Lola Dickinson interrogates her role as a historian within the medical humanities, questioning the functions of power, positionality, and perspective in her work.
In March 2025, I attended the ‘Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities’ PhD School at Durham University. I was thrilled to have been selected for this three-day workshop that promised the opportunity to learn from prominent academics in the field of medical humanities while building a community of PhD researchers with similar interests. However, despite my excitement on that first day in Durham, I was also somewhat ambivalent.
As a historian, I often find myself unsure about the space history as a discipline occupies—or doesn’t—in the broader field of medical humanities. While medical humanities acknowledges the historical underpinnings of many of the themes and topics explored within its scope, historical research is often perceived as a context-provider, rather than as a central methodological or epistemological mode (Fitzgerald and Callard 2016).
The methodological differences between the various disciplines that engage with the larger field of medical humanities can sometimes unintentionally create barriers to collaboration and engagement. The methods and research outputs of the social sciences, for example, which more commonly mirror the structure of scientific methods and papers, are often privileged as being more accessible within medical contexts (Albert et al, 2014). As a historian, this has at times created a sense that I am unable to contribute meaningfully to medical humanities discourse.
Yet, by the end of the PhD School, my concerns about the dismissal of history within the field of queer medical humanities had been thoroughly challenged. Three days of discussion around using a queer lens to approach medical humanities research allowed for an environment wholly anchored in interdisciplinarity. Due to the wholistic and meaningful way in which this interdisciplinarity was fostered, I left the School with much more confidence that historical scholarship has a key place within the medical humanities.
Interdisciplinarity and Queer Methodology
Within queer studies, medical humanities, and countless other developing research clusters, interdisciplinarity is considered a cornerstone of scholarly work. Scholars in these fields frequently note the futility of rigid disciplinary boundaries, as well as the necessity of transdisciplinary collaboration to ensure that scholarship can meaningfully contribute to knowledge production (Woodward and Woodward, 2015; Greco, 2013). Yet, in practice, attempts at interdisciplinarity can unintentionally result in disciplinary hierarchies.
This is particularly the case in the medical humanities, where the arts and humanities have often been framed as ‘interpreting or illustrating biomedical frameworks’ but not necessarily ‘epistemologically generative—capable of producing knowledge in their own right’ (Sterbini and Wilson, 2025). The differences in the language and methodologies of the social sciences ‘versus’ the arts and humanities can produce alienation rather than connection, particularly during a time when the humanities as a whole feel increasingly unstable and under attack. Such hierarchies are entrenched within the medical humanities, often stymieing attempts of interdisciplinarity.
The framework of ‘queer methodology’, however, completely shifts the lens through which the medical humanities are accessed. During the PhD School, whether in zine-making workshops or discussions of mutual aid and care, we were encouraged to think deeply about our own research, positionality and the kinds of outputs academia privileges. This presents its own methodological shift: how do we write in ways that are accountable to the communities we study, rather than the institutions that produce the records we draw from?
Queering Historical Methods for the Medical Humanities
On the second day of the School, Nikolaos Papadogiannis, an esteemed HIV/AIDS historian, delivered a presentation which highlighted the significance of navigating historical research in a way that allowed the work to be accessible beyond academia. Nikos’ comic, ‘Trajectories: AIDS Activism in Western Europe’, co-authored with Rachel E. Love and illustrated by Terry Anderson, was an important example of historical analysis that was engaging, accessible and reconsidered the script of historical research (Papadogiannis et al, 2022).
Nikos reflected frankly on both the joys and difficulties of producing these graphic histories. As he noted, graphic history provides a medium which is extremely accessible and allows academic work to reach a much wider audience. This process of queering academic outputs is important for questioning epistemic practices, their origins and their limitations. Yet, as Nikos also reminded us, the production of graphics and cartoons can be restrictive in the amount of content and level of detail that can be included. It also requires working with trained illustrators, who must be appropriately paid. In this sense, while graphic narratives are an incredibly important, and increasingly recognised method, clear considerations of resources, content, and perspective must be made before embarking upon them (Benesch et al, 2025).
Nikos’s reflections encouraged me to consider how my research might be significant beyond an academic audience. I am hoping to turn a presentation I delivered earlier this year into a comic, with the intention of producing a sexual health education resource. This presentation centred the development of sexual health provisions for sex workers in the context of AIDS, underscoring the significance of local negotiations in the shaping of this healthcare.
Building Abolitionist Bridges
The Durham PhD School allowed us, as participants, to engage with scholars working in disciplines with whom we might otherwise have never interacted. Indeed, some of the most productive conversations I had were with scholars from a variety of disciplines outside my own, including criminology, geography, sociology, and psychology.
At first glance, our projects seemed disparate. One examined compulsory psychiatric treatment as a carceral practice in England. Another looked at queer lived experience of carceral spaces and systems in the UK. My own research considers the relationship between sex workers and the state at the height of the AIDS crisis in Britain. But from these conversations emerged a shared political framework—abolition—that anchored how we approached our research, each project centred (in different ways) on state violence, criminalisation and pathologisation.
As feminist abolitionists, we each came to our work with an understanding that carceral logic—the discursive and legislative apparatus that legitimises imprisonment and policing by labelling behaviours, peoples and bodies as ‘deviant’—underpins much of how our society functions, from law to medicine to gender structures.
