Centre for Medical Humanities / Wolfson Post-Graduate & Early Career Research Network Tuesday 28th February 2017, 4pm-5.30pm, The Horsfall Room, St. Chad’s College, North Bailey, Durham Topic: Writing the Mind The next meeting of the CMH Postgraduate / Early Career Researcher Medical Humanities Network will take place on Tuesday 28th February. Tea, coffee and cakes will be served!

The meeting will include a presentation from Natalie Riley (English, Durham), drawing upon her work on the sciences of mind and contemporary Anglophone fiction, asking 'What are Neurocritics for?' We would also like to invite researchers to give short work-in-progress presentations (5-10 minutes). This can be on any aspect of work connected to the field of Medical Humanities, as widely understood. For this seminar, we particularly welcome contributions engaged with questions of cognition, consciousness, theory of mind and embodiment. Please contact if you would like to present, or if you have any questions.

Workbook for Contemporary Maternal-Newborn Nursing: 110: Medicine & Health Science Books @ Amazon.com. LECTURE GUIDES. University of Michigan, Dearborn to accompany. KATHLEEN STASSEN BERGER. WORTH PUBLISHERS. The Developing Person Through the Life Span. EIGHTH EDITION.

New members are always very welcome! Please contact if you would like to attend.

Rest and its discontents Rest and its Discontents - Hubbub exhibition Rest matters to everyone. Its presence, absence and quality affects mind, body, culture and society. Rest & its discontents explores the dynamics of rest, stress, relaxation, sound, noise, work and mindwandering in an evolving laboratory of moving image, performance, drawing, poetry, data, sound, music and debate. Rest & its discontents features the work of over 25 contributors, including Nina Garthwaite’s radio for mind wanderers Default Mode Radio Network; Christian Nold’s audio installation and noise-monitoring network Prototyping a new Heathrow Airport; Tamarin Norwood’s video Sleep Studies I–V; and Patrick Coyle’s thirty-nine floating solar-powered objects alluding to the categories of labour prohibited on the Sabbath. Rest & its discontents draws on Hubbub’s research and explores the art, science and culture of rest, stress, noise and mind-wandering.

The exhibition is at Mile End Art Pavilion, and runs from 30 September – 30 October 2016. Opening hours 12.00-18.00, Tuesday-Sunday. Closed on Mondays. Late opening: Thursday 6 October, until 21.00. Admission is free. Hearing the Voice is delighted to be participating in this year’s.

On Saturday 15 October, project director will be discussing his recent book - ‘ ' - in which he explores the different voices in our heads: the kindly ones, the guiding ones, the voices of conscience and memory, and the sometimes terrible, sometimes beneficent voices of those who hear others speaking when there is no one around. The book has received wide critical acclaim, and a recent interview with US magazine Kirkus reviews can be found. Charles will be joined by HtV team members (Co-director) and, who will introduce their own research into voice-hearing and discuss different aspects of our work at Hearing the Voice. Please see the for more information and to book tickets. Durham Book Festival will be held in various locations around the city of Durham from 7-16 October 2016.

The Practice, Benefits and Challenges of Interdisciplinarity: for postgraduate researchers (Durham University) You are invited to take part in a two day workshop on the experience of interdisciplinary team working. The workshop will take place from lunchtime on Wednesday 22 nd June to lunchtime on Thursday 23 rd June at Durham University. It will be hosted by staff from in collaboration with six early career researchers from around the UK who spent last year as members of our and funded New Generations in Medical Humanities Group learning together about interdisciplinary team working in medical humanities. Medical humanities is a dynamic field that critically engages with ideas, practices, policies and evidence relating to health, wellbeing, illness and disease. As such it embraces a wide disciplinary range of influences including those from the humanities, social science and science.

The workshop will draw examples from medical humanities but will be open and relevant to postgraduates who are interested in interdisciplinary working from any field. Our approach will be about ‘how to do it’ and also give you insights about the benefits and challenges of developing a career that involves interdisciplinary work. The workshop is supported by the Wellcome Trust and is fully funded, but availability, as well as residential places are limited. If places are oversubscribed we will make our choice of candidates based on the quality of your application but also our need to have a wide disciplinary mix of students. If you are interested in participating, please submit a 250-word statement that justifies why you should be selected to attend. This justification statement should include a brief description of your PhD research, your reasons for being interested in interdisciplinarity, and a confirmation that you are able to attend and have discussed this with your supervisors.

Please address your application to Professor Jane Macnaughton at the Centre for Medical Humanities, and submit it by the deadline of June 8th by email to. After carefully reviewing the candidates, we will notify by email those that are selected by June 9th. Any applications submitted after the deadline will not be considered. Centre for Medical Humanities/Wolfson Post-Graduate & Early Career Research Network Sex, Gender and Health: Female Bodies / Trans Bodies / Male Bodies Wednesday 15th June 2016, 4-5.30pm The Williams Library, St. Chad’s College, Durham Tea, Coffee and Cakes will be served! The next meeting of the CMH Postgraduate / Early Career Researcher Medical Humanities Network will take place on Wednesday 15th June.

This seminar will consider the gendered experience of illness and well-being, and the cultural understandings of experiences typically associated with the female body and the male body. We particularly welcome contributions reflecting on trans* and gender queer experiences of medicine and the body. The session will begin with a number of short presentations from current researchers, before leading into an informal discussion. If you would like to deliver a presentation (around 5-15mins) please get in touch with Fraser Riddell by 30th May. We are keen to encourage researchers to share their work-in-progress. CMH is able to provide a number of travel bursaries for postgraduates / ECRs attending from outside of Durham.

Please let us know if you would like to benefit from this support when you register. Topics may include but are not limited to: • Medical constructions of the female, trans and male body • The gendering of medical conditions (e.g. Hysteria, infertility) • Reproductive health (e.g. Contraception, family planning, menstruation) • Pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding • Abortion and miscarriage • Circumcision • Masculinity and reproduction (e.g.

