Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Dr Gavin Miller and Dr Anna McFarlane about their work on science fiction and the medical humanities. Gavin and Anna explain what science fiction has to offer the medical humanities, and how science fiction shapes our understanding of the future of healthcare, when the line between healthcare and biological enhancement could become increasingly blurry. They also share what they have learned in the process of editing The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities with Dr Donna McCormack.

Gavin Miller is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow. His recent publications include Science Fiction and Psychology (LUP, 2020) and Miracles of Healing: Psychotherapy and Religion in Twentieth-Century Scotland (EUP, 2020). He is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities, and his latest project is an investigation of UFO practices in post-war Scotland.

Anna McFarlane is a Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds and author of the monograph Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades (2021). Her current research was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and focuses on traumatic pregnancy and its expression in fantastika. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, and the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Anne and Jenn about writing and personal stories in the context of medical and health humanities. Anne discusses how she combined the personal and the critical in writing her monograph Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Reflection. Jenn shares her experience of how care providers can integrate creative practices with healthcare and how such practices may support well-being.

Prof Anne Whitehead is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University UK. She was a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and has recently published the monographs Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Reflection (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

Jennifer H Pien is a Clinical Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and is the Director of The Pegasus Physician Writers and Editor-in-Chief of The Pegasus Review. Her interests include physician well-being and the intersection of creative writing and medicine. Sea of Souls, her forthcoming novel, is represented by Lisa Grubka, United Talent Agency.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Prof Guo Liping and Prof Vivienne Lo about the cross-cultural medical and health humanities and their collaborative work on film and the Chinese Medical Humanities.

Prof Guo Liping is Professor of English, Director, Centre for Narrative Medicine of Peking University Health Science Centre, Vice Dean, School of Health Humanities, Peking University. Her research interests include narrative medicine and medical humanities education. She’s vice editor-in-chief of the Chinese journal of Narrative Medicine.

Prof Vivienne Lo is a Professor in the department of History and the convenor of the UCL China Centre for Health and Humanity. She also teaches the Ancient and Medieval history of China and has specialist modules in the History of Asian Medicine and Classical Chinese medicine at BSc and MA. Vivienne's core research concerns the social and cultural origins of acupuncture, therapeutic exercise, and food and medicine. She translates and analyses manuscript material from Early and Medieval China, and publishes on the transmission of scientific knowledge along the so-called Silk Roads. She has a long-term interest in visual cultures of medicine and healthcare. Current projects include a history of nutrition in China.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Dr Michelle Chiang about her work on the value of illness stories, and how they could potentially inform or challenge our existing understanding of health, illness and dying. Michelle discusses her experience as a literary scholar and a medical humanities researcher in the Singapore research landscape, which is still trying to wrap its head around medical humanities as an interdisciplinary and collaborative field of inquiry.

Dr Michelle Chiang is an Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the coordinator of NTU's Medical Humanities Research Cluster. Her literary research intersects with her medical humanities interests in narratives of loss: the loss of physical control, the witnessing of loss, and the experience of dying. She is the principal investigator of a Ministry of Education (Singapore) funded research project Medical Humanities Approach to the Value of Patient Stories and Narrative Ethics.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Professor Dan Goodley and Dr Kirsty Liddiard about the contributions of critical disability studies to the medical humanities, including the ‘absent presence’ of disability in medical humanities. Dan and Kirsty advocate for a paradigm shift that centres disability as the driving subject of inquiry and discuss proposed programmes of research, including ‘Disability Matters’ and ‘A new cultural politics of breathing’.

Prof Dan Goodley is Professor of Disability Studies and Education in the School of Education and co-director of iHuman; the interdisciplinary institute for the study of the human. Dan is interested in theorising and challenging the conditions of disablism (the social, political, cultural and psycho-emotional exclusion of people with physical, sensory and/or cognitive impairments) and ableism (the contemporary ideals on which the able, autonomous, productive citizen is based). He draws on ideas from critical psychology, medical sociology, medical humanities, philosophy, sociology and education.

Dr Kirsty Liddiard is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education and theme co-leader in iHuman at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of The Intimate Lives of Disabled People (2018, Routledge) and co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies (2018, Palgrave) with Tillie Curran and Katherine Runswick-Cole. She is co-editor of Being Human in Covid-19 (2022, Bristol University Press) with Warren Pearce, Paul Martin and Stevie de Saille and a co-author of Living Life to the Fullest: Disability, Youth and Voice (2022, Emerald). Her research explores disability, childhood and youth. She tweets @kirstyliddiard1.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Dr Brandy Schillace about medicine and its engagement with the humanities. This episode explores how the humanities engage and reflect critically upon the practices of health, as well as shape conversation and lead the way for social justice and change. Brandy also discusses the new global initiatives launched by BMJ’s Medical Humanities.

Dr. Brandy Schillace (skil-AH-chay) is a critically acclaimed author, historian, and editor in chief of BMJ’s Medical Humanities Journal. Her recent book, Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher – described by the New York Times as a “macabre delight” – explores Cold War medicine, bioethics, and transplant science. Dr. Schillace’s next book, The Intermediaries, will tell the forgotten, daring history of the interwar Institute of Sexology in Berlin: trans activists, the first gender affirming surgeries, and the fight for LGBTQ rights in the shadow of the Nazi Third Reich. She writes regularly for WIRED, Scientific American, Globe and Mail, WSJ Books, and Medium. Her YouTube series, Peculiar Book Club, features livestreamed chats with bestselling authors of unusual nonfiction, from Lindsey Fitzharris and Mary Roach to Carl Zimmer and Deborah Blum. Dr. Schillace has appeared on Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum, NPR’s Here and Now, and the History Channel. 

