Dr Frances Williams explores some of the tensions to be found in attempting to narrate the history of the Arts in Health movement, a sprawling field encompassing many ‘sub-fields’, including the medical humanities. When
Reflecting on their recent Confabulations event, researchers Laura Cowley, Christine Slobogin and Katie Snow question the relationship between humour and art within the critical medical humanities. What does art bring to, and how does
Marie Allitt, Agnes Arnold-Forster, Harriet Barratt, Victoria Bates, Rebecka Fleetwood-Smith, and Clare Hickman reflect on the recent ‘Senses and Health/Care Environments’ conference, which took place in Bristol earlier this spring. In April 2022, the
Katie Salmon reviews Efectos Secundarios: 19 Historietas del COVID (2021), copublished by Astiberri and la Fundación Cultura en Vena. Efectos secundarios (Side Effects) (2021) comprises nineteen graphic narratives from 2020 about the COVID-19 pandemic.
In August 2021, the Witch Institute convened witches, activists, artists, filmmakers, curators, historians, scholars, feminists, healers, and more to explore the radical possibilities and dangers under Western capitalist colonialism of witchy ways of knowing, being, caring,
Launched in October 2021, Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities aims to make explicit the contributions that artists and art historians can make to debates and developments in critical medical humanities. Convenors Fiona Johnstone, Allison Morehead and Imogen Wiltshire reflect on the programme so far.
Freya Verlander reflects on an experiment leading seminar participants on a virtual ‘skin safari’. Part of the series ‘Contemporary Womxn’s Writing and the Medical Humanities’, guest edited for The Polyphony by Rebecca Rosenberg and Benjamin Dalton.
Performing Medicine’s Bella Eacott examines some of the norms around the use of touch in healthcare settings, and considers how these have been altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Touch is central to healthcare practice:
Joshua Shaw reviews Entangled Bodies: Art, Identity and Intercorporeality, ed. Tammer El-Sheikh (Malaga: Vernon Press, 2020).
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.