Cultural understandings of fertility and vasectomy) • Gender, sexuality and access to healthcare • Sex and desire in the clinical encounter • The queer subject in medicine New members are always very welcome! Please contact if you would like to attend.

Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of War (Public Lecture, Durham Cathedral, Prior's Hall, June 7th 2016, 5pm) Join us for the forthcoming talk by Georgetown philosophy professor Nancy Sherman: Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of War. Nancy has consulted for the U.S. Armed Forces on issues of ethics, resilience, and post-traumatic stress, and published widely on ethics, military ethics and psychoanalysis.

The focus of her talk will be on post-traumatic stress moral injuries and the nature of moral recovery. Discussions often underplay the moral dimensions of psychological injuries and the attitudes that go with it--guilt, shame, moral disappointment, feeling responsible for doing wrong or being wronged or being complicit. She argues that psychology and medicine alone are inadequate to help with many of the most painful questions veterans are bringing home from war.

Respondent Michael Snape is inaugural Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies, Durham University, and a lay canon of Durham Cathedral. He was previously Reader in Religion, War and Society at the University of Birmingham, and is the official historian of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department. He has published widely on religion and the experience of war in Britain and North America c.1700-1950, including most recently God and Uncle Sam: Religion and America’s Armed Forces in World War II (Boydell and Brewer, 2015). There will be a drinks reception immediately following. Please contact to confirm your place. The poster for more information. Breathing Pauses in Ancient Rhetoric, Virginia Woolf and Robert Musil (Symposium, IAS Durham, 6 June 2016) Join Dr Stefanie Heine (University of Toronto) in Durham at the Institute of Advanced Studies to explore how breathing pauses convey rhythm in both the spoken and written word by comparing and contrasting with the work of early 20th Century modernist writers and.

The prose rhythm demanded by the ancient rhetoricians is structured by intervals, where the most crucial interval, the full stop, should be marked by a breathing pause. While the rhetoricians discuss breathing in the context of verbal delivery, Woolf and Musil use especially careful composition to highlight intervals for breath in the body of their texts. This takes place on Monday June 6th from 5pm - 7pm. It is free to attend and refreshments will be provided.

All welcome, no need to register. CMH/WRI Postgrad/ECR Meeting: Tuesday 15th March, 4 - 6pm, The Williams Library, St.

Chad’s College, North Bailey, Durham Topic: Emotion, Affect and the Body The next meeting of the CMH Postgraduate / Early Career Researcher Medical Humanities Network will take place on Tuesday 15th March, 4 - 6pm. This meeting of the postgrad/ECR medical humanities discussion group will examine some of the various dimensions of affect and emotion within the medical humanities and related disciplines. Papers will include: • Monir Ahmed (Durham, Theology) – 'The arts, emotion and well-being' • Rick De Villiers (Durham, English) – ‘Samuel Beckett and Embarrassment’ • Emilie Vince (University of East Anglia) – ‘Failures of Empathy: Reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods as a Critique of Care Ethics’ Please contact meeting convener Fraser Riddell () if you would like to register your attendance. CMH is able to provide a number of travel bursaries for postgraduates / ECRs attending from outside Durham. Please let us know if you would like to benefit from this support when you register.

Tea/coffee and cakes will be provided. We look forward to seeing you there - new members are always very welcome! Breath, a physiological universal, is uniquely both an automatic and controllable process at different times; it is also a subjective experience, an elaborated technique, and a fundamental part of knowledge systems and world views. Breathing is interactive and offers a mode of relating to the world, engaging with others, objects, environments, and technologies. Crucially, the significance and meaning of breath varies according to the context in which it is understood and enacted. Yet breath is a theme seldom considered in anthropological or cross-cultural research, despite the implications this could have in comprehending just what breath is, and what it means to live and breathe. This interdisciplinary two day symposium, organised by the and at Durham University as part of the Life of Breath project, offers an exciting platform to explore, discuss and gain insight into the perception and experience of breath and breathing practices both historically and cross-culturally.

Guest speakers will include; • (University of Amsterdam) • (Massey University, New Zealand) The full programme is available here. Affiliates' Lunch Meeting: December 10th St Chad's College 12-2pm We are delighted to announce that the speakers for our next Affiliates' Lunch meeting will be Dr Patrick Zuk (Music) and Dr Michael Mack (English). Patrick will give an overview of his recent work on music and trauma. Michael will present a paper entitled “On Scandal: The Wound of Pasolini”, based on his forthcoming book Contaminations, developing a theory of contamination out of the Italian film-maker’s usage of the term scandal. A buffet lunch will be provided.

All are welcome, so please do extend the invitation to colleagues you think might be interested. Please contact if you would like to attend. CMH/WRI Postgrad/ECR Meeting Wednesday 2 nd December 2015, 4-5.30pm, The Williams' Library, St.

Chad’s College, North Bailey, Durham Topic: Mental Illness and Mental Wellbeing The next meeting of the CMH Postgraduate / Early Career Researcher Medical Humanities Network will take place on Wednesday 2 nd December, 4-5.30pm. This meeting of the postgrad/ECR medical humanities discussion group will examine some of the various dimensions of mental illness and mental wellbeing within the medical humanities and related disciplines.

Topics may include but are not limited to: • Stress • Depression and melancholia • Mental capacity • Stigma relating to mental illness • Cultural constructions of madness • Personality disorders • Mindfulness • Artistic practice and mental wellbeing • Free time and mental health The meeting will open with a number of short presentations and then lead into a wider discussion about the issues raised. We are looking for two or three volunteers to provide an informal opening presentation on an aspect of their research which speaks to the theme of this session (5-8 minutes). Please reply to Fraser Riddell () if you are interested in presenting and in order to register your attendance. Tea/coffee and cakes will be provided. We look forward to seeing you there - new members are always very welcome! GoHWell, Hubbub, Centre for Medical Humanities Seminar November 18th W007, Main Geography Building Members of will be joining with colleagues in the Department of Geography and Centre for Medical Humanities to share details of research carried out by the group in the first year of its residency in The Hub at Wellcome Collection, as well Hubbub's plans for the future.

