The Medical Humanities Research Network

The Medical Humanities Network was established in January 2021 by Jane Hartshorn (University of Kent) and Lise Grønvold (Birkbeck, University of London). The meetings take place on the third Thursday of the month at 5pm. Each month, we invite a speaker to present their research, discuss their practice, or facilitate a workshop.

The aim of the network is to create a space where researchers can share ideas, seek peer support, and collaborate on future projects.

Our workshops have an interdisciplinary focus and encourage members to develop new skills and explore their research through a creative lens.

We also believe it is important to include patient voices within academia, and many of the artists and writers we invite have lived experience of illness and/or disability.

Email chasemedhums@gmail.com to be added to our mailing list.

Past Events

Writing the Night/The Night Side of Life: A Creative Writing Workshop with Louise Kenward

Thursday 16 March, 5-6 pm

  • What does the night represent to you? What does it mean for something to happen at night as opposed to during the day? How does the darkness of the night alter our perspective and our sense of the world, or our sense of ourselves?

    Susan Sontag wrote that ‘illness is the night side of life’ and in this creative writing workshop we’ll use visual and text prompts to explore our own experiences of illness as nocturnal, holding a torch up to the little seen, tracing the silhouettes and shadows of nightfall.

    It is only in darkness that we see the light of the candle. And what of the white nights, the nights where it does not get dark?

    Bio:

    Louise Kenward is a writer, artist and psychologist. Currently developing Moving Mountains, a project (and anthology) of nature writing by disabled authors and writers living with chronic illness, her work has featured in Women on Nature, The Polyphony, The Clearing and Radio 3 (Landscapes of Recovery). In 2020 Louise co-produced the anthology Disturbing the Body (Boudicca Press), and she has been Writer in Residence with Sussex Wildlife Trust for the last year (Inhabiting Instability). Louise is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Place Writing with Manchester Metropolitan University, where she is beginning a practice based project in creative writing, exploring post-viral illness in a wetland landscape (Romney Marshes).

    She can be found on Twitter @LouiseKenward and Instagram @Louise_Kenward

To You, – A creative writing workshop with Olivia Turner

Thursday 16 January, 5-6 pm

  • In this workshop we will explore the relationship between epistolic writing, intimacy and health. Olivia will read excerpts of her writing, which play with the assumed intimacy of the clinical encounter and the presumed intimacy of the page. We will write our own letters to explore closeness, the role of the writer and reader, and what it means to be an examined body.

    Bio

    Dr Olivia Turner is an artist and researcher based in the Northeast of England. Her recent exhibitions The Way My Body Feels (2022) and You Echo Through Time (2022) at the Great North Museum, explore themes of wildness, feminism, lived experience, and bodily agency within the Shefton Collection. She frequently collaborates with Classical archaeologist Dr Sally Waite. Olivia is an Associate Lecturer and is currently working as a postdoctoral practice-led researcher for the Medical Humanities Network at Newcastle University.

Amanda Couch: The Herbs of the Commons Became Weeds the Women of the Commons Became Witches
Thursday 12 January, 5-6:15pm

  • Amanda will facilitate a participatory performance, The Herbs of the Commons Became Weeds, the Women of the Commons Became Witches to explore and celebrate the wild plants that women would have used as food and medicine. Together participants and host will infuse hot water with rosehips and imbibe the brew whilst reflecting on the relationship to our bodies, the land, and wild plants, their nourishment and healing.

    Through foraging, food preparation, drinking and discussion, the workshop aims to unearth, revive and disseminate knowledge lost by our being severed from the land and our ancestors of wise women who were persecuted, tortured, and killed during the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries, to make and re-make the commons.

    The wild rose, a thorny clamberer of the hedgerows, with its ‘hip’ fruit that is potentially still available in November/December, symbolises the problematic and challenging times that we find ourselves in as well as these dark histories. Through the creative act of making and drinking the herbal tea we might absorb the knowledge of the rose as it infuses and flows through our bodies enabling the stories of our kinship to plants, land and healing to pour out in the safe space ‘sub rosa’.

    Prior to the seminar, you will be invited to forage for some rosehips, or to request some foraged and prepared by Amanda*. Your rosehip tea can be made from fresh or dried hips. During the session, you will need a vessel to boil water in and a vessel to drink from.

    *If you would like to receive some dried hips in the post, makes sure to email Amanda at amandajcouch@gmail.com with your address by lunchtime on Tuesday 6 December.

    Bio:

    Artist, curator, researcher and senior lecturer in Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts Farnham, Amanda Couch researches, reinterprets and reimagines histories, myth, ritual and embodied knowledge weaving the theoretical, personal, and material processes. Her work straddles the domains of performance, sculpture, photography, print and the book, food, the everyday, participation, and writing.

