Genevieve Smart, Nora Heidorn, Maria Morata Marco, Katharina Wiedlack, Lyndsay Mann, and Sofie Layton reflect on the ‘Experimental Pedagogies for Health and Care’ workshop held in Vienna, exploring new directions for teaching and knowledge sharing in the Medical Humanities.
How might teaching, knowledge-sharing, and pedagogy in the Medical Humanities be reimagined? In what ways can we draw on experimental, collaborative, and practice-based methods to do this? And how far can these methods critique and transform academic norms?
These were questions at the heart of the ‘Experimental Pedagogies for Health and Care’ workshop, held at The University of Vienna, 15–16th June 2026. In an international gathering of researchers, activists, curators, and artists – many of whom are informed by intersectional feminist, queer, trans and crip politics – participants shared knowledge-sharing strategies which move beyond traditional teaching methods, attempting to critically intervene in academic hierarchies.
As a whole, the workshop aimed to produce new methods for knowledge-sharing that are experimental, practice-based, collaborative, embodied, and interdisciplinary; new connections between academic and artistic research environments; and new insights into the institutional pressures we face, negotiate, and hope to transform. In the piece below, we share snapshots and reflections from the workshop contributors. In some cases, they offer new pedagogical methods for colleagues to adopt. In other cases, they critique the pedagogical structures that exist in academic and artistic spaces. In many cases, these are concomitant.
Disrupting academic hierarchies
Gemma Blackshaw:
The event opened with a lecture by Professor Gemma Blackshaw (RCA; Freud Museum, London) as part of Vienna’s ‘(Sexual) Health: Media, Inequalities and Justice’ lecture series, entitled ‘Waiting with Liliana Amon (1892–1966): A Sick Feminist Art History of Attention, Affect, and Care’.
Weaving personal narrative and archival research, Blackshaw discussed her ongoing encounters with modernist artist Egon Schiele’s drawings of the – possibly pregnant – Liliana Amon, completed at Vienna Women’s Clinic (Blackshaw and Butler 2026). Reflecting on her experiences of working with fragmented research material, Blackshaw presented a methodology of “waiting-with”: waiting-with archival materials which reveal themselves over time; waiting-with new insights born from personal experience; waiting-with the delays, uncertainties, and incompletions of the research process.
To students and teachers alike, Blackshaw’s advice was to relinquish claims of expertise and mastery by admitting and embracing our own unknowing and uncertainty, in the research process and beyond.
Gemma Blackshaw introduces an imaginative reconstruction of the possible setting of Amon’s portrait by Schiele: the hospital bed.
Extending many of the themes in Blackshaw’s lecture, the workshop programme shifted attention from research practice to pedagogic practice.
Fiona Johnstone:
Dr Fiona Johnstone (Durham) reflected on how experimental teaching methods were used at a recent PhD School, “Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities”, to unsettle hierarchies of expertise and create more inclusive academic environments.
An adapted “clean set up” exercise asked participants to collectively respond to the question: “How do we want to be together in this space?”. This groundwork helped to align expectations, reduce potential misunderstandings, and establish a non-hierarchical space for collaborative knowledge production. A drawing workshop emphasised process, reflexivity, and the decentring of expertise in academic creation. Autoethnographic practices interrogated the role of subjectivity, complicating the singular “I” while maintaining analytical rigour. Zine-making, meanwhile, facilitated speculative and collaborative re-imaginings of healthcare environments through queer perspectives.
Collectively, these practices suggest that experimental pedagogies are not merely innovative teaching techniques, but critical frameworks that challenge epistemic norms, foreground embodiment and positionality, and enable more inclusive and responsive forms of knowledge production within health and care contexts.
Monika Pietrzak-Franger:
Professor Monika Pietrzak-Franger (Vienna) similarly sought to disrupt knowledge hierarchies, positioning herself as a teacher who walks alongside – rather than overly-directs – her students. She described how her pedagogical approach is inspired by Janusz Korczak, a paediatrician who fought for children’s rights in Poland, even creating school parliaments and a national children’s newspaper.
Encouraging autonomy in her students, Pietrzak-Franger also advocated for sharing our own embodied experiences, and admitting when we are ‘exhausted facilitators’ to humanise the pedagogical environment.
Access and (Dis)Ability
Katharina Wiedlack:
Also drawing on personal experience, Professor Katharina Wiedlack (Vienna) recalled the ambivalent process of “outing” herself as a ‘“neurospicy” crip’ when teaching her module on storytelling, ableism, and disability representation:
‘The decision of whether to ‘come out’ has to be made individually, based on the groups, my courage in that moment, and my perceived vulnerability. If I do, I am keenly aware (or maybe paranoid) of my students’ reactions. Sometimes, it can help students to see ableism, question normative expectations, or can make the space safer for disabled students. It could support my credibility as a disability scholar, but, potentially, it could also undermine or expose me’.
