The Medical Humanities Research Centre (University of Glasgow) is pleased to announce a change in leadership and a new member of core staff. Dr Gavin Miller (Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities), after twelve years of dedicated service, has now stepped down as lead director, and his co-director, Dr Megan Coyer (Senior Lecturer in English Literature), has taken up the role. Dr Manon Mathias (Reader in French) has been appointed as co-director. The MHRC is also delighted to welcome Dr Dieter Declercq as Lecturer in Medical Humanities (Narrative Medicine) within Film & TV Studies as a new integral part of the centre team from September 2024.
The Medical Humanities Research Centre (University of Glasgow) hosted an end of year networking and drinks reception for the Glasgow Medical Humanities Network on 12th June this year. The GMHN brings together and enhances medical humanities across universities and collections in the city of Glasgow and was established with the support of a Wellcome Trust grant in 2019. At the reception everyone enjoyed nine 5-minute lightning talks from network members on current or recently completed medical humanities research projects. The drinks reception that followed took place in the Anatomy Museum, and we were treated with a short talk from Dr Ourania Varsou (Lecturer in Anatomy) on the history of the museum and its collections. We hope to make this an annual event!
New co-director, Manon Mathias, delivers her lightning talk.
Newcastle Medical Humanities Network is thrilled to announced the latest published chapter by members Dr Olivia Turner and Dr Sally Waite, ‘Corporeal Pedagogy: Visualizing Anatomy Through Art, Archaeology, and Medicine’ in Graphic Medicine, Humanizing Healthcare and Novel Approaches in Anatomical Education. Biomedical Visualization, vol 3. Springer International.
Abstract
This chapter outlines the educational methodology, Corporeal Pedagogy established by Dr. Olivia Turner and Dr. Sally Waite, which uses the Shefton Collection of Greek Art and Archaeology for interdisciplinary teaching and learning. This methodology considers the relationship between objects, art, and medicine to better understand how we visualize and imagine the visceral body. It aims to create a form of learning and teaching that addresses and challenges certain conventional modes of Western education, particularly within a European university setting, and to instead facilitate embodied and haptic learning and production of knowledge. Corporeal Pedagogy explores ancient and contemporary notions of the body and embodiment, and how our perception of anatomy changes during experiences of transition, illness, and disease. The participating students used object handling, creative practice, meditation, and selected readings to investigate what it means to learn through the body. Within a university setting, the workshops illustrate the transformative role objects can play in education to facilitate radical forms of teaching and learning in the field of medical humanities.
Newcastle Medical Humanities Network is thrilled to announced that The Suicide Cultures Podcast, Episode 3, featuring Anne Whitehead, is now live! Anne talks about her new book Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective, published by Bloomsbury. Anne discusses how her process of writing the book and the period during which she was writing (the COVID-19 Pandemic) shaped the form and content of the book. Rebecca and Anne also talk about creativity and archives in relation to suicide.
CHASE – the Centre for Health, Arts, Society and the Environment – provides an interdisciplinary platform at the University of Liverpool for collaborative research with a focus on health, medical and environmental concerns. On July 13th 2023, they hosted a welcome event that showcased examples of projects across the Centre.
Driven by the social sciences and humanities, CHASE, the Centre for Health, Arts, Society and the Environment, responds to a range of interconnected contemporary challenges related to health, medicine, environmental and climate change and the interactions between them – for examples: the complex histories of and social and creative responses to medicine, climate change and environmental contamination; the rise of environmentally induced (dis)ease; the persistence of chronic conditions and mental illness and creative responses to these; the significance of postcolonial feminist, disability and crip theories; the political economies and philosophies of wellbeing and health; the imperative of social justice and the politics and pragmatics of intervention and recovery.
Critical to their work as a Centre is genuine collaboration with communities of practice, people with lived experience of illness and degraded environments and various publics and activist communities across the city of Liverpool, the region and beyond. And central to their commitment to methodological creativity is the catalysing role of the arts: poetry, music, literature, film and creative and participatory arts.