    Alongside Catherine Morland, she co-curated The Commons: Re-enchanting the World (2020-22) at The MERL, University of Reading; performed online (2021) and in person (2016, 2019) at the Wellcome Library, London; performed and exhibited at the Royal College of Physicians, London, (2020). She had a solo show and performed at Ivy Arts Centre, University of Surrey (2018). Her work is in public and private collections, nationally and internationally and her writing is published in journals, online, in books and as part of her artist book publications. She convenes a Commons Feast Virtual Monthly Meet Up on the third Tuesday of the month, to share foraging and commons knowledge framed as participatory performance.

Screening and Discussion with filmmaker and researcher Caitlin McMullan
Thursday 17 November, 5-6pm

  • Join Caitlin McMullan for a screening and discussion of two recent films, Material Bodies and First Step Swim.

    Through interweaving dance and dialogue, Material Bodies is a sensual and cinematic look at the relationship between amputees and their limbs. This visceral and colourful short film explores how a prosthetic leg can be more like a piece of jewellery or a dance companion.

    Touching on themes of identity, body image, disability and isolation, First Step Swim is a self-portrait following Caitlin on a journey of wild swimming. By taking control of how she is viewed Caitlin looks to challenge the non-disabled gaze and gain a better understanding of her body and surroundings.

    Bio:

    Caitlin McMullan is a London born and Glasgow based independent researcher and filmmaker with a background in design. Often exploring her own identity within her practice, Caitlin is interested in creating work that changes perceptions and creates new ways of thinking about disability.

    In 2018 Caitlin co-founded the project Sensory Prosthetics with Dr Sarah Wilkes, working with University College London’s Material’s Library at the Institute of Making. Sensory Prosthetics led to a collaboration on the film Material Bodies which has now been screened internationally and published by NOWNESS in 2021. Caitlin received her first film commission in 2021 and has since gone onto participate in Scottish Documentary Institute’s New Voices and Bridging the Gap programmes. She is currently working on her latest commission through Bridging the Gap.

Bodies/Images/Incursions: a Reading and Workshop on Medical Images with Liz Orton
Thursday 20 October, 5-6.15pm

  • Liz Orton works with archival images and text to explore language, authorship and the body. Her recent work, based on personal experiences of illness, uses found medical material as a contested space to explore issues of trust and consent in doctor-patient relationships. Images can never be external to the reality they seek to represent, and by recontextualising found images, Liz exposes them to both personal and political critique, and dwells on the idea of unresolved histories.

    Liz will read from two recent text-based works, Every Body Is an Archive and Shadow Work. These works address tensions between personal and medical ways of knowing illness, and draw on/in multiple voices to produce fractured narratives.

    In a short workshop we will explore the politics and poetics of re-working found medical material. We will enjoy the push and pull of images, working with feelings of desire and vulnerability. By co-opting medical gestures such as cutting, stitching and annotation we will use the space of the image to generate our own language.

    Liz Orton is an artist using archival practices, both real and imagined, to explore the tensions between personal and scientific forms of knowledge. Before being diagnosed with ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 2019, Liz was a Lecturer in Photography at London College of Communication, and Associate Artist with Performing Medicine. She is the recipient of several major grants and awards including the MEAD Fellowship, a Wellcome Trust arts award and UCL Grand Challenges grant. She is editor of Becoming Image: Medicine and the Algorithmic Gaze, and regularly exhibits in group shows. In 2022 her work has been featured in Trigger, Tendon Magazine and Notes Journal, and her text You are My Territory will be in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine.

Communicating Pain: a collage workshop with Danne Jobin
Thursday 29 September 2022, 5-6pm

  • In her text, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes that ‘physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language.' An episode of illness breaks down language and consequently limits one's capacity to communicate pain to oneself and others. The experience, although profound, becomes unintelligible. Turning to other creative means of self-expression can offer a different slant, enabling meaning to emerge from that very site of fragmentation. Artist Rebeka Elizegi describes collage as ‘a hybrid language in itself’, one that ‘feeds on different kinds of elements and is made out of diversity, but at the same time [...] allows artists to create dialects and grammars with their own personalities.’ Similarly, Blanca Ortiga states that collage finds its structure ‘in the unstable’, enabling ‘a relational way of thinking [...] from which the unexpected emerges.’

    This participative workshop will explore collage in relation to illness and disability to reflect on the ways cut and paste can join up disparate elements to express complex realities. Through collage, you will be encouraged to address altered states and distorted temporalities, the psychological and bodily sensations of illness, and the discrepancies between personal experience and outsiders' perception of illness.

