Rethinking Rigour: Conditions of Creativity and Criticality within the Academy
Thursday 4th December (online and Durham University) and Friday 5th December (Durham University)
The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research (NNMHR) is pleased to present RETHINKING RIGOUR, a two-day symposium exploring creative-critical research in medical humanities.
Provisional Programme:
Thursday 4th December, 2pm to 5.30pm, in-person and live-streamed: Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, Harry Meadley, and Tamarin Norwood. (For those attending in-person, coffee will be available from 1.30pm, with the talks starting at 2pm).
Friday 5th December, 9.30am to 4.30pm, in-person only: creative writing workshop with Gita Ralleigh; Olivia Turner and Katey Warran in conversation; provocations workshop with Louise Creechan, Daniel Jones, Emily Davis, Sofie Layton, Amaleena Damle, Anne Whitehead and Lucy Burke.
The medical humanities offer fertile ground for the convergence of creativity and critical inquiry. With its orientation towards ‘blue skies’ interdisciplinarity, the field encourages and rewards creative experimentation and methodological innovation. Researchers often turn to imaginative methods to illuminate experiences of health, illness, and wellbeing that may otherwise remain obscured or taboo. For example, the tradition of narrative medicine engages with the gaps, elisions, and contradictions inherent in illness narratives through literary forms such as life-writing and autofiction. Likewise, visual art and performance can render visible the aesthetic textures of experiences that defy conventional articulation.
What is creative-critical? Creative-critical research frequently challenges the traditional frameworks and metrics of academic excellence. Its power lies in its capacity to engage with complex, often personal themes through abstract and radical forms. This work may be confronting, but it is not without intellectual rigour. As Rita Charon, Amy Ship, and Steven M. Asch remind us in relation to narrative medicine, critical-creative methods are themselves ‘a rigorous discipline, rooted in the literary study of the complex relationships between doctor and patient, doctor and colleague, doctor and self, doctor and the cosmos’.[1]
Why rigour? Coalescing around the concept of ‘rigour’, this symposium asks:
- What forms does creative-critical research take within the medical humanities?
- What are the challenges of aligning creative-critical methods with established academic frameworks of assessment and output?
- What new opportunities might we identify for scholar-practitioners working at the intersection of creativity and criticality within (and around) the medical humanities?
RETHINKING RIGOUR aims to move the creative-critical medical humanities conversation forwards by challenging the privileging of critical over creative in certain disciplinary modes. Instead, it invites participants to explore how creativity and criticality might be understood as mutually generative in illuminating hidden, marginalised, or ineffable aspects of lived experience.Bringing together scholars and practitioners grappling with complex questions about health, embodiment, lived experience and wellbeing in the registers of creative writing, visual arts, moving image, performance, and more, this two-day event explores what a reconfigured framework of ‘rigour’ might look like in creative-critical medical humanities research spaces.
Full Programme:
[1] Rita Charon, Amy Ship, and Steven M. Asch, ‘Arts, Humanities, Medicine, and Discovery: a Creative Calling’, Journal of general internal medicine, 35.2 (2020), pp. 407-408, doi:10.1007/s11606-019-05513-6.