On July 13th 2023 – they hosted a welcome event that showcased examples of projects across their three centre themes: Critical Medical Humanities; Arts, Mental Health and Wellbeing and Environmental Humanities, in addition to their cross faculty MA in Health, Cultures and Societies. The CHASE team introduced the work of three artists whose work is shaping new ways of researching mental health in the community (Philharmonic Cellist, Georgina Aasgaard); environmental histories (Environmental Artist, Byrony Benge-Abbot) as well as new ways of reconfiguring recovery (Award winning filmmaker Melanie Manchot).
The welcome event was well-attended across all three faculties at the University of Liverpool, in addition to non-academic partners in the City. Watch the introductory talk below or find out more by visiting the event website here.
CHASE Welcome Speech 2023
CHASE would like to thank all those who participated in the day, and who attended their interdisciplinary workshop on objects – Things Provocations – as an heuristic for interdisciplinary working.
Lucy Carolan, Fine Art PhD Researcher at Newcastle University, has been shortlisted for The Prescription Prize in Creative Writing 2023, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.
A strong field of competition entries came in from writers across the UK in prose, poetry and hybrid writing. All entrants are to be congratulated on the breadth of their engagement with creative writing on the medical humanities and the RCPSG collections.
NNMHR is excited to announce four new research networks awarded grants in our 2023 round of our New Networks in Critical Medical Humanities funding scheme.
The four successful networks will be launching their programmes and portfolios over the coming months. Each comprise compelling new programmes for research and activity in the critical medical humanities.
They represent a dynamic collective of researchers and practitioners based both in the regional north of the United Kingdom and from around the world.
The NNMHR, and our appointed New Networks deciding panel, would like to thank everyone who submitted their network proposals to this popular scheme. The standard of the many applications we received was exceptional. We will make further announcements about our expanding network and research opportunities soon.
These four research networks will join our existing network portfolio and expansive collective of affiliated network partners. Click here for details of them all.
We want to hear from you. It’s time to connect up with the critical medical humanities community. You can message NNMHR Networks Coordinator Dr James Rákóczi for further information or contact any of our network partners directly.
Pain and b/Black Identity: Race in Medicine
“This network will establish and maintain a space to think about ‘race’ as it is articulated in medical assessments of pain. It will be a ‘critical’ space in the sense that these medical assessments will be interrogated and contextualised as being part of a system that de-emphasises and sometimes erases b/Black people’s experiences of pain. By fostering connections in the broader conversations in the medical humanities around race, racism, medical science and clinical care practice, this network will focus and support work approaching race in medicine through the issue of pain and pain management.
To this end, we wish to explore the question of ‘physical’ pain as it is experienced by b/Black people in the Anglophone world and beyond. In the history of psychiatry, racial injustice has been predominantly approached through ideas of risk, violence and compulsion; much of the psychiatry-centred work in critical medical humanities has focussed on either (a) ideas of ‘intergenerational trauma’ (instead of the more quotidian ‘pain’) or (b) concepts of danger, violence and risk as opposed to subjective experiences of and structural responses to pain. As such, focussing on pain will not only explore and elucidate ‘metaphysical’ pain, but it will show how physical bodily pain is a phenomenon that represents very specific challenges for not only medicine and the medical humanities, but what we characterise as ‘iHPS’ (integrated history and philosophy of science and medicine).
We are interested in hearing from researchers and practitioners with a demonstrable interest in (a) pain in the context of medicine; (b) race in the context of medicine whose work would facilitate a specific focus on pain; (c) race and pain in medicine. Please contact the PI, Alexander Douglas, at .”
Stomach Ache: Curating with Guts in the Medical Humanities
“The brain-gut-microbiome axis is a pressing topic in emerging science and popular imaginaries. Major exhibitions at The Eden Project, UK (2015) Medical Museion, Copenhagen (2018) and Melbourne Museum, Australia (2019) have framed the microbiome and gut health as cutting-edge themes in curatorial practice. Yet epidemiological research suggests that complex, chronic and imprecisely diagnosed gut issues are rising exponentially around the globe, and that people’s experiences of seeking treatment are often unsupportive and ineffective. Acknowledging this failed connection between emerging science and people’s clinical experiences possesses a different kind of cultural urgency to the more traditional curatorial task of increasing people’s scientific understanding of the gut via artworks and cultural artefacts.
