Mapping the Medical Legacies of British Colonialism

Reflecting on her recent fellowship at Art HX, researcher Shelley Angelie Saggar traces how objects and photographs recall the medical legacies of British colonialism, as well as her own family history.  

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Nature’s Medicine: Could Green Prescribing Shape the Future of our Health?

Shauna Walker contextualises the UK government's recent investment in 'green social prescribing.'

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From Menstruation to the Menopause: Book Review

Jemma Walton reviews From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French, by Maria Kathryn Tomlinson (Liverpool University Press, 2021).

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Sensitive Subjects Pt. 2: Creative Practice and Ethics in Times of Loss

Olivia Turner reflects on the Sensitive Subjects: Creative Practice and Ethics workshop she organised at Newcastle University, turning to issues around bereavement and grief.

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Recent Posts

‘Mom Guilt’: Postpartum Depression and Motherhood

Prerna Tolani and Sathyaraj Venkatesan explore guilt and postpartum depression through the lens of Teresa Wong’s 2019 graphic memoir, Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression.  Postpartum depression (PPD) is a psychiatric condition

Book Cover of Mara Pieri's 'LGBTQ+ People with Chronic Illness'

‘LGBTQ+ People with Chronic Illness’: Book Review

Emily Mendelson reviews LGBTQ+ People with Chronic Illness: Chroniqueers in Southern Europe by Mara Pieri (Springer, 2023). As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic continues, millions of individuals find themselves chronically ill as a result of

Illustration of a pregnant woman with an IV drip and a chemical compound in background

Chemical relations: a humanistic glossary of hormones

Andrea Ford explores the social and humanistic aspects of hormonally-active chemicals in a forthcoming co-edited collection Hormonal Theory: A Cascading Glossary (2024) Form follows function, as the design maxim goes, but function also follows

A yellow door with an opening looking out on to construction site

Constructing Sites: Surveying Scenes of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Angela Woods and Des Fitzgerald invite abstracts for Constructing Sites: Surveying Scenes of Interdisciplinary Collaboration What are the main sites of interdisciplinary collaboration in medical and health research and how, exactly, do they work?

CRITICAL NNMHR 2023 Congress poster

The Polyphony Meets NNMHR

The Polyphony team is excited to attend the 2023 NNMHR Congress, hosted online by Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities and the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research. Our editors will interact with panels

Neurodivergent Humanities Network and Mentorship Programme Launch

'New ways of thinking, being and doing research': the founders explain the ethos of the Neurodivergent Humanities Network and introduce their anti-hierarchical mentorship scheme.

Maddening the ‘Normal’ Mind

Jodie Russell argues for Philosophy of Mind scholarship to move beyond the conception of the psyche as either rational/irrational. It is only through abandoning this opposition- and engaging with Mad Studies-  that a more

Uncomfortable Bedfellows? Critical Disability Studies and Psychoanalysis

Dr. Joe Holloway makes a case for bringing the traditionally differentiated frameworks of psychoanalysis and critical disability studies into dialogue with each-other.  Despite the excellent research from a range of scholars working at the

Poetry and Stimming

In this blog for World Autism Acceptance Week, James McGrath, an autistic poet and academic, advocates the value of “stimming” and explores how it relates to poetry. I dedicate the lipogramatic poem below to