‘Maybe this is the point where Disability Studies and Medical Humanities converge. Where mental/medical conditions become points of knowledge sharing and bleed into our pedagogical projects’.
Bernd Oppl:
Vienna-based interdisciplinary artist, Bernd Oppl, similarly asked how disability could shape creative and critical methods.
Informed by his visual impairment, Oppl’s art practice critiques ocular-centrism, highlighting other forms of perception. In one artwork, his reading machine translates the sound of laughter into light, brightening with volume. ‘I illuminate rooms with laughter’, he states.
In his teaching at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, too, disability is an analytical framework. Oppl’s students create films informed by theories of crip time, use alt-text as a poetic form, and produce touch-based artistic encounters. Critiquing the barriers of art institutions, students develop alternative narratives which champion access, intersectionality, and interdependency.
Ren Loren Britton:
Artist-designer Ren Loren Britton considered the creative and pedagogical potential of access when presenting their ‘Riders Agreement’: a document which is both an Access Rider and Collaboration Agreement which they use in artistic collaborations and teaching (Britton 2024).
‘My work departs from the understanding that the way our bodies meet the world shapes what we share, learn and experience — it actively unmakes ableist white supremacist norms and attempts to reshape pedagogy so that embodiminded* differences are not rendered as disadvantages in any institutional space. I remain stubbornly hopeful as a practice that Disability-Justice-informed pedagogy can enable other ways of learning, teaching, making and practicing to produce alternate knowledges that unmake ableist norms.’
‘The workshop challenged me to think and learn across disciplines, especially from the context of the medical humanities, which from a Disability Justice perspective I feel antagonistic towards. It was a productive challenge to consider how my practice could counter sedimented norms that shape whose experience and knowledge is rendered important within the medical humanities’.
Collaboration and Care
Sofie Layton:
Dr Sofie Layton (Durham)’s artist-led workshop brought these tensions into the foreground: What is the relationship between bodies and institutions? And how do we represent and care for bodies that aren’t our own?
On a long, blue yoga-met resembling a seabed, Layton presented a light box, postcard-photograms made from seaweed forms and medical imagery, and white chalk pens. Here, Layton laid her ‘boundary objects’: small hearts, brains, kidneys, and pebble-sized prints of fetuses contained in resin “pebbles”, derived from medical data and MRI scans.
Attendees engaged with the objects both physically and affectively – touching, sketching, and writing about them, before sharing the different ways these objects made us feel.
Layton writes: ‘Through the course of the workshop a series of haptic and visual engagements and rejections of the objects took place. These produced some intimate and insightful reflections on the 3D forms, the problematics of the imagery and their emergent meanings when navigated through different individuals’ discourses. This produced beautiful and delicate reflections alongside some very vehement rejections of the process, the aesthetic and the remediated data’.
Sofie Leyton presents her ‘boundary objects’ to the group.
Nora Heidorn:
Dr Nora Heidorn also shared her method for collaboration when teaching.
An exercise adapted from the Feminist Health Care Research Group, Heidorn invites students to write “care labels” in the style of clothing tags (‘do not tumble dry’) that convey relational needs, for example: What helps me in conflict or stress? How can I best be supported? (Heidorn 2021).
Heidorn, however, finds this care practice in tension with the ultra-productivity culture of academia.
‘Participating in this workshop made apparent to me that it is precisely these artistic, creative, practice-led methods for knowledge exchange that sustain us in our roles as teachers. Being able to offer and experiment with these pedagogies with our students and collaborators allows us to integrate our creative research practices with our teaching to practice research-led teaching at its most critical and exciting.’
‘It also allows us to practice our respective politics – be they feminist, queer, intersectional, anti-ableist, crip, trans, decolonial… And when we are able to do this – even just sometimes, within the institutions we work – we can share something of our authentic selves and contribute something meaningful within working structures that often force us to perform, hide, or self-censor’.
Maria Morata Marco:
Maria Morata Marco likewise engaged in care practices when offering her meditation, ‘Love Your Body’, which positions the body as ‘an archive of sensory and emotional experiences which shape the pedagogical experience’.
First conceived in her SOMA ARCHIVES project with the Sickness Affinity Group, Morata Marco’s meditation was inspired by a sermon from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) in which caring for the body is a collective tool of resistance under slavery. She writes: ‘It is my modest attempt to honour this text and the deep influence it produced in me as I encountered it in a citational gesture of respect and solidarity’.