From this point of complex entanglement, our network asks three questions:
How do people living with complex gut issues think creatively and adaptively in response to their symptoms, when medicine is unable to offer a linear pathway toward treatment and cure?
What new definitions of medical and social equity arise in this disconnect between cutting-edge gut science and lived experience?
How might these formulations help us complicate representations of lived experience in curatorial and artistic practices, leading to new ways of curating with the medical humanities?
A series of workshops will invite curators, artists and medical humanities researchers from across Australia, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe to consider digestive dysregulation as a provocation into new curatorial methods, with knowledge outcomes published in a summative working paper. Workshops will be bookended by two iterations of an exhibition at the Lethaby Gallery (Window Galleries), University of the Arts, London. Stomach Ache: Curating with Guts in the Medical Humanities consolidates an ongoing collaboration between network leads Dr Rachel Marsden at University of the Arts, London and Dr Vanessa Bartlett at University of Melbourne, and a wider network of artists, curators and medical humanities researchers. You can find the network leads on Twitter @rachmarsden and @vanessabartlett, and on IG @rachel_marsden and @vanessabartlett.”
UK Disability History and Heritage Hub
“The UK Disability History and Heritage Hub (UKDHHH) is a network focused on the histories of disabled, neurodivergent and Deaf people, spanning from the ancient world to the modern age. Created by a team of PhD students following a PGR-organised conference in March 2022, the network aims to widen the conversation about all types of disability history within and beyond the academy.
The current network is an international group of historians, early-career and professional researchers, heritage sector professionals, activists, and members of the public. The UKDHHH runs virtual monthly reading group sessions, and we have upcoming plans for many new types of events. We aim to use our platform and events to facilitate conversations about disability history, platform disabled, neurodivergent, and Deaf perspectives, and provide opportunities for individuals to connect. We are excited to receive funding from the NNMHR New Networks scheme to bridge these conversations into the wider field of medical humanities, to facilitate new intersections between these areas of study, and promote socially and politically conscious discussions about disability in the medical humanities. We look forward to continuing our work and expanding our group!
To join our mailing list and reading group, you can sign up online at our website. We also are on Twitter at @UKDisHistHub.”
Warblers: Network of Reproductive Pain Studies from Southern India
“Warblers is an interdisciplinary research network of ECRs and academics working in the area of health humanities with a special focus on the issues of reproductive rights and birth trauma. The network – through critical academic discussions, collaborative and interdisciplinary research, and open forum discussion – will bring forth voices of the birthing person in order to understand the socio-cultural sentiments governing the notion of birth in the context of India.
The network would like to delve deep into one of the key components of childbirth, i.e., the phenomenology of birth pain. Articulation of birth pain has always been considered taboo in the context of India. The imposed or learned silence has led to a series of mental health issues. Thus, the network through open forum discussion would like to revise the socio-cultural and gendered norms that shape the cultural memory of birth pain.
In India, the failure to implement reproductive rights is rooted in the social structure in which we are embedded. India follows a collectivist and community-based social structure where we are cognitively tuned to be interdependent. The individual notion of autonomy and empowerment that shapes reproductive rights policy fails to make a significant change in the life of the birthing person.
Hence, drawing on critical perspectives from social cognition, cultural memory, social neuroscience, gender studies, and law, the network aims to propose alternative ways to understand interdependent notions of autonomy and agency that will gear towards the emotional empowerment of the birthing person.
Nursing home culture, although well embraced by Indian society, has also given birth to self-stigmatization for women who have experienced medical interventions such as c-sections, and assisted reproductive technologies. Many women conceive medical intervention during childbirth as a disabling component of their childbirth experience, resulting in a damaging impact on the mother-child relationship and holistic well-being.
