OSL Symposium: Creative-Critical Approaches to the Health Humanities

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Date: Friday 9 May 2025
Venue: Perdu, Amsterdam
Open to: PhDs and (Re)MA students as well as early-career and established researchers; OSL members have first access.
Credits: 1EC, see more information below
Registration: VIA THIS LINK (Registration will open on 17 February 2025)

Keynote speaker: Hanna Meretoja (Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Turku, Finland)

Call for Papers

The emerging field of ‘health humanities’ has been arguing for and highlighting the value of different and complementary perspectives on health, medicine and disability from fields ranging from literature and anthropology to sociology, philosophy and cultural analysis. Concurrently, there has been an increasing interest in approaching research as a creative practice and developing innovative ways of conducting and presenting academic work, a field termed ‘creative-critical writing’. This symposium aims to bring both fields together with the aim of exploring in what ways creative-critical approaches to research and/or writing can provide new ways of thinking about health, illness and care. Proposals are invited from (Re)MA and PhD students, as well as established researchers on this topic.

Credits: Students can obtain 1EC in two ways:
1) Giving a presentation at the symposium;
2) Submitting a question for the keynote speaker by May 2nd end of day (based on a recommended reading to be circulated in advance), as well as submitting a reflection on the event (approx 800 words) to osl@rug.nl by May 30th, end of day.
NB: Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities.

Proposals for 20-minute presentations (ca. 300 words), together with a biographical note, should be sent to Hannah Van Hove (havhove@vub.be) by 10 March 2025. Creative-critical approaches to papers are welcomed.

Keynote speaker: Hanna Meretoja is a literary scholar, narrative theorist, novelist, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory (University of Turku). Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018, Oxford University Press). She currently runs the research project ‘Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency’ (2023-2027, The Research Council of Finland). As a novelist, Meretoja has a unique lyrical voice that seamlessly threads cultural theory and philosophy into a poetic, ruptured narrative with an acute sense of lived experience.

Organisation: This symposium is one of the activities organised by the OSL-funded research incubator ‘Creative-Critical Approaches to the Health Humanities’ which brings together researchers working in the fields of literary studies, creative writing, disability studies, nursing and narrative medicine to form a transdisciplinary and interuniversity research group.

Core members: Sarah De Mul (Open Universiteit); Nadia de Vries (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis); Andries Hiskes (Universiteit voor Humanistiek en De Haagse Hogeschool); Hannah Van Hove (Vrije Universiteit Brussel); Mia You (Universiteit Utrecht and Sandberg Instituut).

Programme

9.00 – 9.20      Registration

9.20 – 9.30      Welcome – Hannah Van Hove (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

9.30 – 10.30    Keynote: Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku, Finland), ‘Counter-Narrating Cancer’

Chair: Sarah De Mul (Open Universiteit)

10.30 – 11:00 Coffee

11.00 – 12.30   Panel 1: Auto/ethnographic Tools and Scripts

Chair: Andries Hiskes (Universiteit voor Humanistiek en De Haagse Hogeschool)

Femke van Hout (Tilburg University), ‘Chronicling the Chronic – A Creative Approach to Narrating the Ongoingness of Chronic Pain’

Cato Denissen (Universiteit Antwerpen), ‘Visualizing Voices: The Impact of Language Portraits on Social Inclusion for People with Physical Disabilities’

Tess Casher (University of Oxford), ‘Did I Stutter?’

Emma Ettinger (University of Glasgow), ‘(Re)Staging Neurodiverse Sibling Relationships: Defining an Auto/Ethnographic Methodology in Disability Studies and Practice-Research’

12.30 – 13.25  Lunch

13.25 – 14.40  Panel 2: Sensory States and Contested Sites

Chair: Nadia de Vries (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis)

Chiara Robbiano (Universiteit Utrecht), ‘“Seeing peach blossoms— eyes utterly overwhelmed”: Dōgen’s and Autistic Sensory Stories’

Sabina Dosani (University of East Anglia), ‘Products of Conception, Imaging & Imagining the Maternal Foetal Relationship’

Noa Roei and Simone Stergioula (Universiteit van Amsterdam), ‘Sensory Mapping in Emergency Care: Notes Towards Caring Research Methodologies’

14.40 – 15.25  Panel 3: Editing the Health Humanities

Chair: Hannah Van Hove (Vrije Universeit Brussel)

FRAME editors (Universiteit Utrecht), ‘On Editing FRAME’s Medical Humanities Special Issue’

Colleen Derkatch (Texas Christian University), ‘What Does it Mean to Write the Health Humanities? The Role of the Founding Series Editors for John Hopkins University Press’s Health Humanities Series’

15.25 – 15.45  Coffee

15.45 – 17.15 Panel 4: Artistic Affordances and Archival Assemblages

Chair: Mia You (Universiteit Utrecht and Sandberg Instituut).