Medical Humanities: Postgraduate/ ECR Networking Event 26 October 2015, 6.00pm All welcome Free wine, soft drinks and snacks will be provided. Durham University’s Centre for Medical Humanities (CMH) would like to invite you to a networking event for postgraduates and early-career researchers interested in the medical humanities. While the event will primarily be an informal chance to meet other students and researchers, the session will aim to open up discussion by addressing the question: “ What is the ‘medical humanities’ today?” Professor Jane Macnaughton (Co-Director of the CMH) will provide an introduction to the wide range of interdisciplinary research currently being carried out by the CMH. We are particularly keen to welcome new students and researchers who have just commenced their work in Durham or other institutions in the North East. Anyone who wants to know more about this exciting field is welcome, even if it is not the principal focus of your research. The CMH provides a vibrant interdisciplinary research environment for thinking critically about the human experience of health and illness. Current postgraduates/ ECRs have backgrounds in a diverse range of disciplines, from Anthropology to English, Geography to Philosophy.

The CMH’s Wolfson Postgraduate/ ECR Research Network provides an ideal forum to build relationships and share ideas with researchers from across the university. Attendance is free – but please Jane Abel to register your attendance. 26 October 2015, 6.00pm Senior Common Room, St. Chad’s College, North Bailey, Durham, DH1 3RH The CMH Wolfson Postgraduate/ ECR Research Network will be holding a series of research seminars and other events throughout the year. If you would like to be kept informed of upcoming events please Fraser Riddell. Centre for Medical Humanities – Affiliates’ Lunch 22 October 2015, 12-2pm Our first Affiliates’ Lunch of 2015/16 will take place on Thursday, 22 nd October, from 12-2 pm in the Birley Room, Hatfield College.

This first meeting will be a brainstorming session in which we explore potential research directions for the Medical Humanities at Durham and possibilities for collaborative research and new projects. We are keen to involve Affiliates in shaping our research strategy for the next few years, and would very much like to have your ideas and input. CMH Affiliates’ lunches are normally focused on an interdisciplinary theme of interest across a range of departments and comprise two short talks by colleagues from different disciplines, followed by discussion over a buffet lunch. If you have suggestions for themes for Affiliates’ Lunches in 2016, please feel free to contact. To confirm your attendance on Thursday 22 nd October please contact our administrator,. All are welcome, so please encourage colleagues who might be interested to come along.

We look forward to seeing you there. Making the invisible visible Life of Breath Launch Event, Wed 23 September 3-6.30pm in the Joachim Room at the College of St Hild & St Bede We still have a few spaces and would be delighted if you could join us for this celebration. If you’d like to come please sign up. It is shaping up to be a fascinating afternoon with a diverse range of speakers sharing their perspectives on breath interspersed with breath made visible through sound, speech and music. For more details, please download our., Project Manager (Durham) for Life of Breath writes (as originally posted on the ): What is breath? We all know what it feels like.

We can perceive the rise and fall of the chest, the air moving in and out of our lungs, but unless it’s a frosty morning, we can’t see it. As well as being unseen, most of the time our breath is taken for granted, invisible. Perhaps the only time we pay attention to our breath is when we make demands of it – to speak, to sing, to power the body through exercise. Er211 Smartphone Recovery Pro Crack more. We also become intensely aware of our breath, or rather the lack of it, when it isn’t working as it should, perhaps through illness or anxiety.

The rest of the time our lungs quietly, imperceptibly, carry on with the business of keeping us alive,. Invisibility is also a powerful metaphor for those with respiratory illness – their hidden symptoms, the gaps in our understanding, the lack of effective treatments, the stigma associated with breathlessness, the.[1] Tackling this literal and metaphorical ‘invisibility’ is one of the main aims of the.

By exploring breathing and breathlessness from a number of different perspectives the Life of Breath project is tasked with ‘making the invisible visible’ (see ‘‘). Following on from the, Life of Breath at will be formally launched on Wednesday 23rd September 2015. In the splendid gothic surroundings of the Joachim Room at the College of St Hild & St Bede, a number of diverse project collaborators will share what breath means to them. First we will hear from, from Hull York Medical School, an expert on palliative care. Then artist will outline her work on visualising the breath. Durham colleague will consider what human skeletal remains can tell us about breathlessness in the past, while fellow academic explores the breath in literature. Finally James Edwards and Gaynor Williams, members of the patient support group, will share what it is like to feel breathless.

These speakers will be framed by moments of reflection, breathing spaces if you will, encounters with the breath made visible through spoken work, sound and music. Anyone with an interest in the project is welcome to join us at the event, although places are limited. If you would like to attend please register at ————————————– [1] Carel, H., Macnaughton, J., Dodd, J. (2015), The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, 3(4): 278-279. 18th June 2015 ‘Visual Culture in Medical Humanities’ Joint workshop with the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture - 18th June Van Mildert College, Durham 10-30 - 17-30pm This one-day workshop is designed to explore the intricate connections between two dynamic fields and the ways in which fruitful collaborations could be set up between them.

It will also invite participants to consider the question ‘where next?’ What research projects might we be able to nurture by paying attention to visual culture in medical humanities? For more details click. To register please click. 18th September 2014 Portraits of Violence. Durham Light Infantry Museum Art Gallery, 6-7:30 pm Free event supported by the Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University, and Wellcome Trust.

One of the most poignant innovations of the First World War was the production of portrait masks for severely disfigured servicemen: the surgical ‘failures’. In London and Paris, professional sculptors were responsible for the provision of these delicate masks: their results are recorded in the photographs of British home front photographer Horace Nicholls and in a silent film of Anna Coleman Ladd at work in her American Red Cross studio in Paris. Both sources docu-ment the artistry of prosthetic repair, and Nicholls’ images dramatize the psy-chological impact of facial mutilation – regarded by many to be the most dehu-manizing of injuries. Paradoxically, though, the juxtaposition of human face and portrait mask disturbs the equation of identity and appearance on which tradi-tional portraiture depends. Given the professed ‘death of the portrait,’ one might expect a different treatment of disfigurement today; a loosening of the convic-tion that appearance and identity are relatively fixed. Images from recent con-flicts do not bear this out, however, and the representation of disfigured veter-ans (indeed, disfigurement and disability of any sort) in the press and popular culture remains convention-bound.