The Warblers network, through active engagement with academic and non-academic sectors, would like to reconsider birth as a fluid, complex, and diverse experience thereby aiming to break the myth of natural birth as idealized in Indian society.”
The NNMHR are delighted to share the programme for partner institution Lancaster University’s upcoming online symposium “What can wellbeing and health research look like in the arts, humanities and social sciences?”, due to take place on 22 and 23 May 2023. The symposium is organised by Lancaster’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Health Hub.
Keynote speakers will be Professor Angela Woods (Durham University) and Dr Alex Wragge-Morley (History Department, Lancaster). The full programme can be viewed below, and registration is via Eventbrite.
On citizenship, boundaries and belonging: Designing Inclusive Medical and Health Humanities Spaces
April 19, 12-1:30PM BST
As the medical humanities field continues to expand and flourish within innovative spaces of health research, critical questions emerge about who belongs in that space, who gets to build and sustain it, and who gets to be a citizen.
This keynote argues that the medical and health humanities as a field and discipline are at key crossroads necessitating a reflection on citizenship and belonging, particularly amongst those on the margins, and advocates a self-reflection on the realities of inclusion, exclusion, power and resistance within the field. This talk puts into perspective how method, praxis, analysis, pedagogy, cosmology, and epistemology must align with the most marginalized in our spaces and practice. As we ruminate the realities of where the medical humanities is actively positioned at the moment in the wake of ongoing calls for global social and reparative justice, we must examine where the critical health and medical humanities sits within this discourse. Does this inter-multi-transdisicplinary engagement with medicine, health, bodies, people, culture, and society reflect the real and imagined productions from the people existing within these spaces? Are we doing enough as academics, researchers, activists, healthcare workers or creative practitioners to understand these spaces we claim to research and serve? If not, how do we actively challenge ourselves to redirect the field towards genuine inclusivity and, more importantly, dismantle systems of dominance and discrimination at this critical juncture when calls for greater ethical practice, transparency and civic responsibility in our research practice are met with resistance.
About Chisomo: Dr Kalinga is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Her research engages how modern and traditional literary practices (performance, form and aesthetics) are constructed by ordinary people in narratives of health and wellbeing. Her research interests are disease (specifically sexually transmitted infections), illness and wellbeing, biomedicine, and traditional healing. She is currently collaborating with her colleagues across Malawi and Southern Africa to support the Malawi Medical Humanities Network (MMHN) and the South-Africa based Medical and Health Humanities Network Africa.
SECOND KEYNOTE:
Nils Fietje and Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya
Global health policy and the critical medical humanities: pasts, presents and futures
April 20, 12-1:30PM BST
What is at stake when scholarship seeks to directly influence global health policy? Nils Fietje (WHO Regional Office for Europe) and Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Professor of Medical and Global Health Histories, University of Leeds) discuss organisational cultures and the intersections of history and theory with contemporary policy and practice.
Nils Fietje – Technical Officer, WHO Regional Office for Europe
Sharpening the double-edged sword: the role of the medical humanities in global public health policy making
Over the past ten years, the ‘critical turn’ within medical humanities has done much to challenge and complement our understanding of medicine and the practices of health care. But to what extent have the medical humanities directly influenced health policy? Is there a seat at the policy making table for research from the field? Or is this even desirable? This talk will explore why the double-edged sword of actively contributing to global health governance might be worth wielding; and how one might go about sharpening the other edge.
About Nils: Nils Fietje is a Technical Officer within the Behavioural and Cultural Insights Unit at the WHO Regional Office for Europe. He has a background in English literature and the cultural history of medicine. As part of the BCI Unit, he is leading efforts to understand how cultural contexts affect and interact with health and well-being, across the life-course and throughout the continuum of care. Recently, this work has included a particular focus on arts and health, having published the first-ever WHO report on the evidence base for arts and health interventions.
Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya – Professor of Medical and Global Health Histories, University of Leeds
Who needs to learn from WHO(m), and how?: Revisiting cultures of global health theory and practice
Global Health has different stages, involving very different actors, as well as political, social, economic and, not least, cultural frameworks. There has been a tendency in historical work to focus on offices based in Europe and North America, based on presumptions about the epistemic, economic and political primacy of the thoughts and actions within such contexts. This scholarship draws upon – and fortifies – exclusionary ideas of racial and cultural superiority that are widespread. They generally minimise the complexities of implementation and the important roles played by low and middle income country actors, who often choose not to communicate in English. So, when these voices are identified carefully and considered respectfully, what do they teach us? That culturally competent and adaptable implementation of grand ideas developed elsewhere is more important, than some exclusionary and racially superior notion of one group knowing better than others and the related wisdom of ‘nudging’ behavioural change? This talk proposes humility as a core need and strength in organisational culture, in norm making and implementation.
About Sanjoy: Sanjoy is the permanent Head of the School of History at the University of Leeds, and also the Professor of Medical and Global Health Histories. He continues to work on a decolonised history of the World Health Organisation since its inception, even as he continues to work with multiple WHO Departments and Divisions around the world, usually in partnership with regional and national governance.
THIRD KEYNOTE
Dr Ayesha Ahmad, Professor Jeremy Greene, Professor Patricia Kingori, Professor Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, Professor Stuart Murray, Dr Will Viney and Professor Jo Winning
‘Critical’: What next for medical humanities?
April 21, 12-1:30PM BST
A plenary roundtable chaired by Prof Angela Woods brings seven leading scholars together to reflect upon the past, present and future of medical humanities.
The 2023 Congress marks a decade since the ‘critical’ turn in medical humanities. This plenary roundtable reflects upon the significance and impact of this ‘critical’ turn, with an emphasis on the most important issues – thematic, methodological, structural – facing the field today. To set the scene for discussion each speaker will offer a short provocation about the past, present or future of medical humanities.
The provocations:
Will Viney: The critical value of projects in the medical humanities – projects are often created to solve problems, but what problems do they create?
Jeremy Greene:*Medical humanities* is a capacious term that is generally nonthreatening and can contain within it a diverse set of programs with entirely orthogonal social or political purposes, ranging from radical revisionings of the social order to reactionary and revanchist uses of nostalgia. In focusing our attention to a tighter beam, what are the *critical medical humanities* critical of, and who are they critical for?
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi:Medical humanities in Africa – critical, urgent or out of touch?
Ayesha Ahmad: Global Health Humanities is an act of creation. Such an act is symbolic when situating storytelling in contexts of suffering. In particular, I argue that creating stories in suffering is a mode of resistance and addresses silence in situations of silencing. To this end, storytelling is a saviour of suffering.
Stuart Murray: Both Medical Humanities and Disability Studies have experienced critical turns, but where these leave the relationship between the two remains unclear. I want to argue that both have under-acknowledged limitations as critical fields, but that the current working methods of each are well placed to critique the other, highlighting their shortcomings and speaking to some of the consequences that have come from their relative success as emerging academic disciplines.
Jo Winning:In early March 2023, the UK government announced its plans to make the UK a ‘Science and Technology Superpower’ by 2030 [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/plan-to-forge-a-better-britain-through-science-and-technology-unveiled] – critical medical humanities have a crucial role to play in any such plans, and must refuse the exclusion of the humanities.
Patricia Kingori: Fixations of endings in global health are a violence to which the medical humanities must pay greater attention.
Register now for NNMHR Congress 2023, 19-21 April:
In 2022, The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research (NNMHR) launched the first round of the New Networks in Critical Medical Humanities Funding Scheme. Four networks were awarded funds of up to £2500 each to support events, activities and the development of resources.
The networks selected for funding in the 2022 round were:
The NNMHR has a strong national and international reputation as an interdisciplinary hub for researchers, practitioners and artists working in the critical medical humanities. Through a dynamic programme of events for early career researchers, and congresses held at Durham, Leeds, Sheffield and online in 2021, the NNMHR has been successful in engaging over two thousand researchers at all career stages and from all the disciplines contributing to the field. Collaboration and moving across disciplinary boundaries is increasingly important to generating new frameworks, scholarship and practices within critical medical humanities research.