Fiona Johnstone (Durham University), ‘Critical Interlopers: Artists as Researchers in the Health Humanities’

Emilia Nielsen (York University, Toronto), ‘Creative-Critical Writing as Method and Research-Creation as Methodology in the Health Humanities?’

Charlotte Roberts (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London), ‘Notes are Doorways’

Ruth Clemens (Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society) and Scout Tzofiya Bolton, ‘Poeting the Clinical Archive: A Dialogue’

Abstracts

Creative-Critical Approaches to the Health Humanities
Friday 9th May 2025 – Perdu, Amsterdam

Keynote

Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku, Finland), ‘Counter-Narrating Cancer’

This talk explores intersections of my artistic and scholarly work on counter-narratives of cancer. As a narrative scholar, I became interested in cultural narratives of cancer when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019. I started analysing master and counter-narratives of cancer, and I wrote a novel partly based on my own cancer experience and partly drawing on my academic work on the topic. Currently I am running two large, interdisciplinary research projects: Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency (Research Council of Finland, 2023-2027) and “Narrative Agency Reading Group Model: Applications for Libraries, Schools and Hospitals” (Research Council of Finland, 2025-2026, Proof of Concept funding). After discussing the process of creating writing that led to the novel, I will present my theoretical-methodological approach of narrative agency, which we apply and further develop in these projects, and discuss the creative-critical work it involves, including a podcast series, “Cancer Sisters” (Syöpäsiskot), produced for a Finnish lifestyle magazine, and a collaborative process of creative-critical writing. The talk engages in reflection on the affordances and risks of the kind of creative-critical writing that brings together creative engagement with personal experiences and critical insights from scholarly work, producing, articulating, and sharing embodied knowledge.

Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland). She runs the projects “Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency” (Research Council of Finland, 2023-2027) and “Narrative Agency Reading Group Model: Applications for Libraries, Schools and Hospitals” (Research Council of Finland, Proof of Concept, 2025-2026). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (2019-2020) and Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford (2019-2020, spring 2023), and she is member of Academia Europaea and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative studies, memory studies, and medical and health humanities. Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018, Oxford University Press) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), and she has co-edited The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics (2023, Oxford University Press), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020), Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (2018, Routledge), and the special issues of Memory Studies (“Cultural Memorial Forms”, 2021) and Poetics Today (“Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom”, 2022). She has also published a novel, Elotulet (2022, The Night of Ancient Lights, Die Nacht der alten Feuer, 2024) and has scripted and hosted, with Astrid Swan, a podcast series, Syöpäsiskot (Cancer Sisters).

Panel 1: Auto/ethnographic Tools and Scripts

Femke van Hout (Tilburg University), ‘Chronicling the Chronic – A Creative Approach to Narrating the Ongoingness of Chronic Pain’

This paper proposes a way of narrating chronic pain: the telling of a chronicle. Recent work in the medical humanities has been critical of traditional approaches to illness narratives. In line with this, this paper argues that chronic pain tends to resist internally coherent, plot-driven – in other words, Aristotelian – narrative. Chronic pain typically lacks any clear directionality or forward movement, and often resists a sense of agency or a higher purpose or meaning. However, this paper rejects the idea that chronic pain can only be captured in the form of an unshareable and chaotic anti-narrative. It proposes that chronic pain could be borne witness to through the creative act of chronicling – an ongoing telling about one’s ‘ongoingness’.