    Participants will need scissors, glue and magazines or other printed matter. Mixed-media approaches are also welcome.

    Bio

    Danne Jobin holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent and has an interest in trans & nonbinary poetics and collage. Danne’s poems have been published in Magma, harana poetry, Datableed and Tenebrae. They have read at the festival Poetry in Aldeburgh as well as for the 87 Press and Datableeder. Danne vlogs regularly on their YouTube channel Poetology and organises workshops on collage poems, poetic rituals and queer poetics. They also support writers and artists as a creativity coach. https://www.dannejobin.com/

Ovarium: Reading and Q&A with poet Joanna Ingham
Thursday 25 August 2022, 5pm

  • Tender, loving and visceral, Ovarium is a pamphlet of poems about a giant ovarian cyst. Ingham charts her journey with the cyst, from diagnosis to surgery to recovery, via a landscape of scanner rooms and hospital wards. The poems explore the impact of illness, and the body as a site of disgust and shame but also healing and endurance. Ingham’s poems are forensic as she looks at the disorientating and sometimes patriarchal language of anatomy and medicine, and the way illness can change the relationship we have with our own bodies.

    Bio

    Joanna Ingham writes poetry and fiction. She grew up in Suffolk and has recently returned to live there after many years in London and Hertfordshire. Naming Bones, her first pamphlet, was published by ignitionpress in 2019 and she won the Paper Swans Press Single Poem Competition in 2020. She has worked in community arts, facilitating creative writing workshops in a wide variety of settings. She lives with her husband and daughter.

Pregnancy advice from the archives with Kate Errington
Thursday 14 July 2022, 5pm

  • In this workshop we’ll use historic and contemporary examples of risk communication in pregnancy as a catalyst for conversation around how the archives can enlighten current practice and inform future public health communication and policy. In reacting to these materials, we will examine any developments in communication strategy, as well as the intersections or conflicts of official guidance with other sources of pregnancy information – for example, NHS antenatal information in contrast to information sourced from social media, or a doctor’s advice with “old-wives’ tales”.

    Attendees will be asked to come to the workshop with one example of a pregnancy risk message, that they will be willing to share. This may be anecdotal (advice you, or someone you know, received during pregnancy), a news article, a post on social media, and can relate to anything posed as a risk during pregnancy – e.g. diet choices, exercise, vaccinations, social toxins such as alcohol or smoking, etc.

    Although this workshop is concerned with messages surrounding risk in pregnancy, everyone - as healthcare service users and public audiences of healthcare communication – is welcome to attend.

    Bio

    Kate Errington is a PhD student at Birkbeck and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, researching the cultural history of pregnancy. She is also the co-founder of the Broadly Conceived reading group – a monthly group that focuses on all things repro, including (in)fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, maternity and more.

    Kate’s research uses archival materials in dialogue with contemporary sources to explore our understanding of maternity in 20th century Britain, and to interrogate the ongoing development of public health strategies and communications directed at pregnant populations.

    You can contact Kate at kerrin01@student.bbk.ac.uk or @KateErrington3 (Twitter).

  • In this workshop we’ll co-create a digital zine using online collections of images. In discussing presence/absence in archives, legal and ethical questions of (re)use and remixing, and some of the histories of zines, cut and paste, and collage, we’ll explore the ways zines may offer new relationships to (medical) archives in which sick, Mad, neurodivergent or disabled people’s accounts are often absent, submerged or limited to narratives of "Lived Experience". The workshop is best on a laptop/desktop where you can have zoom open at the same time as a web browser. 

    Bio

    Lilith (Lea, as in sea) Cooper is a zine maker, artist, researcher and zine librarian at the Edinburgh Zine Library. In 2020 they began a PhD working with the zines at the Wellcome Collection. They regularly facilitate zine making and have worked on various different zine projects including most recently Take It Back, commissioned and supported by Unlimited with funding from Creative Scotland, exploring experiences of madness, mental illness, neurodivergence and in mental health services. They are based in Fife, Scotland. You can find more of their work at www.zinejam.com or @lilithjcooper (twitter).