Shifting the focus from small research projects and individual fellowships, the New Networks in Critical Medical Humanities Funding Scheme enables the NNMHR to identify and support emerging networks of researchers committed to the innovative development, complication and expansion of the field. These networks will involve early career researchers in leading or coordinating roles, and will help catalyse new ideas, methodologies, collaborations and areas of further investigation within the critical medical humanities, nationally and internationally. We welcome proposals for new networks as well as applications from established networks seeking to support new activities or initiatives.
The New Networks in Critical Medical Humanities Funding Scheme is made possible by a Discretionary Award from Wellcome Trust [UNS128916].
For the 2023 round, the NNMHR invites applications for grants of up to £2500 to support networking activities for up to two years (2023-2025). All awarded funds must be claimed and spent by the end of August 2025.
Costed networking activity may include, but is not limited to:
collaboration events and activities of core network members (including travel)
collaboration and scoping events with relevant stakeholders
scholarly outreach and public engagement initiatives
core resources for collaborative research activity (including technological resources)
costs associated with plenary speakers or keynote events
costs associated with any publications emerging from the network in the duration of the award
Staffing costs in the form of stipends or hourly payments for unwaged or precarious workers including but not necessarily limited to artists, activists, representatives from charities or similar organisations. If the ECR network leader named on the grant is not currently in full-time paid employment, funds may be requested to support their salary costs (on an hourly paid or fractional basis) for time spent coordinating network activities. Hourly paid staffing costs must be administered by the host institution in line with their own policies around casual employment. If the ECR network leader named on the grant is not currently in full-time paid employment, funds may be requested to support their salary costs (on an hourly paid or fractional basis) for time spent coordinating network activities. Salary costs must be administered by the host institution in line with their own policies around casual employment.
Costs that are not eligible for funding include:
teaching buy-outs, fellowships, or personal payments for individual or group research time
technology and computing resources for individual use
Prospective applicants will be able to attend an online workshop to explore what makes a successful research network, to reflect upon the benefits and limitations of online working, to address barriers to access, and to share best practice.
The NNMHR will support successful applicants by offering them mentoring, helping them to establish the public profile of their network, and inviting them to showcase the activities of their network at the annual NNMHR congresses and through regular contributions to The Polyphony. The NNMHR will provide regular informal opportunities for the individuals running critical medical humanities networks to share their experiences and ideas, reflect on what is working and what is not, and identify areas of synergy and potential collaboration.
The NNMHR will agree with successful applicants an approach to evaluation prior to the commencement of funded activity. As they will engage and develop different constituencies and intellectual agendas, networks require space to experiment, as well as flexibility in the definition of what counts as ‘success’.
Administration of the Award
At least one applicant within the proposed network must be affiliated to an institution willing to administer the grant. Contact details for this applicant (if someone other than the lead author) and their institution, as well as a brief letter of support from their institution confirming that they are willing to administer the award as detailed below, must be provided.
The administering institution must be able to bear the cost associated with the grant in the first instance; requests for reimbursement of costs will be made to Durham University (representing the NNMHR) on a quarterly basis, with evidence of spend in arrears. Any unspent funds will remain with the NNMHR. Please note that the NNMHR are not in a position to dispense this grant as a lump sum upfront.
Eligibility
Applicants can come from any discipline or sector engaged in critical medical humanities research, working anywhere in the world. Applications will only be considered from groups of two or more individuals working collaboratively. In order to ensure that the network supports the career development of its coordinators, at least one applicant in this group must regard themselves as being early career (broadly defined as not having yet taken up a permanent post).
While a focus on critical medical humanities research is essential, the scheme recognises that research takes place in spaces beyond the academy and can be carried out within a wide range of professional, artistic and community contexts. Applications from researchers from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities and from people who identify as disabled or who have lived experience of illness will be strongly encouraged.