Instead of looking for an overarching plot, the chronicler starts – like the Aristotelian chroniqueur  – from the little details, the everyday experiences (Lacoue-Labarthe, 2006). Whereas chronic pain narratives are often deemed repetitive and endless, literary scholar Elizabeth Freeman (2019) states that instead, we might have to look for a sense of what Gertrude Stein called insistence. Insistence refers to something that refuses to go away (it is what it is), but is not totally static either: it constantly differs due to continuing changes of emphasis. It’s a way of dilating or intensifying everyday existence through different affects, bodily feelings, rhythms and connections.

At the end of this presentation, I will reflect on a study I aim to conduct with young people (aged 16-25) with chronic pain. They will be asked to chronicle their pain, by recording little daily life experiences, moments, feelings and details, in any form of their choosing: written, sound recordings, photographs or videos. I am curious to see if chronicling might allow for ways to relate to the chronic not as a transformative event, but as not entirely meaningless either.

Femke van Hout is a PhD student in the Medical Humanities at the Department of Cultural Studies at Tilburg University. Her research focuses on time experiences of young people with chronic pain, and how these time experiences might be recounted in a narrative. She uses an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary studies, philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and qualitative research methods. Apart from this, she writes for Filosofie Magazine, the Dutch magazine for public philosophy.

References

  • Freeman, E. 2019. Beside you in time. Sense Methods and Queer Socialibities in the American Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 2006. L’“Allégorie”: Suivi d’un Commencement Par Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilée.
  • van Hout F., van Rooden A., Slatman J. 2022. Chronicling the chronic: narrating the meaninglessness of chronic pain. Medical Humanities. 49(1):1–8. 

Cato Denissen (Universiteit Antwerpen), ‘Visualizing Voices: The Impact of Language Portraits on Social Inclusion for People with Physical Disabilities’

People with physical disabilities often experience stigmas in face-to-face interaction which can lead to social exclusion. The underlying social misconceptions can lead to low self-esteem, and consequently, people with a physical disability often avoid social initiative-taking. In my research I highlight the importance of language and language skills of people with physical disabilities to tackle this negative cycle. This presentation will focus on the use of language portraits, a creative research tool, as an effective means to raise awareness about how language can foster the social inclusion of people with physical disabilities. Language portraits involve individuals visually representing their linguistic repertoire within the outline of a body silhouette. This tool is increasingly utilized in research to explore how people perceive and reflect on their own language use. Drawing from my personal experience as a PhD researcher with a physical disability, I will demonstrate how the creation of a language portrait provided valuable insights into the diverse ways language can support social inclusion. These insights laid the foundation for my doctoral work, which examines how individuals with physical disabilities can use language as a proactive tool to enhance their social inclusion and participation. Previous research has shown that self-advocacy plays a key role in social inclusion. In my research, I propose intrapersonal awareness as an essential starting point. However, creative methods for fostering this awareness—such as language portraits—are frequently overlooked. Educational policies and curricula aimed at improving language skills often reflect majority perspectives and perpetuate inaccurate generalizations. In this presentation, I will propose language portraits as a powerful tool to raise awareness and provide meaningful insights for people with physical disabilities, enabling them to empower themselves and actively contribute to both social and academic environments.

My name is Cato Denissen (1998), and I am a PhD researcher at the university of Antwerp. I have a physical disability (cerebral palsy) and my experiences and overlooked needs inspired the topic of my research. I believe language skills of people with a disability can be deployed as a tool to proactively promote their own social inclusion and participation. My first article has recently been accepted for publishing, and in my second article I reconceptualize self-advocacy as an applicable strategy to improve social participation on different levels. The endgoal of my PhD would be the development of a language programme or learning modules targeting people with physical disabilities to improve their language skills and strategies that benefit their social participation. Kris Van de Poel is my supervisor and Marilize Pretorius and Inge Blockmans are my co-supervisors. I have an academic background in English, and film-, literature-, and theatre sciences (bachelor’s degree, 2021) and I obtained a master’s in English and literature (2022), and a master’s in teaching languages (2023).

Tess Casher (University of Oxford), ‘Did I Stutter?’

“Did I Stutter?” presents a narrative analysis of the process of speaking while using speech therapy techniques. As a person with a stutter, I consider the internal dialogues and storytelling practices that occur when dysfluent speakers implement speech fluency techniques. While foregrounding the diverse experiences of persons with differing levels of vocal dysfluency, I incorporate both autoethnographic reflections and secondary accounts of speaking with a stutter. My paper outlines the narrative frameworks that tend to engender positive and negative speaking experiences when dysfluent persons approach stressful speaking situations (such as presentations, speaking on the telephone, and making critical first impressions).

