Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health

Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health
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This podcast is part of the project 'Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health', a series of free online events where scholars, health professionals, and the public discuss how arts and humanities can inform healthcare. Hosted by the University of Glasgow, these conversations seek to develop meaningful dialogue and connection between humanities and medicine. Each one of these events will form the basis of an episode of the podcast. The project is a joint initiative by Prof Ian Sabroe (University of Sheffield) and Dr Dieter Declercq (University of Glasgow).

  1. 1D AGO

    Episode 30 - Appliedness /w Martina King

    Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Martina about appliedness and medical education, medical humanities and (the lack of) defined disciplinary identity, and how the medical humanities interact with multiple academic disciplines in research and teaching.

    50 min

  2. 10/08/2025

    Episode 29 - Care /w Stella Bolaki and Neil Vickers

    Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Stella and Neil about Care. Key themes include: the place of self-care in contemporary writing and medical humanities; theories of care in the medical humanities and further afield; the relationship of care to narratives of illness and disability; care deficits and the long shadow that they cast in illness narratives.

    47 min

  3. 08/15/2025

    Episode 28 - Queer Medical Humanities /w Ben Dalton and John Gilmore

    Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Ben andJohn about Queer Medical Humanities. Key themes include:queer inclusivity in hospitals and hospital design, knowledge in healthcare and, issues of healthcare delivery, queer methodologies for healthcare futures andpoliticisation of health and queer healthcare. Dr Benjamin Dalton is Lecturer in French Studies in theSchool of Global Affairs at Lancaster University. He works at the intersections of French Studies and the Medical Humanities, exploring how contemporary Frenchand Francophone literature, film and philosophy dialogue with biomedical science and different healthcare contexts. His current work maps contemporary philosophical approaches to the hospital, and he has published on newconceptions for clinical environments emerging in the works of Catherine Malabou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paul B. Preciado, and Anne Dufourmantelle. He has a particular interest in LGBTQIA+ inclusivity in healthcare and hospital design,and is currently working on a project about queering the hospital.   Dr John Gilmore (he/they) is a Registered General Nurse,Assistant Professor and Head of General Nursing at University College Dublin, where his work focuses on intersections of health and social justice. John isalso a Fulbright scholar and has held visiting positions at University of California San Francisco, Columbia University and University of Huddersfield.

    48 min

  4. 04/17/2025

    Episode 27 - Shame /w Prof Luna Dolezal and Dr Will Bynum

    Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Luna and Will about shame. Key themes include: understanding shame, the role shame can play at work and shame competence. Luna Dolezal is Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. She has been researching shame for over 15 years, and is PI of the Shame and Medicine Project (2020-2025), funded by the Wellcome Trust, and was PI of the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 Project (2020-2022),funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Luna has developed training in ‘shame competence’ in collaboration with the Devon &Cornwall Police, and worked with Will Bynum to set up The Shame Lab. See Luna’s University of Exeter Staff Profile here.   Will Bynum is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and and a veteran of the United States Air Force. He received his M.D. at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in 2010 and Ph.D. in Health Professions Education at Maastricht University in the Netherlands in 2023, where defended his thesis entitled “Out of the shadows: a qualitative exploration of shame in medical learners.” Along with Luna, he is a co-creator of The Shame Space, a global consortium that advances open communication about the role of shame in healthcare, a co-producer on the award winning “Shame in Medicine” podcast series produced by The Nocturnists, and a co-founder of The Shame Lab, which catalyzes research and training to advance shame competence in healthcare and beyond. He is the author of over 30peer-reviewed publications and has given over 150 workshops and presentations to top hospitals, conferences, and organizations such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, and the American Hospital Association. He has received numerous awards for his research including Best Paper by the AAMC Research in Medical Education Committee in 2021 and Best Doctoral Report by the Association of Medical Educators of Europe in 2023.

    55 min

  5. 02/20/2025

    Episode 26 - Uncertainty /w Dr Ria Cheyne and Prof Stuart Murray

    Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Ria and Stuart about Uncertainty. Key themes include: imposter syndrome and participation in academic/institutional culture; pressures of speaking with authority; precarityand career development; the uncertainty of the current HE environment; vulnerability and humility as research positions; generative possibilities of uncertainty as a critical tool; uncertainty and anxiety; and disciplinary uncertainty.  Stuart Murray is Professor of ContemporaryLiteratures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he was the Founding Director of the Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities. He haswritten six monographs and edited/co-edited five collections on topics ranging across postcolonial literatures and film, disability representation, embodiedtechnologies, and wider depictions of health. His most recent book is Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines, published by Bloomsbury in 2023 and he has just started a new research project on Sleep and Modernism.   Ria Cheyne was a Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University until April 2024, when she tookvoluntary severance from her permanent position. She is now a fixed term researcher on the Disabled Researchers Network project at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research interests include genre fiction, neurodiversity, and representations of disability and health. Her monograph, Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction (LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2019) is available open access. She identifies as a literature scholar, a disability studies scholar, and/or a medical humanities scholar depending on the time of day.

    54 min

  6. 10/29/2024

    Episode 25 - Decolonizing our practices /w Dr Arya Thampuran and Prof Sarah de Leeuw

    Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Dr Arya Thampuran and Prof Sarah de Leeuw about decolonizing our practices. Key themes include: decolonial practice in academic spaces (non-extractive methodologies and representational labour); capitalism and extractive decontextualization; depoliticization of indigenous knowledges and practices; feminist queer-informed anti-colonial methodologies; critical poetics; medical education; and rural, remote, northern, and marginalized geographies. Dr Arya Thampuran is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University and co-lead of the Black Health and the Humanities Network in her day job, and a yoga instructor pre-sunrise/post-sunset. These roles capture her interests in mental health and healing, engaging with communal knowledges and practices around wellbeing. Her work is broadly situated at the intersection of the medical humanities and critical race studies; she is interested in how creative practitioners in contemporary African diasporic contexts express distress and healing, in ways that re-script prevailing psychiatric narratives of illness and wellness. Principally, her work is committed to a decolonial and intersectional approach.   Sarah de Leeuw, a Professor and Canada Research Chair (Humanities and Health Inequities) with the Northern Medical Program (a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine) is an award-winning researcher, creative writer (poetry and literary non-fiction), and multidisciplinary scholar studying why some people and places have better health than others. Trained as a historical-cultural geographer, de Leeuw’s research, activism, and creative practices have for more than 30 years focused on anticolonial, feminist, and queer-informed understandings of overlooked people, communities, and geographies. She grew up in Haida Gwaii and Terrace (Kitsumkalum territory) and now divides her time between Lheidli T’enneh/Dakelh Territory (Prince George) and Syilx Territory (Okanagan Centre).

    51 min

  7. 12/07/2023

    Episode 24 - Science fiction /w Dr Gavin Miller and Dr Anna McFarlane

    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.

    50 min

  8. 10/25/2023

    Episode 23 - Writing and personal stories /w Prof Anne Whitehead and Dr Jennifer H Pien

    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.

    52 min
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About

This podcast is part of the project 'Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health', a series of free online events where scholars, health professionals, and the public discuss how arts and humanities can inform healthcare. Hosted by the University of Glasgow, these conversations seek to develop meaningful dialogue and connection between humanities and medicine. Each one of these events will form the basis of an episode of the podcast. The project is a joint initiative by Prof Ian Sabroe (University of Sheffield) and Dr Dieter Declercq (University of Glasgow).

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