Assessment Criteria
Applicants will be free to determine the nature and scope of network activity within the Wellcome Trust’s overall guidelines, and can use funds to cover the costs of network coordination. It will not be a requirement that networks generate discrete research outputs or applications for further funding; however, applicants must be able to identify some broader goals for the network beyond simply exchanging ideas, and to show how participation will benefit those involved in the network’s coordination and activity.
Applications will be assessed against the extent to which they:
further a critical medical humanities approach to health-related research
have the potential to impact positively on the people engaged, whatever their background, role, profession, status or career level
involve early career researchers in coordinating or leading roles
take intellectual risks or propose experimental ways of working
are committed to inclusivity and have identified strategies to achieve this
embrace interdisciplinarity as part of their approach to their chosen theme/s
address the sustainability of the proposed collaboration and/or the topic at hand beyond the life of the grant (this could take a number of forms including ECR career development, or how the network might exist or evolve in the future)
Applications will be assessed by a panel made up of members of the NNMHR Steering group.
Please note:
While we will take into account matters like representation and diversity among the people and topics involved, the actual size of your network is not included in the assessment criteria. This is intentional. We want to see the best and most innovative ideas that the critical medical humanities have to offer. These might involve any number of people from any location/s in the world. Key questions addressed by these networks can impact local through to global settings and contexts, the most important thing is bringing the right people together to do that. Interdisciplinarity matters, but how you achieve this is up to you.
Networks can work to broad or narrow themes: what matters is the furthering of knowledge and practice around approaches to thinking about health.
The aims of individual networks might include the production of scholarly outputs but this is not essential. We are interested in bringing together new communities of thought and practice and how you seek to address issues within the field of critical medical humanities is up to you. We are happy to consider all types of activity that might positively impact the field.
Application Process
Applicants should send their completed application form and institutional letter of support by 5pm (UK time) on Friday 12th May 2023 to Dr James Rákóczi at .
The institutional letter of support is to confirm that the institution is willing and able to bear the cost associated with the grant in the first instance; requests for reimbursement of costs will be made to Durham University (representing the NNMHR) on a quarterly basis, with evidence of spend in arrears.
The NNHMR Steering Group will review the applications and aim to notify all applicants of the outcome by the end of June 2023.
NNMHR requires that all funded networks comply with the legal, ethical and risk-based processes of the institution administrating the grant. NNMHR also reserves the right to refuse any expenditure or event that does not meet adequate health and safety or ethical compliance standards
Grant holders must inform NNMHR if planned activities and/or expenditure needs to change significantly within the duration of the award
Any unspent funding will remain with the NNMHR at the end of the grant period.
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Frequently asked questions:
How much are the awards?
Each award is for up to £2500.
How many awards will be made?
We are likely to make four or five awards in this round.
Our network was awarded funding in the 2022 round. Can we apply again for more funding to develop our network further?
No, we have decided to prioritise funding a wider selection of networks rather than give additional funds to networks that have already received support from the NNMHR.
We applied for an award in the last round, but were unsuccessful. Can we apply again?
Yes!
How will the award be made?
At least one applicant within the proposed network must be affiliated to an institution willing to administer the grant. Contact details for this applicant (if someone other than the lead author) and their institution, as well as a brief letter of support from their institution confirming that they are willing to administer the award as detailed below, must be provided.
The administering institution must be able to bear the cost associated with the grant in the first instance; requests for reimbursement of costs will be made to Durham University (representing the NNMHR) on a quarterly basis, with evidence of spend in arrears. Any unspent funds will remain with the NNMHR. Please note that the NNMHR are not in a position to dispense this grant as a lump sum upfront.
I’m not quite ready to apply for this funding yet. Will there be another opportunity to apply for new network funding in the future?
We are unlikely to be able to offer further rounds of funding after 2023.
Further Information: For informal enquiries or advice about your eligibility for the scheme, please contact Dr James Rákóczi at .