An exception is the work of American pho-tographer Nina Berman, whose portraits of veterans challenge the usual narra-tives of sacrifice, courage and redemption – including the fantasy of repair. Suzannah Biernoff is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at Birk-beck, University of London. Her recent writing pursues the themes of corporeal history and visual anxiety in the context of First World War Britain. Please RSVP to if you wish to attend. This event is free and open to all.. 9th May 2014 Public Lecture: Prof Christine Jeffries Stokes and Annette Stokes from the Rural Clinical School of Western Australia Williams Library at St.

Chad’s College, 12.30pm 'Our People, Our Story, Our Way’ The Western Desert Kidney Health Project This is an opportunity to hear about a unique and highly innovative renal clinic and health promotion project in one of the remotest parts of Australia. The Western Desert Kidney Health Project – launched in October 2010 – is a multidisciplinary team of Aboriginal health, medical and community development workers and artists aiming to reduce disease and diabetes in the vast Goldfields area. With the aid of two six-tonne ‘healthy lifestyle’ trucks, the project covers an area about the size of Great Britain populated by almost 8,000 people whose expected life-span is 17 years less than that of non-Aboriginal people. One vehicle is a mobile clinic for early detection of disease and chronic disease management, health promotion and evaluation; the other transports artists and healthy lifestyle workers who collaborate with the communities to create education stories about kidney health. Ongoing action research targeted at 10 indigenous communities aims to determine the prevalence of type 2 diabetes and end stage renal disease, the prevalence of the risk factors for these diseases, the age at which those risk factors appear and to determine whether community education and development strategies, coupled with current recommended medical care can reduce the prevalence of these risk factors. The project team presents health promotion strategies to the communities using a community arts for community development model.

The communities are then assisted with appropriate referrals and strategies to reduce the prevalence of these diseases and assist prevention. The project is led by the two presenters of this talk. Christine Jeffries-Stokes is a paediatrician and medical researcher. She has been in the Goldfields for 20 years, working particularly in paediatrics and indigenous health.

The project’s Chief Investigator is senior Wongutha woman Annette Stokes of The University of Western Australia’s Kalgoorlie-based Rural Clinical School. Annette is an awarded medical researcher as well as being a visual artist, community arts practitioner and musician. She has lived in the Goldfields all her life and holds a high level of cultural authority and respect. Christine and Annette are sisters-in-law and are accompanied on their UK visit by Christine’s husband Geoffrey, a respected elder and preacher of the Wongutha people. Please RSVP to if you wish to attend. This event is open to all.

19th March, 2014 Workshop on Wonder Kenworthy Hall, St. Mary's College, 9:15am-4:30pm If it is a good thing to be alive, then is it not an intensely good thing to be intensely alive? 16-17th January 2014 The Lantern Parade: A Conversation Wolfson Research Institute, Queen's Campus. The is an occasion to view a community in another light. Sometimes it is a one-off event, but in many cases it becomes an annual celebration that generates narratives and traditions, leading to wider programmes of work that connect arts, health education and community development.

Lantern imagery provokes wonder and engagement in community arts worldwide, and offers opportunities to explore the impact of participatory arts on community health and individual well-being. We want the phenomenon of community lantern parades to be better theorised in an inter-disciplinary context that will support future collaborations, so our purpose in this two-day conversation is to engender opportunities for academics, community participants and arts and health practitioners to meet and work up outlines for further work and research. We hope you will join us in a congenial exploration of the meaning, value and purpose of lantern-making. Our focussed conversation will be guided through three phases: ‘Framework’ (How do lantern parades evolve?), ‘Covering’ (How might we apply appropriate research methodologies?), and ‘Illumination’ (What might research discover that adds value to these events?).

We will begin and end at lunchtime, and enliven our talk further with an informal dinner and a practical session. This event will contribute to the Institute for Advanced Studies 2014 theme of ‘Light’. RSVP: Mike White and Mary Robson, Centre for Medical Humanities, Caedmon Building, Leazes Road, Durham DH1 1SZ. Please note that this event is now fully booked.

4 – 5 November 2013 Critical Medical Humanities Symposium Organisers: Felicity Callard, Will Viney, Angela Woods. To be held at Durham University. To mark the conclusion of Durham University’s Centre for Medical Humanities’ Wellcome Trust Strategic Award, we are hosting an intense, future-orientated and interdisciplinary symposium. We invite 50 applicants to join us at Durham University for a special, two-day event, ‘Critical Medical Humanities’, a forum dedicated to new and emerging areas of interdisciplinary research.

As well as offering an opportunity to meet with scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, the meeting will interrogate and reinvigorate concepts, practices, and institutions that shape our understandings of health, illness and embodied experience. Organised around five ‘critical’ areas, plenary sessions will open into working groups with opportunities to debate points of contention or agreement, and to discuss participants’ current and future projects. Further details can be found. 24th October 2013 Centre for Medical Humanities Postgraduate Network - Welcome Lunch Collier Room, College fo St Hild & Bede.

12.15pm for lunch; meeting to start promptly at 1pm. Are you a postgrad or postdoc working in the field of health, illness, medicine or wellbeing? Would you like to join a cross-disciplinary group of early career scholars working in related areas?

The Centre for Medical Humanities invites all new and returnign postgrads and postdocs to a welcome lunch and introductory meeting on the 24th October 2013. Existing members base their work in fields as diverse as English, Geography, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, History of Medicine, Psychology, Theology and beyond.

