning editor for two series, Arts for Health (Emerald) and Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities (Routledge) and is lead Editor-in-Chief for The Encyclopedia of Health Humanities (Springer). In 2021, he led the campaign for young people’s mental health called What’s Up With Everyone with Academy Award-winning Aardman (Shaun the Sheep, Wallace & Gromit). This initiative brought five original short animations to more than 18 million people and won Best Social Media and Content at the Design Week Awards 2021.

To mark the end of our first season, we are putting out this bonus episode of the podcast. Prof Ian Sabroe and Dr Dieter Declercq talk with previous guest and friend of the podcast Dr Lauren Barron and look back on the first season of Conversations About Arts Humanities and Health and the series as a whole.

This conversation was originally recorded as part of the Mayo Clinic's 'Humanities in Medicine Symposium 2021 Engaging Across Disciplines: Toward a Practice of Transdisciplinarity'. We are very grateful to the conference team at the Mayo Clinic for kindly allowing us to share this conversation as an episode of our podcast.

Prof Ian Sabroe and Dr Dieter Declercq talk to Prof Rita Charon about her pioneering work in narrative medicine, as well as the pivotal role of aesthetics and aesthetic experiences in the practices of narrative medicine.

Rita Charon is a general internist and literary scholar who originated the field of narrative medicine. She is Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and Professor of Medicine at Columbia University. She completed the MD at Harvard in 1978 and the PhD in English at Columbia in 1999, concentrating on narratology and the works of Henry James. Her research focuses on the consequences of narrative medicine practice, narrative medicine pedagogy, and health care team effectiveness. At Columbia, she directs the Foundations of Clinical Practice faculty seminar, the Virginia Apgar Academy for Medical Educators, the Narrative and Social Medicine Scholarly Projects Concentration Track, the required and elective Narrative Medicine curriculum for the medical school, and Columbia Commons: Collaborating Across Professions, a medical-center-wide partnership devoted to health care team effectiveness. She inaugurated and teaches in the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program at Columbia. She has lectured and served as Visiting Professor at many medical schools and universities in the US and abroad, teaching narrative medicine theory and practice. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency, and research funding from the NIH, the NEH, the American Board of Internal Medicine, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, and several additional private foundations. She was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 2018 Jefferson Lecture, “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.” Dr. Charon has published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Narrative, Henry James Review, Poetics Today, The Drama Review, Partial Answers, and Literature and Medicine. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2006) and co-author of Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (Routledge, 2002) and Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (SUNY Press, 2008).