Zine Making Workshop with Lilith Cooper
Thursday 16 June 2022, 5pm

Poetry with Daniel Sluman, Polly Atkin & Dorothy Lehane
Thursday 2 December 2021, 5pm

  • Daniel Sluman - single window (Nine Arches Press, 2021)

    Daniel Sluman’s third collection, single window, is a hybrid memoir of poetry and images. One an amputee with chronic pain, the other suffering from Crohn's Disease and Fibromyalgia, Daniel Sluman and his wife Emily found the year of 2016 almost untenable. Unable to safely navigate the stairs to bed, they spent 24 hours a day together on their sofa, isolated from society except for a single window, where they watched the world moving around them. single window is an incomparable, uncompromising and starkly-realised sequence of poems in the form of a journal, which bear witness to the loneliness and fear experienced by disabled people living in Tory Britain. Through a precise, hyper-confessional fusion of poetry and photography, this book details the realities of disabled lives, exploring intimacy and unconditional love as well as isolation and confinement, and documenting a world that many people otherwise never see.

    Polly Atkin - Much With Body (Seren Books, 2021)

    Much With Body is the startlingly original second collection by poet Polly Atkin. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction: unusual descriptions of frogs, birds, a great stag that ‘you will not see’. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel, the author’s wild swimming being just one kind of immersion. There is also a distinct link with the past in a central section of found poems taken from transcripts of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworths, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.

    Dorothy Lehane – House Girl (Aquifer Books, 2021)

    The girl in the sequence is diseased and stigmatised, locked away in the house. Siblings perform diagnostic ceremonies and make home-made treatments using potions from the natural world. With a sense of thwarted belongingness, the house girl is simultaneously complicit and disobedient. While grieving for a particular loss of bodily autonomy, she offers the reader a glimpse into the complex and troubling psychic processes that accompany chronic illness.

    Daniel Sluman is a 34-year-old poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, and he has published three poetry collections with Nine Arches Press. His most recent collection, single window was released in September 2021 and is shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He tweets @danielsluman.

    Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by second, Much With Body (Seren: 2021), and a biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021). She is working on a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability. She has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. With Kate Davis and Anita Sethi she co-founded the Open Mountain initiative at Kendal Mountain Festival, which seeks to centre voices that are currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing.

    Dorothy Lehane is the author of six poetry publications: House Girl (Aquifer Press, 2021), I’m very interested in falling in love with you (Run Amok Press, 2021), Bettbehandlung (Muscaliet Press, 2018), Umwelt (Leafe Press, 2016), Ephemeris (Nine Arches Press, 2014) and Places of Articulation (dancing girl press 2014). Excerpts from House Girl can be found on the Glasfryn Project, Molly Bloom and issue 30 of GoldenHandcuffs Review. She is the founding editor of Litmus Publishing.

What the Book Told’: Artists’ Books and Lived Experience with Stella Bolaki
Thursday 16 September 2021, 5pm

  • What is distinctive about the artist’s book as a form of creative self-exploration and communication? Since the 1960s, the artist’s book has been an innovative and versatile medium of expression, as well as a radical way of bringing art to a wider public. This talk and workshop will explore artists’ books from the ‘Prescriptions’ collection (University of Kent) that is dedicated to the topics of illness and wellbeing. We will reflect on how contemporary artists reimagine the book format to give voice to intimate experiences, craft multisensory stories about health and illness, and challenge medical hierarchies. Participants will also be guided to create a handmade book to capture aspects of their own lived experience. 

    Bio:

    Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in Medical Humanities in the School of English at the University of Kent and Director of Kent’s MA programme in Medical Humanities. She is the author of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which explores representations of illness across different art forms. The interdisciplinary and collaborative project “Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities” she led from 2016 to 2019 helped establish the “Prescriptions: Artists’ Books” special collection, based at the University of Kent’s Templeman Library.

Slow, Small or Not in the Same Place: Approaches to Disability Ecopoetics with Polly Atkin
Thursday 15 July 2021, 5pm

  • This workshop takes a different approach to writing about nature and the landscape, thinking about how and where we meet ’nature’ if we cannot access ‘wild’ spaces, or if our access to ‘wild spaces’ comes at a bodily cost. It asks you to explore the ways in which you experience ’nature’ in your daily life: looking in pavement cracks or ceilings corners, out the window, on your doorstep; looking at the small, slowly. We will also think about the role of imagination, memory and research - of travelling in the mind if we can’t travel in our bodies.

    Bio:

    Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by second, Much With Body (Seren: 2021), and a biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021). She is working on a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability. She has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. With Kate Davis and Anita Sethi she co-founded the Open Mountain initiative at Kendal Mountain Festival, which seeks to centre voices that are currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing.

Illustrated talk, photography and drawing workshop with Liz Atkin
Thursday 17 June 2021, 5pm

  • In this workshop, artist Liz Atkin will describe her experience of compulsive skin picking and how she manages and refocuses her condition through her visual practice. Participants will use drawing and photography as a way of exploring tactility and touch, focusing on different textures and how they might relate to the body and body-focused repetitive behaviours. The session will be followed by a Q&A with Liz.

