Geographies of Medical and Health Humanities: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation

Abstract

In recent years, both within and beyond academic and clinical spheres, medical and health humanities have become increasingly influential. Drawing from interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, medical and health humanities present unique lenses for considering nuanced spaces and lived experiences of health and health care; they also help challenge traditional ways that medicine and health care are understood and practiced. This collection brings together practitioners and theorists working broadly in medical health humanities, asking them both to consider their work as temporally and spatially located and to position their practices in conversation with a growing uptake of humanities methods and methodologies in other disciplines. The work of nine contributors uses these themes as a starting point for thinking about the future of medical health humanities in new and potentially even more productive ways.

What’s in it for the animals? Symbiotically considering ‘therapeutic’ human-animal relations within spaces and practices of care farming

“…101. Sarah de Leeuw et al (2018). “Geographies of Medical and Health Humanities: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation.” GeoHumanities ;4(2):285–334.…”

“Disciplined research in undisciplined settings”: Critical explorations of in situ and mobile methodologies in geographies of health and wellbeing

“…As noted by de Leeuw et al, traditional approaches for understanding and contextualising experiences of health and wellbeing in place “are often limited and not suited to capture a fleeting emotional experience, the unknowable, or a biological event that happens in the blink of an eye” (, p. 289). While people can talk about their health and wellbeing practices (Hitchings, ), certain experiences and fleeting sensations can be less “tellable” than the more “rehearsed” biographical stories commonly volunteered within traditional interview circumstances (Holton & Riley, ).…”

“…While people can talk about their health and wellbeing practices (Hitchings, ), certain experiences and fleeting sensations can be less “tellable” than the more “rehearsed” biographical stories commonly volunteered within traditional interview circumstances (Holton & Riley, ). The types of mobile and in situ methods shared by participants during our workshop highlighted a range of opportunities for augmenting narrative and discursive accounts of health and wellbeing with methods that “foreground encounters in the here and now” (de Leeuw et al, , p. 324). They opened up new possibilities for discerning, expressing, and communicating diverse sensations, feelings, and emotions, and their implications for experiences of health and wellbeing.…”

“…Mobile and in situ methods hold particular appeal within geographies of health and wellbeing through enabling researchers to engage with embodiment and emotion at diverse temporal scales; from momentary more-than-human encounters in the "field" opening up new bodily capacities to feel and act (Gorman, 2019), to more repetitive emplaced practices that become imbricated within therapeutic accretion over time (Foley, 2017). Through being with participantsin person, or remotely through growing access to geo-spatial technologies and toolsresearchers can begin to understand the significance (to health, wellbeing, impairment, and illness) of diverse patterns of movement and pause, sociality and solitude in place (Bell et al, 2015), alongside embodied, emotional, and physical transformations that unfold as people transition through the networked spaces and places that constitute everyday life (de Leeuw et al, 2018).…”