For us, abolition functions both as a framework and as a method. As a framework, it offers a way of analysing how systems of punishment and policing create society’s ‘norms’, legitimising and sustaining broader structures of racial capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. As a method, abolitionism demands that we imagine and practise forms of research that move beyond punitive logics and reimagine structures of knowledge that are centred on care and community.
We view carceral logic as central to understanding racialised and gendered violence, capitalism and colonialism. The work we do contributes to a greater analysis of how this logic and culture have been embedded within our everyday lives, as punishment and imprisonment have been normalised as a response to complex social issues and behaviours. Our conversations pushed us past thinking about the spaces that are typically associated with carceral logic—prisons and psychiatric hospitals—and towards the historical and ongoing structural conditions that render certain bodies disposable and certain knowledges illegible (Wilson Gilmore 2022).
We discussed how abolitionist frameworks shape not just our research questions but also our methodologies, ethics, and relationships to our work, both inside and outside of academia. This, in turn, places historical enquiry as central to a queer abolitionist framework. Without a historical perspective that articulates how carceral and medical institutions have created and maintained power; it is impossible to consider present practices of care and control (Cooper and Szreter 2021).
Abolition as Method
What does it mean to centralise abolition as a queer method in the medical humanities? This was the question that I left the PhD School pondering. At its core, an abolitionist method is not simply about a desire to dismantle carceral and oppressive systems. It is also about reimagining structures of knowledge, care and community so that they are no longer dependent on harm, exclusion or the reproduction of carceral logics that deem some people more important than others. In the medical humanities this means asking: whose voices shape and have shaped the field, what forms of evidence are valued and why, and how can we produce knowledge that refuses violence?
There are some crucial examples of thinkers who already employ abolitionist methods. Saidiya Hartman’s groundbreaking work shows how the silences in the archive—as archived materials typically centre on wealthy white men—are not simply gaps that need to be reflected in our academic works but can become, themselves, sites of enquiry (Hartman 2021). By interrogating the limits of the archive itself, Hartman demonstrates how research can resist reproducing harm while opening space for other forms of knowing. Abolitionist and decolonial approaches—those that challenge Eurocentric frameworks and seek to recover ways of knowing rooted outside colonial systems—urge us to interrogate whose knowledge counts, who is harmed by traditional modes of research, and how we might imagine otherwise (Olufemi 2021).
One of the School’s most powerful outcomes, then, was how it fostered interdisciplinarity while encouraging us to queer the methods of our own disciplines. Taking the example of abolition, I was able to leave the school with a methodological approach to my work that was not dependent on discipline and fostered connection beyond my own field. This is something that, as presenter João Florêncio noted at the school, we cannot take for granted.
Queer scholars often occupy precarious positions within faculties, with only one or two academics working on queer scholarship at any given university. The growing precarity within the humanities and academia more broadly has only exaggerated this trend. It was sobering to hear of colleagues in the United States whose entire modules and courses had been cut as a result of Trump’s DEI eliminations. This space, therefore, offered something crucial to each attendee in terms of their own work and positionality: it was both political and personal.
To queer the medical humanities is not simply to add queer subjects or stories. It’s about challenging the epistemological assumptions that underpin our research. To ask ourselves, our colleagues, our communities, and our readers: what counts as evidence, who is heard, and what kind of care is possible?
About the author
Lola Dickinson is a AHRC CHASE-funded PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her PhD focuses on public health, HIV/AIDS and sex work in 1980s and 1990s Britain. She has published work in Modern British History and Global Histories. You can find her on BlueSky: @loladickinson.
About the 2025 Medical Humanities PhD School
This post is part of a collection of contributions from attendees of the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School which took place in Durham in March 2025. The PhD school was funded by Wellcome, as part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, and the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics (CMHB) at Linköping University.
All articles in this collection can be found on this page: 2025 Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School.
References
Benesch, Oleg, Shaul Mitelpunkt, and Charlotta Salmi. 2025. ‘Graphic Narratives and History in the Americas’. The American Historical Review 130(2): 231-64.
Cooper, Hilary and Simon Szreter. 2021. After the Virus: Lessons from the Past for a Better Future. Cambridge University Press.
Fitzgerald, Des and Felicity Callard. 2016. ‘Entangling the Medical Humanities’ in Atkinson, Sarah, and others, (eds) The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Edinburgh Companions to Literature. Edinburgh University Press.
Greco, Monica. 2013. ‘Logics of Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Medical Humanities’. In Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences, edited by Andrew Barry and Georgina Born. Routledge.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2021. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. Serpent’s Tail.
Olufemi, Lola. 2021. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. Hajar Press.
Papadogiannis, Nikolaos, Rachel E. Love, and Terry Anderson. 2022. ‘Trajectories: AIDS Activism in Western Europe’, St Andrews. https://taa.st-andrews.ac.uk/comic/ [accessed 23 September 2025].
Sterbini, Claudia and Keiran Wilson. 2025. ‘The Problem of (Inter)disciplinary Hierarchies’, Polyphony.
Wilson Gilmore, Ruth. 2022. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Verso.
Woodward, Kath, and Sophie Woodward. 2015. ‘Gender Studies and Interdisciplinarity’. Palgrave Communications 1(1).