Narratives that seek to encapsulate the experience of speaking at the margins of communication norms present a unique mode to reconsider the complicated relationships between the self, disability, and medical expectations. Stuttering destabilizes the pervasive metaphor that one’s “voice” can operate as a near-metonymic proxy for one’s selfhood. While complicating the voice-self relationship, stuttering also challenges traditional definitions of disability. Blurring the physical-cognitive, chronic-temporary, visible-invisible binaries, stuttering, and the emerging field of dysfluency studies occupies an interstitial theoretical space.

From this liminal basis, my presentation aligns with the shift in speech-language pathology research from exclusively promoting the value of strictly fluent speech to finding methods to empower dysfluent speakers to keep talking. Linking literary studies and health research, this project overarchingly works to uncover beneficial narrative frameworks that support dysfluent speakers in cultivating the confidence to share their voices in a variety of speaking environments.

Tess Casher is a writer, disability advocate, and stutterer. She is currently pursuing her second master’s in English literature at the University of Oxford. She has given a TEDx talk on “The Art of Stuttering.” In 2023, she published a middle-grade novel (Sleuths in Skates) that seeks to provide dysfluency representation and promote compassionate communication. The book has been integrated into multiple graduate speech-language pathology curricula and public libraries across Canada. She has upcoming publications with STAMMA and Action for Stammering Children. Next year, Casher will begin doctoral studies in English literature with a focus on representations of dysfluency at the University of Alberta.

Emma Ettinger (University of Glasgow), ‘(Re)Staging Neurodiverse Sibling Relationships: Defining an Auto/Ethnographic Methodology in Disability Studies and Practice-Research’

In Narrative Prosthesis (2000), David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder encourage us to find counternarrative reading and writing practices that ‘embrace, transform, and reckon with our inherited disability storylines’ (163), as Lord Byron does in his closet drama The Deformed Transformed. Both the critical and creative counternarrative practices they refer to work to represent (or re-present) disability as an embodied experience, rather than a symbolic stereotype or a problem for the plot to solve. If, as the social and cultural models propose, disability is experienced through interactions with others and the environment, then narratives about disabled and neurodivergent relationships particularly deserve our attention. As Mitchell and Snyder remind us, the impacts of disability ‘stretch[] far beyond the parameters of any single individual life’ (xiii).

This paper proposes that drama, as a medium grounded in both embodiment and interaction, makes a particularly fertile ground for exploring the ways that relationships are shaped by disability and neurodivergence. In particular, I will use my own practice-research playwriting project, ‘Staging Neurodiverse Sibling Relationships’ to make a case for an auto/ethnographic (or insider-outsider) perspective and methodology—offering family members an opportunity to find value in our interdependent relationships and to rehearse or experiment with alternative (or counternarrative) life scripts.

Emma Ettinger is a PhD student in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her practice-research thesis, ‘Staging Neurodiverse Sibling Relationships’ combines autobiographical and interview-inspired playwrighting techniques to explore how sibling relationships involving autism and other forms of neurodiversity are (and might be) represented and rehearsed through drama. She is interested both in contemporary playwriting and in the possibilities afforded by staging and re-staging classic texts.

Panel 2: Sensory States and Contested Sites

Chiara Robbiano (Universiteit Utrecht), ‘“Seeing peach blossoms— eyes utterly overwhelmed”: Dōgen’s and Autistic Sensory Stories’

My thesis is that sensory stories —which display characters receiving sensory inputs, such as sounds, colours, lights etc.— can, by activating our bodies, bridge the gap between self and others and open a shared space between different people.

Firstly, I show that by listening to sensory stories we can imagine the sensory state of someone who might seem different. Literary scholars have studied the effect of scenes where characters touch, see, hear something: they provide entry points into the storyworld at the sensory level (Ready, Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad, 2023). Japanese Zen Buddhist philosopher Dōgen’s concept of expression (dōtoku) encourages appreciating communications styles that, by differing from ours, complete us and allow us to deepen our understanding of reality and the quality of our actions. By listening to sensory stories we can step in the shoes of an autistic child or a Zen master, for instance Naoki Higashida’s (The Reason I Jump, 2007) shows how to prevent light from ‘needling’ its way into his eyeballs, and Dōgen refers to a master, whose eyes got completely overwhelmed at the sights of peach blossoms.