Gemma Blackshaw:
Care was also crucial to Blackshaw’s additional workshop contribution. Inspired by her and Alice Butler’s research on historic health resort postcards, Blackshaw adopts postcard writing as a pedagogic practice (Blackshaw and Butler 2023).
Each year, she and her students write ‘the work I want to do’ on stiff postcards. These are intended to be propped on desks, carried in bags, or pinned on boards. They offer a visual and physical reminder of our core goals and values, and act as a rebuttal to academia’s endless deadlines, funding applications, and annual monitoring reports (‘the work I should do’).
As informal, hand-written, and ephemeral, the postcards also remind Blackshaw of the human at the heart of the research and, as an epistolary form, they bring to light how kinship, solidarity, and care are essential to our working lives and beyond.
Lyndsay Mann:
Artist Lyndsay Mann discussed how our relationships with institutions shape our practices.
‘In my film, Holding The Street, Ute Frevert describes institutions as systems of rules that come with emotional expectations of how people should feel and behave within those institutions.
Institutions were explicitly or implicitly present across each conversation at “Experimental Pedagogies” and our closing group discussion addressed the role of the institution within health and care pedagogies directly. These exchanges on practice are critical for experimental methods, which support us in challenging the established emotional and behavioural expectations of institutions’.
What do we bring to the table?
Finally, the workshop offered an exercise in which the group could connect informally. Participants placed an object that is key to their pedagogy on a table lined with paper and drew around its contours. Here, many of the workshop’s themes were made visible: our choices in what we foreground, our points of intersection and tension, our gaps and uncertainties, and the insights that are only born from collaboration.
Convenors: Nora Heidorn, Maria Morata Marco, Monika Pietzrak-Franger. Organisers: Livvy Helmholz-Vero; Charlotte Peters; Genevieve Smart; Ulrike Zillinger.
Photos: Charlotte Peters.
About the authors
Genevieve Smart is an interdisciplinary researcher at University of Vienna. In works traversing literary studies, film studies, psychoanalysis and the Medical Humanities, Genevieve examines portrayals of queer and technologically-assisted reproduction from the early 20th century to present. She is a co-organiser of the reproduction research network, Broadly Conceived.
Nora Heidorn (University of Vienna) is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and curator. She explores the complex politics of health, sexual reproduction, and care ethics with an intersectional approach. Her work combines the history of medicine, science and technology with feminist philosophy, art and visual culture, and employs curatorial and artistic research methods.
Maria Morata Marco (University of Vienna) uses artistic practice and research to examine epistemological encounters between (sick) bodies, technology, and art. She is a member of the Sickness Affinity Group which uses artistic projects to question ableist structures. Her current research focuses on the relationship between medical imaging and the visibility of chronic pain.
Katharina Wiedlack is Assistant Professor for Anglophone Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research fields include American studies, historical and contemporary Russian American relations, popular culture, and disability, queer and feminist theory. Her latest monograph is titled Under Western Eyes: Vulnerable Minorities and the Russian State in New Cold War Cultures.
Sofie Layton is an artist whose works include installation, site-sensitive performance, and theatre. Her recent work explores the creative interface between patients and the scientific clinical landscape, based on a participative narrative process. She currently leads The Heart of the Matter a national project exploring the medical, experiential and poetic dimensions of the heart.
Lyndsay Mann is an artist whose work centres around voice. She connects with communities of practice and scholarship, such as botany and medicine, where claims of objective knowledge meet lived experiences and community expertise. Her multi-modal approach generates questions around the values placed on different forms of knowledge, and the hierarchies they produce.
References:
Blackshaw, Gemma, and Alice Butler. 2026. ‘Flight as Method: A Sick Women Exchange in Material Encounters, and the Time It Takes to Care’. In Art and the Critical Medical Humanities. Bloomsbury.
Blackshaw, Gemma, and Alice Butler. 2023. ‘Sick Women Correspondents: Practices of Care in Cross-Historical Love Letter Writing’. MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, March 30. https://www.maifeminism.com/sick-women-correspondents-practices-of-care-in-cross-historical-love-letter-writing/.
Brice, Sage. 2024. ‘Critical Observational Drawing in Geography: Towards a Methodology for “Vulnerable” Research’. Progress in Human Geography 48 (2): 206–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325231208899.
Britton, Ren Loren. 2024. ‘On Rehearsing Access’. Futuress, April 16. https://futuress.org/stories/rehearsing-access/.
Heidorn, Nora. 2021. ‘Care Labels: A Tool for Cultivating a Politics of Care’. In Care(Less): A Supplement to On Care, edited by Gemma Blackshaw and Sharon Kivland. MA Bibliothèque.
Morrison, Toni. 2005 [1987]. Beloved. Vintage.