Typical network activities include reading groups, work-in-progress seminars/presentations, talks from external speakers and academic skills workshops (research methods, interdisciplinary publishing, research proposal writing etc.). The first meeting will be, in part, dedicated to designing a programme of activities for the year ahead. For questions about the CMH group or to be added to the mailing list, please contact (network convenor). For catering purposes, please confirm your attendance on the 24th to no later than 17th October. 16th October 2013, 10-3pm Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities funding event Penthouse Suite, Collingwood College, South Road, Durham. DH1 3LT The meeting is to discuss the expansion of the Wellcome Trust’s Medical Humanities, Research Resources and Society and Ethics funding streams, now open to a wider range of applications from the humanities, the social sciences and the arts. The stream encourages bold and intellectually rigorous research applications that address important questions at the interface of medicine, health-related sciences, and the wider humanities, including the arts and social sciences.

The stream supports research that examines the social and ethical aspects of biomedical research and health, with the aim of addressing tractable, real-world problems. The stream underpins research across the medical humanities and the social sciences by supporting cataloguing and preservation projects of significant primary source material in libraries and archives in the UK and Ireland. Opportunities will be available for one-on-one 'surgeries' to discuss individual projects with Trust staff. Each slot will be 15 minutes and will be allocated on a first come first served basis. To book a surgery, please contact specifying your preferred funding area.

Resources • (last modified: 25 September 2013). Monday 10th June 2013 'Putting a name to It: Diagnosis, health and illness' Annemarie Jutel - Victoria University of Wellington, Graduate School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health 3 - 4.45pm, Williams Library, St Chad's College, Durham University. While diagnosis is important in identifying and curing disease, it also has a strong social impact. Diagnosis can be a source of anxiety or of relief, of hope or of despair. It structures the experience of health and illness, deciding what counts as normal, defining who is responsible for what disorders, providing frameworks for communication and structuring relationships. It presents a point around which tensions may develop, and interests collide. This presentation will present the sociology of diagnosis, underlining how the material reality of disease is both shaped by, and influences, social life.

Dr Sally Brown, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health, will give a short response to the paper, followed by general discussion. All are welcome. Please RSVP to if you would like to attend. Thursday 14th March 2013 Medical Humanities & General Practice Research & Education Workshop 10am - 4pm at the Royal College of General Practitioners, 30 Euston Square, London Participants in the day include Iona Heath, recent past President of RCGP, Clare Gerada, Chair of RCGP, John Gillies, Chair of RCGP Scotland and Sue Kinsey, of RCGP’s Patient Partnership in Practice. The day will be structured by 8 short presentations delivered in themed pairs. Each pair of presentations will be followed by 15/20 minutes facilitated discussion with the presenters who will be joined by a GP clinician. These conversations will then be opened to the floor for a further 20 minutes of discussion with participants.

Iona Heath will facilitate the discussions and provide a link between the themed pairs throughout the day. John Gillies and Sue Kinsey will provide responses at the end of the day from the perspectives of the GP and the patient. Registration costs £30 including refreshments on the day. Further information can be found.

Thursday 7th February 2013 States of Rest, an IAS 'Experiencing Time' Workshop Kenworthy Hall, St Mary's College, 2-5pm Time is often studied and conceptualised in ways which emphasise dynamism, flow and movement, the labours of attention, striving and growing. But what of those aspects of our corporeal existence which appear to depart from these concepts and notions? What is happening – existentially, ethically, neurologically – during states of rest? And how, methodologically, might be best explore such states? These three presentations will be followed by a panel discussion and moderated question time. All are welcome and tea and coffee will be provided. Please RSVP to if you would like to attend.

All are welcome Resources • (last modified: 22 January 2013). Friday 25th January 2013 Collaborations with the Centre for Humanities Engaging Science and Society - CHESS St Chad's Chapel, St Chad's College, 3.30-5pm We are delighted to welcome Professor Julian Reiss to our affiliates meeting. Julian will introduce the aims and research directions planned for the new Centre for Humanities Engaging Science and Society, or CHESS, followed by discussion on areas of collaboration with the Centre for Medical Humanities and our affiliates. Julian joined Durham University as Professor of Philosophy in October, 2012, following previous appointments at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Complutense University, Madrid and the LSE, London. Informed by degrees in both economics and finance and in philosophy, Julian’s research interrogates the methodologies of the sciences (especially causal inference, thought experimentation and modelling), the philosophy of economics and normative issues in the philosophy of medicine.

His publications include ‘Error in Economics: towards more evidence-based methodology’ (2008), ‘Philosophy of economics: a contemporary introduction’ (2013) and a forthcoming volume ‘Causality between metaphysics and methods’. The overarching goal of the new centre, CHESS, is to increase understanding of and improve the role of academic knowledge in society. The increasingly technical nature of socio-political and cultural decision making offers greater potential for the influence of academic knowledge. However, our understanding remains limited on the proper role of such knowledge, and particularly on how to create and use knowledge to better serve social goals. Addressing this gap will be the core work of CHESS.

There are clearly many areas for collaborations across the two centres and we hope many of you will take this opportunity to come and meet Julian. Please RSVP to All are welcome Resources • (last modified: 23 January 2013). Wednesday 28th November 2012 Michael Symmons Roberts: A Reading and Interview Lecture Room 140, Elvet Riverside, Durham University at 6.15pm Michael Symmons Roberts will be reading from his poetry, and (with Professor David Fuller) discussing issues related to religion and beauty, the body in sacred and secular aspects, and, on the basis of his particular interest in genomics, the relations of poetry and science. Michael Symmons Roberts is the author of five collections of poetry including Raising Sparks (1999), Burning Babylon (2001), which was shortlisted for the T. Eliot prize, Corpus (2004), winner of the Whitbread Poetry award (also shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the T.S.Eliot prize, and the Griffin International prize), and most recently The HalfHealed (2008). He is the author of two novels, Patrick's Alphabet (2006), and Breath (2008). With Paul Farley he has also written Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness (2011), which won the Foyles Best Book of Ideas award for 2012.