Secondly, I argue that autistic and Dōgen’s sensory stories teach us the benefits of an open bottom-up style of information processing, which can take one out of the subject stance, prevent the readiness to objectify or categorize the other, and enable one to resonate with the received sensory input.

Thirdly, building on Dōgen (Shōbōgenzō, esp. Udonge) and Yergeau (Authoring autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness, 2018), I argue that episodes of hyperstimulation —and stories about them, told for instance, by autistic authors and by Dōgen— can help us decenter and enter the in-between space, which some neurotypicals might feel unequipped to enter, but which is a place of growth through openness to different expressions.

Chiara Robbiano is Associate professor of philosophy, diversity committee chair, and lecturer in the China Studies track at University College Utrecht (Utrecht University, NL). She has been a visiting professor of philosophy at Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan).

With a background in Ancient Greek Philosophy, she is working on cross-cultural philosophy and philosophy of education, publishing in books and peer-reviewed journals such as Philosophy East and West, Ancient Philosophy, Journal of World Philosophies, Journal of Buddhist Philosophy, Culture and Dialogue, and Tropos. She co-edited Key Concept in World Philosophies. A toolkit for philosophers, for Bloomsbury Academic, a volume with 45 chapters (2023); she contributed to a OUP volume as a member of the international Buddhist-Platonist Dialogues. She is a board member of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, and serves as reviewer for various philosophy journals. She is also involved in SoTL (scholarship of teaching and learning) and in projects promoting dialogue and reflection in students, teachers and the broader public, such as the TV series Food For Thought. In her most recent publications and lectures, Chiara Robbiano engages in dialogue with East Asian, South Asian, Ancient Greek, and contemporary philosophers, thinkers, neurodiversity scholars and writers to develop frameworks, concepts, and embodied practices that promote valuing diversity, learning, thinking, and self-cultivation together, especially in higher education.

Sabina Dosani (University of East Anglia), ‘Products of Conception, Imaging & Imagining the Maternal Foetal Relationship’

When my pregnancies ended in silence in an ultrasound suite, the word “miscarriage” jarred. Was I a faulty container? Did I do something wrong? Medicine didn’t help me to answer those questions. To investigate what an ultrasonically-imaged embryo might represent in obstetric and maternal contexts, I turned to creative-critical writing methodology.

In this twenty minute presentation, I will read a brief extract from my memoir, Flesh and Blood, which investigates my experiences of recurrent miscarriage while working as a medical expert witness in the Family Court. Flesh and Blood takes the reader on a journey through a medicalised pregnancy, which unfolds under the bright glare of medical examinations, alongside a parallel, professional journey with families eviscerated by illness, adversity and addiction.

In the second part of my talk, I will present literary criticism entitled, Products of Conception, Imaging and Imagining the Maternal Foetal Relationship. Here, I consider depictions of obstetric ultrasound in three contemporary works: Queenie (2019) by Candice Carty-Williams, Hilary Mantel’s memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2013) and Maggie O’Farrell’s personal essay “Baby and Bloodstream”, from I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. In each text, the ultrasound is a contested site where obstetric and maternal miscarriage narratives collide.

Sabina Dosani has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. She is a Visiting Research Fellow in the department of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, where she teaches medical humanities to medical students. Sabina also works as a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist In 2022, she was named as a BBC New Generation Thinker. In January 2025, she was appointed Editor-in-Chief for BMJ Medical Humanities.

Noa Roei and Simone Stergioula (Universiteit van Amsterdam), ‘Sensory Mapping in Emergency Care: Notes Towards Caring Research Methodologies’

Emergency care units are not very comfortable places to spend time in. Their aesthetics marks them as functional spaces, and the overstimulation of bright lights and beeping sounds is to be endured at the cost of speedy attention. This “aesthetic of deprivation” (Moss) affects both the average patient, who spends up to two hours in the emergency care department per visit, and the emergency care unit employee who spends in this space multiple shifts per week. Understanding aesthetic experiences as important determinants in the way daily institutional care is experienced by patients and caregivers alike, we wished to tap into forms of care offered (or not) by and enabled (or not) through architectural design within the context of emergency care.