    Bio:

    Liz Atkin is an artist and educator. She has Compulsive Skin Picking, a complex physical and mental disorder, but reimagines the body-focused repetitive behaviour and her experiences of anxiety into drawings, photographs, and performances. Liz is a mental health advocate and raises awareness for the disorder around the world. She has exhibited and taught in the UK, Europe, Australia, USA, Singapore and Japan. Her artwork and an archive of her advocacy for skin picking is held by the Wellcome Collection, London.

Sanatorium Performance / Intrusion as Creative Manifesto with Abi Palmer
Thursday 20 May 2021, 5pm

  • Abi Palmer’s ‘Intrusion Manifesto’ explores the idea that chronically ill and disabled communities, in particular, experience ‘intrusions’ – frequent and unavoidable disruptions to daily life ­– that have an often overlooked impact on our creative practices. She believes that by acknowledging and centring these intrusions, we can use them to develop more innovative and sustainable ways of creating work. 

    Join Abi for a performance and workshop exploring ways to identify your own intrusions and use them as a jumping off point in your own practice. 

    Experiment with developing intrusion-centred work of your own. 

    The workshop will begin with a live performance from Abi’s book Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020), scored with haunting, dreamlike film. The performance explores themes of mysticism, chronic pain, queerness, and what it means to float. 

    Bio 

    Abi Palmer is an artist and writer exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication. Crip Casino – her interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces – has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Somerset House and Wellcome Collection. Her debut book Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020) is a fragmented memoir, jumping between luxury thermal pool, and blue inflatable bathtub. 

    About Sanatorium:

     A young woman spends a month taking the waters at a thermal water-based rehabilitation facility in Budapest. On her return to London, she attempts to continue her recovery using an £80 inflatable blue bathtub. The tub becomes a metaphor for the intrusion of disability; a trip hazard in the middle of an unsuitable room, slowly deflating and in constant danger of falling apart. Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020) moves through contrasting space--bathtub to thermal pool, land to water, day to night--interlacing memoir, poetry and meditations on the body to create a mesmerising, mercurial debut.

    Palmer's accompanying film blends haunted dresses and immersive mycological meditations with analogue footage of Palmer in the bathtub (directed and shot by Anna Ulrikke Andersen) and diaristic fragments from the Sanatorium itself. Themes of chronic pain, queerness and mysticism emerge. Lose yourself in the blurred lines between pain and healing, land and water, sinking — and what it means to float. 

'Writing the Female* Surrealist Body' with Jennifer Brough.
Thursday 26 May 2022, 5pm

  • After a brief introduction to Surrealism’s ideology and women working in this medium (from its conception to present day), this workshop will use a series of writing exercises to encourage participants to reflect on their relationships with their bodies and how they can possibly be rewritten.

    In an hour of reinterpreting and imagining, participants will be asked to blend art writing and personal narratives with a series of writing exercises and visual prompts, including imagery from Dorothea Tanning, Luchita Hurtado, and Dominique Fung, among other artists. This workshop will draw on quotes from surrealist women and activists within the disability justice movement to question why certain bodies are marginalised and how they can be reclaimed through writing.

    Bio

    Jennifer Brough is a slow writer from Birmingham. Her work includes fiction and personal essays exploring the body, gender, pain and disability, art and literature. She is involved in projects centred in disability and feminism, including an art collaboration at Eastside Projects, and is a member of resting up collective, an interdisciplinary sick group of artists.

Memoir & Autoimmunity with Dr Dorothy Lehane
Thursday 18 March 2021, 5pm

  • We are excited to welcome Dr Dorothy Lehane to our next Medical Humanities Network meeting. Dorothy will be discussing her work in process, Reactive: a memoir of an unknowable body, a memoir on the lived autoimmune experience.

    There will also be time for a Q&A. We can't wait to discuss memoir, the process of creative-critical writing, and contemporary experiences of autoimmune illness.

    Bio:

    Dorothy Lehane is the author of four poetry publications: Bettbehandlung, (Muscaliet Press, 2018), Umwelt (Leafe Press, 2016), Ephemeris (Nine Arches Press, 2014), and Places of Articulation (dancing girl press, 2014). Recent poetry and reviews appear in Westerly Magazine, Golden Handcuffs Review, Glasfryn Project and Modern Philology. She is the founding editor of Litmus Publishing and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent and is currently writing a memoir on the lived autoimmune experience, titled: Reactive: a memoir of an unknowable body.