The Gold Between the Cracks: Creative Health, Reproductive Loss and the Art of Repair

For Baby Loss Awareness Week 2026, Fiona Johnstone, Sofie Layton, Estelle Verdi, Mary Robson and Sumayya Mulla write about a growing programme of collaborative research using creative practice to challenge silence, deepen understanding and transform support around reproductive loss and maternal bereavement.

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Creeping Doubt: Living with a Chronic Illness 

Rena Alcalay explores the concept of 'bodily doubt' and how living with a chronic illness destabilises our assumptions about quantifiable data.

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Welcome to our new Editor in Chief, Jordan McCullough

We are delighted to announce that the new Editor in Chief of The Polyphony is Jordan McCullough.

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What is Contragestive Time? Pregnant Uncertainties in Fertility Control

The research team behind the Contragestive Time project explore how alternative forms of fertility control can reshape how we think about contraception and abortion.

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Recent Posts

A top cut out of red card, trousers cut out of green card. Both are pinned to the wall. There are four other bits of cardboard stuck to the all with squiggles drawn on.

Gut Feelings: Challenging Crip Gut Stigma

Órla Meadhbh Murray introduces the Gut Feelings course: a space for people to narrate, explore, and challenge their experience of gut symptoms.

The Case of Martial Metaphor: Art and Antimicrobial Resistance

Meenakshi Srihari offers a critical examination of how art addressing antimicrobial resistance draws on familiar war and superhero metaphors, and shapes how we imagine our entanglement with microbes.

Painting of a Greek temple located in Sicily, with a pale blue sky covering the top third of the image and beige colomns made of carved marble in the centre of the image, casting long shadows onto the grass and sand below.

Book Review: The Forum by Lucy Newlyn

Neil Vickers discusses poet and academic Lucy Newlyn’s debut novel The Forum.

Abstract indigo and turquoise digital artwork with flowing water-like patterns, layered textures, and organic ripples, evoking currents, memory, and quiet movement.

From Pandemic Stress to Nature Connection

A quiet practice of attention, belonging, and rest in urban parks from Yewande Okuleye.

Book Review: Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World 

Arpan K Banerjee reviews Oliver Basciano’s Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity, and the Modern World, exploring the modern history of leprosy through archives, literature, and personal narratives. 

Pride flag painted on tarmac with shadows of passers by over it.

Am I queer enough? When theory and lived experience collide 

David Woodhead reflects on being gay and getting older. 

Seeing Differently: Colour Blindness, Cinema, and the Politics of Perception

Anand Padmasenan critically examines the relationship between colour deficiency, cinema, and disability through his documentary film The Color of Colours.

Twin babies being held by a figure in a red outfit, overlayed by handwriting from a letter.

You and me, I and I: the queerness of intergenerational storytelling

Becky Higgins reflects on her position as an autoethnographic researcher working collaboratively on the topics of memory and illness, exploring the queerness of storytelling as method.

Stylized, abstract image of an apartment block with windows protruding from the facade. The wall is blue and the outside of the protrusions are red, with windowpanes shown inside them.

Beyond Words: Creating Queer Knowledge Through Arts-Based Methods

Sanjana Kumar uses her experience of the 2025 Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School as a lens through which to re-examine her own research practices as a psychodrama therapist and arts-based researcher in Kerala, India.