Show Notes
Prof Ian Sabroe and Dr Dieter Declercq talk to Prof Paul Crawford about his ground-breaking work as the world's first professor of health humanities and his research into how creative practices advance health and mental well-being.
Check out 'What's Up With Everyone?' Paul's recent campaign with the animation studio Aardman.
Paul Crawford is Professor of Health Humanities at the School of Health Sciences and Director of the Centre for Social Futures at the Institute of Mental Health, University of Nottingham, UK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (FRSPH). As founding father of the global and rapidly developing field of health humanities, Professor Crawford leads a large program of research in applying the arts and humanities to inform and transform healthcare, health and wellbeing. He is the author of over 140 peer-reviewed articles or chapters and 13 books, most recently The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities (Palgrave), Florence Nightingale at Home (Palgrave) and Cabin Fever: Surviving Lockdown in the Coronavirus Pandemic (Emerald). He is the commissioning editor for two series, Arts for Health (Emerald) and Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities (Routledge) and is lead Editor-in-Chief for The Encyclopedia of Health Humanities (Springer). In 2021, he led the campaign for young people’s mental health called What’s Up With Everyone with Academy Award-winning Aardman (Shaun the Sheep, Wallace & Gromit). This initiative brought five original short animations to more than 18 million people and won Best Social Media and Content at the Design Week Awards 2021.
More from Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health
Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq will with Danielle about Why Doctors Write, alongside the encounter between arts and medicine, and the doctor-patient connection. Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, is one of the foremost voices in the medical world today, shining an unflinching light on the realities of healthcare and speaking passionately about the doctor patient relationship. She writes about medicine and the doctor-patient connection. Her writing appears in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic, as well as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. Danielle Ofri is a founder and Editor-in-Chief of Bellevue Literary Review, the first literary journal to arise from a medical setting, now an award-winning, independent nonprofit literary arts organization. She is a primary care internist at Bellevue Hospital and a clinical professor of medicine at NYU. Her lectures to medical and general audiences are renowned for her use of dramatic stories (and avoidance of PowerPoint). Her essays have been selected for Best American Essays (twice) and Best American Science Writing, by Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, and Susan Orlean. Ofri is the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2023 Davies Scholar Award from the American College of Physicians, the 2022 National Humanism in Medicine Medal from the Gold Foundation, the 2020 Global Listening Legend Award, and has been awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Ofri is a “Master” of the American College of Physicians, and has received the McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers Association for “preeminent contributions to medical communication.” Danielle Ofri has given TED talks on Deconstructing Perfection and Fear: A Necessary Emotion, and has also performed stories for the Moth. She is featured in the documentaries Why Doctors Write and White Coat Rebels. An ever-struggling student of the cello, she’s hoping to someday complete the ever-uphill slog through all 36 movements of the Bach cello suites.
Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Cathy, Jason and Phil about Personalised and public health: learning (and not learning) from the past. Our guests share a research interest around public health, personalised health, the politics of health, but have different disciplinary training. During the conversation, we tease out some of the similarities but also differences between past and present, and a humanities versus biomedical approach. We explore what can we learn from each other across disciplinary approaches, and from the past to inform approaches to population health today.
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.
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. Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities in the School of Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Health and Medical Humanities at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Brill/Rodopi, 2011) and of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). She has also co-edited Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) and has led “Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities”, an interdisciplinary project that examined how books, art and healthcare can be interrelated. Current research includes a practice-based project that uses creative methods inspired by the artist’s book to explore the experiences of mothers affected by historic and contemporary practices of child removal and adoption, and a new monograph on self-care in contemporary writing.
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.