Please contact for more information. Resources • (last modified: 22 November 2012). 15th November 2012 CMH Postgraduate Meeting: The next CMH postgrad meeting will be on the 15th November from 2-4pm, in G Committee Room, Trevelyan College. We will be discussing the uses of and different approaches to PHENOMENOLOGY in our respective fields and research. Any postgraduate who might be interested in this subject is very welcome to join. No prior knowledge of phenomenology required.

So if you have always wondered what phenomenology is all about, this might be your chance. Hopefully, our discussion will help clarify some of the key points. Please contact for further information or to attend. 5:15pm to 7:00pm, St.

Chad's College, Dr. Christine Milligan, Lancaster University Social isolation, loneliness and stressful social ties are associated with poor physical and mental health including depression, suicide and dementia. This can be of particular concern for lone-dwelling older men who often find it harder to make friends in later life relative to older women. Supportive social ties and the creation of therapeutic and inclusionary spaces that meet the needs of older people can be important for enhancing their quality of life and wellbeing. Community-based social groups, however, are often dominated by older women, and as such fail to meet the needs of older men.

This paper discusses one attempt to address this issue through the 'Men in Sheds' initiative, an innovative pilot programme developed by Age UK. Drawing on empirical research from three Sheds across the UK, it discusses older men's experiences of the Shed interventions, the impact on their sense of self, identity and wellbeing and assesses the extent to which such gender-based activity might provide a therapeutic landscape for lonely and socially isolated older men. Contact for more information about this event. 6:15pm to 7:30pm, Lecture Room 201, Elvet Riverside, Durham University, Professor David Fuller, Durham University For Keats (citing specifically King Lear), in art 'all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty'. And Yeats found that he could 'hear the dance music' in all Shakespearean tragedy. This lecture will discuss the relationships of pain and violence to beauty in tragedy through the criticism of G.

Lessing (Laocoőn, 1776) and Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872), approaching King Lear through tragic works in which beauty more obviously qualifies violence, Richard Strauss's opera Elektra, and Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Mayerling. David Fuller is Emeritus Professor of English at Durham. From 2002 to 2007 he was also the University's Public Orator.

He is the author of Blake's Heroic Argument (1988), James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (1992), Signs of Grace (with David Brown, 1995), and essays on a range of poetry, drama, and novels from Medieval to Modern. He is the editor of Tamburlaine the Great (1998), for the Clarendon Press complete works of Marlowe, of William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose in the series Longman Annotated Texts (2000), and co-editor (with Patricia Waugh) of The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (1999). His edition (with Corinne Saunders) of the medieval poem Pearl, modernised by Victor Watts, was published by Enitharmon in 2005. He trained as a Musicologist, and has written on opera and ballet. His The Life in the Sonnets was published in 2011 in the Continuum series 'Shakespeare Now!' Contact for more information about this event. 6:15pm to 7:30pm, Lecture Room 201, Elvet Riverside, Durham University, Professor Pat Waugh, Durham University 'The Bloomsbury Group' are most often associated with the Cambridge philosopher G.E Moore's belief that 'one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge' (Principia Ethica, 1903). Wyndham Lewis caustically referred to the aesthetic world of Bloomsbury as 'Venusburg'.

Beauty is at the heart of Bloomsbury aesthetics, but there are marked differences, however, in the ways that Moore, Roger Fry, Clive and Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf, as painters, philosophers and novelists, engaged with the question of the relation between beauty and what Moore referred to as 'The Good'.

This lecture will examine how Woolf, like Moore, often misguidedly portrayed as a kind of 'beautiful soul', in fact set out specifically to rewrite the soul and to rethink thinking, in the terms of the modern, and through the resources of fiction. Woolf saw modern fiction as most able to articulate a new soul for a world in which everything is 'part ugliness, part beauty' ('Fiction, Poetry and the Future', 1927). She uses the resources of literary art to resist an encroaching metaphysics of materialism, on the one hand, and to renegotiate the legacies of aesthetic idealism, on the other. The idea of beauty that emerges is passed onto and reworked by later philosophically inclined novelists, such as Iris Murdoch.

Pat Waugh is a professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham. She has written widely on modern literature, aesthetics and intellectual history. She is currently completing two books, The Naturalist Turn: Literary Moderns Rethinking Thinking, and Neo-Modernism: The British Novel After 1945. Contact for more information about this event. 5:15pm to 7:00pm, The Williams Library, St.

Chad's Chapel, Dr. Monica Greco Michael Balint and the Balint method are often invoked in the writings of medical humanities scholars as historical precedents and a source of inspiration. There has been, however, little systematic engagement with Balint's texts and with the psychoanalytic premises of his work. This reflects a more general situation in the field, where discussion of the medical relevance of psychoanalysis is conspicuous by its absence, despite a number of recent contributions. Taking Balint as a point of departure, this talk will look at the ambivalent relationship between medical humanities and psychoanalysis. Without adopting a psychoanalytic approach, I will propose that the question of the medical relevance of psychoanalysis can be a source of specific anxiety in so far as it points (too) directly to a critique of the medical scientific model. Contact for more information about this event.

6:15pm to 8:00pm, Lecture Room 201, Elvet Riverside, Professor Jane Macnaughton This lecture will preview another major event in the IAS 'Recovery of Beauty' theme, an exhibition to be held in collaboration with the Durham Light Infantry Museum Art Gallery in the spring of 2012. The exhibition, entitled 'About Face' will feature a series of paintings by the artist-surgeon Henry Tonks, who worked with the father of plastic surgery, Harold Gillies, during the First World War. The lecture will focus on the use of 'elegance' as a common descriptor for surgical procedures, including those of Gillies, and will reflect upon the reasons for this and the implications for embodied clinical practice.

Contact for more information about this event. 5:15pm, The Williams Library, St.