During the past three years, together with artists, curators, and emergency care physicians, we have experimented with creative research methods at the emergency care department of the OLVG West in Amsterdam, in order to tap into the spatial experience of the staff and the way it affects their sense of well-being and ability to provide proper care. One of the main questions for us was how to conduct research in a caring way, that would not disturb care practices under pressure nor aggravate problems such as staff’s pressing schedules and feeling of overload. We wanted to move beyond classic evaluative methods, with their insistence on impact measurement and tendency to discipline research subjects. One method we’ve experienced with is sensory mapping, in which staff annotates in free style a blueprint of the emergency department unit.

In our presentation we will trace this research practice’s origin and our process of translating it into emergency care setting; reflect shortly on what it yielded in comparison to other attempted approaches, and creatively play with sensory mapping together with conference participants to further experiment with a more dynamic understanding of the relation between creativity, spatial research, and ethics of care.

Dr. Noa Roei is assistant professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. Her current research focuses on art and visual culture in relation to institutional design and infrastructure. Previous research focus and publications addressed art and visual culture in relation to nationalism, conflict and war. Upcoming publications engage with care infrastructure and the need to rethink existing research methodologies in the Humanities.

Simone Stergioula is a researcher in critical theory and affective justice based in Amsterdam. They are currently part of the project Art in Care: Aesthetic Configurations, Impact, and Spaces of Care (ArtiC), where they develop creative-research methodologies to account for the complex entanglements between subjects and architecture in hospital spaces.

Panel 3: Editing the Health Humanities

FRAME editors (Universiteit Utrecht), ‘On Editing FRAME’s Medical Humanities Special Issue’

[abstracts and bios to be provided]

Colleen Derkatch (Texas Christian University), ‘What Does it Mean to Write the Health Humanities? The Role of the Founding Series Editors for John Hopkins University Press’s Health Humanities Series’

What does it mean to write the health humanities?  In this presentation, which is somewhat unconventional in terms of scholarly papers, I will discuss the role I hold together with Sharrona Pearl of founding series editors for the Health Humanities series for Johns Hopkins University Press.  I will discuss the book proposal process from our perspective as academics who work with the acquisitions editor, as well as what role book series play in building and shaping a field, reflecting on the scholarly role that a book series can play.  The presentation will include our vision for the series as a way to contribute to health humanities as a robust discipline and field of study beyond medical training.  In keeping with the conference theme, we will consider the role of creative work in the publication pipeline, drawing on recent innovations in graphic medicine, autoethnography, and doctor and patient narratives.  We will outline what we see to be key challenges in health humanities scholarship, as well as the possibilities for innovative work that connects creative and more traditional scholarly approaches.

Colleen Derkatch is Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Dr. Derkatch’s research and teaching focus on rhetoric of health and medicine, health humanities, and science and technology studies. She is the author of Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and series co-editor of Hopkins Health Humanities (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Panel 4: Artistic Affordances and Archival Assemblages

Fiona Johnstone (Durham University), ‘Critical Interlopers: Artists as Researchers in the Health Humanities’

In the health humanities, the term ‘creative-critical’ is most closely associated with written methods (creative writing, autotheory, autoethnography) or visual methods that align with narrative structures (visual storytelling; graphic medicine; participatory filmmaking); less often is it applied to practice-based research conducted by visual artists.

This presentation draws on two book-length projects that explore the affordances of visual art as a creative-critical practice in the context of the health humanities: a co-edited volume, Art and the Critical Medical Humanities (Bloomsbury Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities, forthcoming for late 2025); and a new single-authored monograph provisionally titled Critical Interlopers: artists as researchers in healthcare and medicine.