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Karla and Bill on the topic of death and dying. This episode explores the complex terrain of race and gender at the intersection of literature, law and bioethics, alongside clinical perspectives on the transformative power of bereavement and the social benefits of funeral ceremonies.

Professor Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Emerita Professor of English, African-American Studies, and Professor of Law at Duke University. She’s the author of Passed On: African American Mourning Stories. Her classrooms and scholarship focused on literature, law, and bioethics. She has been a member of the Advisory Bioethics Board of the Greenwall Scholars Bioethics Fellowship and served as a national and international speaker on matters of Black Cultural Studies. Karla FC Holloway’s most recent novel, Gone Missing in Harlem (Triquarterly, 2021) was awarded a Publisher’s Weekly Starred ⭐️ Review (!) and joined her Harlem Renaissance series that began with A Death in Harlem (2019). Her 3rd novel, The Thursday Lady, is nearing completion.

Dr. William G. (Bill) Hoy is Clinical Professor of Medical Humanities at Baylor. He is an experienced hospice/palliative care counselor with more than 35 years of experience caring for the dying and bereaved. Dr. Hoy is widely regarded as an authority on the role of social support in death, dying and grief and his experience includes more than 20 years leading bereavement and pastoral care programs in hospice care. Though primarily a bedside clinician, Dr. Hoy has authored more than 125 articles and book chapters as well as six books, including Do Funerals Matter? (Routledge, 2013), Bereavement Groups and the Role of Social Support (Routledge, 2016) and Finding Meaning in Funerals (Routledge, expected 2024).

Ian and Dieter talk with Dr Chisomo Kalinga and Dr Carla Tsampiras about the growth of Medical and Health Humanities Africa (MHHA). Adopting an intersectional perspective, Chisomo and Carla discuss many exciting projects and initiatives focused on the south of the continent.

Dr Chisomo Kalinga is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Her work approaches literary and medical narratives from a transdisciplinary approach using both aesthetic interpretation and ethnography. Her research interests are disease (specifically sexually transmitted infections), illness and wellbeing, biomedicine, traditional healing and witchcraft and their narrative representation in African oral and print literatures. She is currently supporting efforts to promote the Malawi Medical Humanities Network (MMHN), an interdisciplinary network for Malawiana researchers, and the Medical and Health Humanities Network Africa (South Africa) to share events, programmes, projects and exhibitions that explore the links between health and the humanities.

Dr Carla Tsampiras is a senior lecturer in Medical and Health Humanities (MHH) in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is a social historian of health interested in the relationships between narratives and ideas about gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality, and health (individual and planetary). She has written on the early years of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa; gender violence and slavery in the Cape colony; MHH in health sciences education and the development of the field of MHH in the region. Her current research work is concerned with flesh foods (meat), gender, power, and violence. She is a member of the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS), sits on the Environmental Humanities South working group, is a board member of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham, and is a founding member of the Medical and Health Humanities Africa network.

Ian and Dieter talk with Prof Miranda Fricker and Prof Havi Carel about epistemic injustice, harms in health contexts, and the connections that philosophical thinking has with literature and art.

Miranda Fricker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research is primarily in Ethics and Social Epistemology with a special interest in virtue and feminist perspectives. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007); co-author and editor of Reading Ethics: Selected texts with interactive commentary (2009); and co-editor of a number of collections, the most recent of which is The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology (2019). She was Director of the Mind Association from 2010-2015; Assistant Editor of the Journal of the APA from 2014-2020; and since 2015 has served as Moral Philosopher on the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government-appointed body of expert advisers that considers claims concerning loss of cultural property during the Nazi era. She is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This year she was elected President of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) 2022-23.

Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where she also teaches medical students. In 2020 she completed a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, leading a five-year project, the Life of Breath. She was awarded the Health Humanities’ Inspiration Award 2018 for her work on the project. Havi won the IJPS 2021 PERITIA Prize for her paper ‘When Institutional Opacity Meets Individual Vulnerability: Institutional Testimonial Injustice’ (co-authored with Ian Kidd), published in International Journal of Philosophical Studies. Her third monograph was published by Oxford University Press in 2016, entitled Phenomenology of Illness. Havi was voted by students as a ‘Best of Bristol’ lecturer in 2016. Havi is the author of Illness (2008, 2013, 2018), shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006). She is the co-editor of Health, Illness and Disease (2012) and of What Philosophy Is (2004). She uses film in teaching and has co-edited a volume entitled New Takes in Film-Philosophy (2010). She also co-edited a special issue of Philosophy on ‘Human Experience and Nature’ (2013). She previously published on the embodied experience of illness, epistemic injustice in healthcare, vulnerability, wellbeing within illness, transformative experience, death, and on the experience of respiratory illness in the Lancet, BMJ, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Applied Philosophy, and in edited collections.

Ian and Dieter talk with Dr Ian Williams and Dr Muna Al-Jawad about graphic medicine and explore the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare. 

Dr Ian Williams is a comics artist, writer and doctor who lives in Brighton. His graphic novel, The Bad Doctor, was published in 2014 and followed up in 2019 by The Lady Doctor. Both were critically acclaimed and he is working on his third, for the same publishers, provisionally entitled The Sick Doctor, which will be published in 2022.

Dr Muna Al-Jawad is a consultant geriatrician and senior lecturer in medical education in Brighton. In 2010 she started drawing comics as part of a masters in clinical education, and her superhero alter-ego “Old Person Whisperer” was born. She uses comics in her practice as a medical teacher and in her research. She does and supervises comics-based research into various areas of practitioner and student experience.

Click here to find out more about Graphic Medicine.

Click here to see some of Muna’s work.