Chad's College, Professor Gail Hornstein How can we picture disturbed mental states? Is there some sign, some subtle indicator that can portray the madness in a person's mind? This illustrated talk will compare a range of visual approaches to this question, both historical and contemporary, emphasizing differences between the external standpoint of psychiatrists and subjective depictions by sufferers of their own psychological lives. Contact for more information about this event. Chad's Chapel & SCR, Dr.

Neil Pickering How should we understand mental illness? The question is fundamental and puzzling. An example brings this out: In the winter of 1826-27, the young John Stuart Mill fell into a state of depression, and on several occasions wondered whether he had any obligation to live on. His experiences probably meet the criteria for a diagnosis of Major Depressive Episode.

But Mill's account in his autobiography is not univocal. He is inclined to talk of the experience as a cloud - something (a disease?) visited upon him from outside. Famously, he believed reading Wordsworth lifted this cloud from him for ever - Wordsworth's poems were, says Mill, 'a medicine for my state of mind'. At the same time, Mill says it was a crisis in his 'mental life': it was a time at which his most fundamental beliefs were challenged, and found wanting - it was an intellectual not a medical crisis.

In this seminar I am to bring out what light my research in Durham has thrown on such cases. Contact for more information about this event. Chad's Chapel & SCR, Dr. Angela Woods This paper discusses cultural theory’s deployment of clinical concepts from the ‘psy’ disciplines in works such as Anti-Oedipus, Madness and Modernism, Hystories, and The Weariness of the Self. Arguing against what is perhaps a majority view – that using psychiatric terminology ‘metaphorically’ is illegitimate, imprecise, irresponsible, and insensitive to the human costs of illness – I aim to show why it is important for an interdisciplinary field such as the medical humanities to view diagnostic categories from multiple perspectives. This seminar will launch my new book (2011).

Contact for more information about this event. 5:30pm to 6:30pm, Penthouse Suite, Collingwood College, Durham University, Professor Marius Romme & Dr.

Sandra Escher Professor Marius Romme: In this lecture I will explain: the core concept of the new approach towards hearing voices, the outline of its beginning and development, the main results of our research and the consequence for the traditional psychosis concept. Sandra Escher: In children as in adults, auditory hallucinations, or hearing voices, is generally seen as a sign of psychopathology. In psychiatry, hearing voices is often interpreted as a symptom of an illness, perhaps a life-long one, which has no relationship to the individual's life history. However, contemporary research challenges these assumptions. A group of 80 children, both patients and non-patients, were interviewed at baseline and three times at yearly intervals thereafter. The rate of voice discontinuation over the three-year period was 60%.

In 85% of children there were trauma or problematic circumstances at the onset of voice hearing, suggesting a relationship between the onset of the voice hearing and life events. Contact for more information about this event. Lecture Room 201, Elvet Riverside The overarching aim of the ‘The Recovery of Beauty’ is to explore whether and in what way beauty can be reinstated as real and valuable, rather than seen as simply or solely constructed and variable. The last decade has witnessed major changes in our understanding of what makes the human body beautiful: the traditional idea that beauty is subjective has been challenged, for example, by evolutionary psychologists. The project aims to uncover and rediscover the meanings and manifestations of beauty, exploring ways of moving beyond a sense of beauty as constructed; to explore how tensions frame and energise our experience of beauty; and to reflect on whether beauty can have a reparative or healing agency that underpins human flourishing.

The public lecture series will include speakers from a range of different disciplines, spanning literature, philosophy, theology, art history, architecture and landscape, science, and gender and cultural studies. Contact for more information about this event.

10:00am to 5:00pm, University of Leicester, Association for Medical Humanities A conference to explore the dramas/stories, the players/people, and the stage/setting, of healthcare past and present. With keynote speakers, delegates' papers and workshops. Special appearances by Dannie Abse - reading and discussing some of his poetry and Jed Mercurio - The Doctor as Anti-hero. Booking and call for papers opens January 2011.

Early bird discount rates until March 2011. For more detail go to Contact for more information about this event.

Mary's College Leading practitioners and researchers from the arts and health world in Australia, South Africa, USA, Mexico and Ireland will soon be visiting Durham for a ‘ Critical Mass’ Research Colloquium organised by the Centre for Medical Humanities towards the end of June. The purpose of the colloquium is to enable a sustained conversation to take place about how those carrying out the highest quality work in this field might be able to pool expertise and plan research collaborations or a supportive network. An open conference of arts and health practitioners just does not produce the focus required to take community-based arts in health to the next level of action research and into the development of resources and workforce. A wilfulness archive is what we assemble when we ‘follow wilfulness around’, tracking where wilfulness goes, and ‘in what’ or ‘in whom it is found. We can learn from it is found. We can learn from these archives how wilfulness is deposited in certain places, which allows the wilful subject to appear as a figure, one who has certain qualities and attributes. Willfulness has been defined as asserting or disposed to assert one’s own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one’s own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse’.

7:30pm to 10:00pm, Durham Town Hall, Gwyneth Lewis Gwyneth Lewis will be reading from her epic poem A Hospital Odyssey, An outrageously imaginative voyage through illness and healing. Drawing on the most recent biomedical research into stem cells and cancer, the poem is a journey through the body's inner space and the strange habitats created by the disease, including the chimeras people see when they are unwell.

Immensely readable, A Hospital Odyssey is a modern epic: Dr. Who meets Paradise Lost. Gwyneth Lewis was Wales' National Poet from 2005 - 2006 and currently lives in Cardiff. Contact for more information about this event. 5:15pm to 7:00pm, St. Chad's Chapel, Simone Flavelle The Lost Generation Project is about finding the lost stories of people with intellectual disabilities, many institutionalised for most of their lives. It is about hearing these stories and recognising and celebrating people who have traditionally been socially isolated and aims to assist these people to connect to their communities through arts and culture.

The Lost Generation Project has found unique people from across Australia and provided them with the technology and skills to tell their stories on film. Each core project participant or storyteller is offered the opportunity to make a short film that tells their story. Simone Flavelle is the Manager/Executive Producer of this project and she will be giving us the opportunity to see some of these films, an experience that cannot be underestimated. Contact for more information about this event. Modernist Irish author and Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett's spare, compact, and provocative plays Footfalls (1976) and Rockaby (1981) are virtuoso studies in the loneliness of old age, physical and psychological disengagement from life, the difficult 'delivery' of dying, and the human costs of caregiving.