In health humanities contexts, the term ‘art’ often signifies not a method of critical thinking, but rather a broad set of creative activities applied with practical outcomes in mind, including the generation of research data (in the case of arts-based research methods), or improvements in individual and public health (in the case of arts-in-health). In such practices, the ‘arts’ element is typically (although not in every instance) instrumentalised as a means to an end, with the ‘aesthetic’ output considered as subordinate to the ‘research’ output or health outcome. Seeking to challenge this dominant framing, this paper foregrounds the concept of ‘art as research’; that is, where art (as both process and output) is regarded not primarily as a tool for producing measurable health outcomes or research data, but as having a critical and aesthetic value in its own right. In doing so, it asks, what ‘work’ are we expecting art to do in health humanities contexts?

Fiona Johnstone is Assistant Professor in Visual Medical Humanities at Durham University where she leads the Visual and Material Lab as part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. Her research explores the intersections of contemporary arts practices and health humanities research. Recent publications include the monograph AIDS & Representation (Bloomsbury 2023); the edited volume Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Material Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine (Palgrave 2024); and articles “What can art history offer medical humanities” (2024) and “Manifesto for a Visual Medical Humanities” (2018). Art and the Critical Medical Humanities, co-edited with Allison Morehead and Imogen Wiltshire, will be published by Bloomsbury in the series “Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities” in late 2025.

Emilia Nielsen (York University, Toronto), ‘Creative-Critical Writing as Method and Research-Creation as Methodology in the Health Humanities?’

Some have argued that creative-critical writing might best be understood as methodology rather than a genre (Ellis, 2024), a generative suggestion that is worthy of further consideration by scholars in the health and medical humanities. While others have argued that in the realm of public feelings regarding academia and mental illness, critical memoir could be considered a research method (Cvetkovich, 2012). I would like to take a slightly different approach here and suggest that we might think of creative-critical writing as one of many methods supported by a research-creation methodology. For example, Canadian research granting agencies have codified what research-creation is by way of this description: “An approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. The creation process is situated within the research activity and produces critically informed work…Fields that may involve research-creation may include, but are not limited to: architecture, design, creative writing, visual arts (e.g., painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, textiles), performing arts (e.g., dance, music, theatre), film, video, performance art, interdisciplinary arts, media and electronic arts, and new artistic practices.” In this presentation, and in adopting a reflective rather than an argumentative stance, I will explore what a research-creation approach in the health humanities can make happen, demonstrating how such scholarship in the Canadian context embraces both the creative and the critical. First, I will reflect on my own contributions to the field of health humanities, especially those that embrace creative-critical writing—and, I should add, critical-creative writing—and my motivations for working in such a manner. Next, I will embrace “reparative reading” (Sedgwick, 1993; 2003) to explore the work of others. Here, I will demonstrate the ways in which Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling can be understood to be in conversation with, as well as make space for, critical-creative projects like that of psychiatrist and writer Bahar Orang especially as poignantly illustrated in her debut book, Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty.

 

Works Cited:

  • Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A Public Feeling. Duke University Press.
  • Ellis, M. (2024). “Creativecritical writing as methodology.” Text. 28: 1-18. Print.
  • Nielsen, E. (2021). “Chronic Poetics and the Poetry of Chronic Illness (in a Global Pandemic).” Canadian Literature. 245: 47-63. Print. ISSN: 0008-4360
  • —. (2018). Body Work. Winnipeg, MB. Signature Editions.
  • —. (2016). “Chronically Ill, Critically Crip?: Poetry, Poetics and Dissonant Disabilities.” Disability Studies Quarterly. 36.4: n. pag.
  • Orang, B. (2020). Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty. Toronto, ON: Book*hug Press.
  • Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Emilia Nielsen is the award-winning author of Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair (University of Toronto Press, 2019), recipient of an Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize for feminist folklore studies. She is also the author of two noted collections of poetry: Body Work (Signature Editions, 2018), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the League of Canadian Poets’ (LCP) Pat Lowther Memorial Award and winner of a Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry as well as Surge Narrows (Leaf Press, 2013), finalist for the LCP Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University, Toronto, Canada, where she teaches in the Health and Society Program and supervises graduate students across the faculties of Health, Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, and Environmental and Urban Change. She is an active member of both the League of Canadian Poets and the Canadian Association for Health Humanities.

