The Cultural Cauldron
Daniel Martini gives an insight into the undergraduate Medical Humanities programme at UC Santa Barbara. In 2019, a disaster emergency physician, Jason Prystowsky, who often spends time in the Navajo nation with past stints
Making Space for the Patient’s Voice: notes from a creative writing workshop (part 2)
Gillian Shirreffs writes: In early November 2020, Jane Hartshorn and I hosted a workshop as part of the Thinking Through Things: Object Encounters in the Medical Humanities project.
Making Space for the Patient’s Voice: notes from a creative writing workshop (part 1)
Jane Hartshorn writes: In November 2020, I facilitated a creative writing workshop as part of Thinking Through Things: Object Encounters in the Medical Humanities.
Following Breathing
Artist Lucy Sabin reflects on making art about breath in 2020. Breathworks began as a participatory arts project on social media, expanding to become an exhibit and events programme supported by Art Fund and
Masks and Monsters: 2020 in Review
What a year. In early 2020 the world went into a lockdown from which it has yet to fully emerge; The Polyphony was at the forefront of the medical humanities’ response to the coronavirus crisis as it unfolded, and unsurprisingly, our top five most-read posts of this year directly addressed the pandemic.
Black Health and the Humanities
Amber Lascelles, Research Associate for the Black Health and the Humanities project, reflects on the motivations behind the project, the marginalisation of Black health research in the UK, and what the humanities have to
Listening to the Silence: On Reading Blu’s Hanging During a Pandemic
Reading Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s novel Blu’s Hanging during lockdown, Julia Brown considers the significance of silence during a pandemic.
Incubator imaginaries
For Anne Whitehead, the NICU incubator raises questions of precarity and resilience, and illuminates care as a layered series of interactions involving human and non-human agency.
Heart Excavations
Artist Sofie Layton works with medical data to give physical form to personal narratives of maternal loss and bereavement. This post describes the process of creating Excavations, a performative work that explores a mother’s grief at having lost a young child to cancer.
Creating bonds with a baby expected to die at birth
This personal essay by Tamarin Norwood charts the months of late pregnancy following a terminal prenatal diagnosis, when an unexplained congenital condition led to oligohydramnios: the depletion of amniotic fluid necessary for foetal lung development.