Departing from conventional critical approaches to Beckett, this presentation develops quite literal and realistic readings and explications of Footfalls and Rockaby, with reference to clinical cases of geriatric patients and their caregivers. Footfalls enacts the complicated dynamic of a daughter responsible for/responsive to her dying mother, while Rockaby—possibly a sequel to Footfalls, the daughter, now aged, at her own life's end—is a minimalist monologue amounting to the last sputterings of the human impulse to narrate, to be. Beckett's pared-down dramas, starkly realized characters, and spare, terse language can powerfully instruct clinicians in the understanding and care of frail, solitary geriatric patients nearing the end of life and in the appreciation and support of those who look after their dying elders.

Contact for more information about this event. 3:30pm to 5:00pm, Durham Town Hall, Bobby Baker, Gwyneth Lewis, Havi Carel & More Happiness: everyone is talking about it, but do we really know what it means? As part of the Durham Book Festival, the CMH presents 'Happy Talk' - a debate on the value, meaning, and potential pitfalls of society's obsession with happiness. Featuring performance artist Bobby Baker, poet Gwyneth Lewis, and philosopher Havi Carel. Saturday 23 October, 3. Double Manual Breast Pump. 30pm - 5pm. For details see.

Contact for more information about this event. 7:30pm to 9:00pm, The Northern Stage, The Opera Group The Opera Group is a new type of opera company. At the company's heart is the development and presentation of brand new musical storytelling exploring Alzheimer’s disease, describing the experiences of the patient, the carer and the research scientist.

Compassionate, heartfelt, strikingly dramatic and often witty, The Lion’s Face is a musical tale of love, loss and family. The Lion’s Face is a collaboration between poet Glyn Maxwell and composer Elena Langer. Visit The Lion’s Face website at Contact for more information about this event. 5:00pm to 5:30pm, St.

Chad's Williams Library, Dr. Havi Carel Phenomenology is a useful methodology for describing and ordering experience. As such, it can be specifically applied to the first-person experience of illness, in order to illuminate this experience and to enable healthcare providers to enhance their understanding of it. However, this approach has been under-utilised in the philosophy of medicine as well as in medical training and practice. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of phenomenology to clinical medicine.

Dr Havi Carel is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at UWE, Bristol and also teaches at the Bristol Medical School. Her book Illness (Acumen 2008) was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. Contact for more information about this event.

5:30pm to 8:00pm, Durham Town Hall, Kathleen Jamie Kathleen Jamie is a writer and poet. She was born in Renfrewshire, Scotland in 1962 and studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. She has published several collections of poetry, including: Black Spiders (1982) The Way We Live (1987), The Queen of Sheba (1994), and Jizzen (1999). Herpoetry collection, The Tree House (2004), won the 2004 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the 2005 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. Of her acclaimed 2005 book of essays Findings, Andrew Marr wrote ‘I love this bookIts sharpness of looking, and directness of thought, will stay with me for a long time.’ As well as poetry, Kathleen Jamie writes for radio, especially travel-scripts, and specially commissioned long poems.

She lives in Fife and in 1999 was appointed Lecturer in Creative Writing at St Andrews University. Contact for more information about this event. 6:00pm to 8:00pm, Tilery, St. Ann's District, Stockton Lantern processions are, literally, occasions to view a community in another light. Sometimes they are one-off events, but in many cases they have become annual celebrations, and part of wider programmes of work that connect arts, health education and community development. They can provide small-scale but significant practical instances of how social capital and resilience are produced and built upon within communities. Lantern events can present a tangible image of how that ‘capital’ is in circulation in the community.

They create potent, resonating images for times and places, and throw light upon what makes for healthy living. Every neighbourhood should have one. Contact for more information about this event.

5:00pm to 7:00pm, St. Chad's Williams Library, Dr.

David Conradson Over the last decade, well-being has come to the fore as a potentially integrative way of thinking about human flourishing. The term is now used by scholars across a range of academic disciplines and amongst governmental, business and third sector organisations. This seminar will review the understandings of the term within psychology and economics and consider what human geography might bring to theorisations of well-being.

Contact for more information about this event. 5:00pm to 7:00pm, St. Chad's Library, Dr.

Michael Mack This talk attempts to delineate Hannah Arendt's philosophy of diversity by connecting her ideas about thinking with her analysis of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Her ideas about what it means to think constitute an original and complex investigation into the way in which thinking is consubstantial with her understanding of 'understanding'. Her analysis of the Nazi Genocide reveals how wellbeing is preconditioned by both human diversity and the ability to understand the common humanity of the diverse. Like thinking, understanding is the faculty that makes us aware that we are not monolithic entities but, on the contrary, we live in a plural world. Contact for more information about this event. 5:00pm to 7:00pm, St. Chad's Library, Dr.

Matthew Ratcliffe This paper explores the phenomenology of touch. Philosophical discussions of perception are generally vision-centric. Despite this, some philosophers have indicated that touch is, in some way, a more fundamental mode of access to the world. By drawing critically upon work by Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hans Jonas, I develop a position of this kind. I argue that touch is partly constitutive of a background sense of reality and belonging that other forms of sensory experience presuppose.

6:15pm, Room 231, Elvet Riverside A series of seminars held in conjunction with the Institute of Advanced Study. The next seminar in the series, entitled 'Humanising Hospital Design' will be given by Professor Wil Gesler on March 5th. 5th March 2009 Prof.

Wil Gesler, University of North Carolina, USA Research into and assessment of the influence of hospital design features on the well-being of users and staff has mainly focused on clinical goals and physical environments. A study by a team of health geographers of an acute mental health care unit in East London shifts the focus toward non-clinical goals and both social and symbolic environments. Contact for more information about this event.