Charlotte Roberts (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London), ‘Notes are Doorways’

This presentation will explore my research notes as a methodological approach that centres Auto-Theory as a form of synthesis of memoir, autobiography, critical theory, philosophy and cultural analysis, foregrounding personal experience and self-reflexivity. Reading, showing and sharing my notes is an aesthetic and epistemological strategy to challenge conventional approaches to writing, mental health, identity, and research as a creative practice. I draw from feminist methodologies that revise conventional notions of knowledge production through the recovery of women’s diaries, notebooks, memoirs, and medical records, alongside writers and artists to form a chorus of voices that create an assemblage of fragments. Together the notes stand as a work of memoir, cultural and aesthetic criticism.

My research explores the archive of artist filmmaker Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949-2012) who chronicled her life through compulsive documentation via Super 8 film, audio tapes, notes and diaristic practices. Her relationship and experience with mental illness is integrally woven into the complex fabric of her Super 8 film, Five Year Diary (36hrs, 1981-1997), and her archive (Harvard Film Archive). Drawing on the notion of the “notational”, I shall ask how it can be used as an approach to archival research and auto-theory writing to illuminate and disrupt normative narratives relating to mental health and female identity. Used both in fiction (Krauss, 2017; Briggs, 2023) and critical writing (Sharpe, 2023; Zambreno, 2021), the “notational” is understood as a literary form that resists the standard elaboration of a narrative arc, and instead uses fragmentation to unravel meanings and associations that refuse totalization. Developing the “notational” as an expanded form across archival research, writing, artistic and filmic practices, I will show how it can become a tool to explore new ways of thinking about lived experiences of health, illness and care in research.

Charlotte Roberts is a PhD candidate at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her research explores mental health and female identity in the diary films of Anne Charlotte Robertson. Charlotte started her career in filmmaking and worked within the third sector making documentary films for health charities. Charlotte then transitioned to work in the NHS, across Women’s Health before starting her PhD. Charlotte lives in London and has two young daughters.

Ruth Clemens (Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society) and Scout Tzofiya Bolton, ‘Poeting the Clinical Archive: A Dialogue’

Scout Tzofja Bolton’s book The Mad Art of Doing Time (2025) presents a collection of poems written while the author was incarcerated in a UK women’s prison due to a crime committed during a psychotic episode. The book begins with a prologue consisting of excerpts taken from official clinical documents: a diagnostic interview report by the forensic psychiatric consultant at HMP Styal and a Judge-appointed psychiatric report for the court. Bolton’s psychotic episode was preventable: she knew it was coming, but her clinical team did not believe her due to a repeated misdiagnosis of emotionally unstable personality disorder; her ensuing protests were only used as proof of her unreliability. In presenting these documents in this context, Bolton prompts us to consider the poetic affordances of clinical texts and their forms. What is the relationship between form and content in the construction of meaning in the diagnostic process, which is often a product of retroactive interpretation? How might the heuristic models of clinical psychiatric diagnosis and poetry share an unexpected set of approaches? In an era of mental health care as the management of the self on the one hand and of dividualised data excess on the other, what should we do with the textual archive of madness created for – or of – each of us who access mental health care in the UK and the Netherlands? This paper presents a creative-critical transmedial dialogue between Clemens, a researcher in cultural analysis, and Bolton, a poet and broadcaster, exploring the poetic affordances or violences of their shared clinical archives. In this way, poetry becomes a mode of taxonomy but also a possibility for taxonomic escape.

Scout Tzofiya Bolton is a poet, musician and broadcaster from the North of England. She likes to use her poetry as a lens through which to dismantle her mental health, her class, her Judaism and her understanding of the world as an unreliable narrator. Her books include Wild Heather (2017), A Terrific Uproar (2022), and The Mad Art of Doing Time (2025). Her works have been featured in both national and international media, and her 2024 BBC

Radio 4 documentary The Ballad of Scout and the Alcohol Tag is currently shortlisted for a Broadcasting Press Guild Award. Scout works as a presenter on National Prison Radio.

Ruth Alison Clemens is a researcher, teacher, and writer based at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), where she is a NWO-funded postdoctoral researcher. Her creative-critical essay on being autistic in academia is published in Soapbox 5.0. She has written articles for Comparative Critical Studies, Modernist Cultures, and Feminist Modernist Studies, and contributed to the books Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism, More Posthuman Glossary, and Posthuman Pathogenesis, among others. Ruth has led artistic research workshops at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), the Grey Space in the Middle (The Hague), and Hypha Studios (London).