Women’s voices, emotion and empathy: engaging different publics with ‘everyday’ health histories

Abstract

This article explores our experiences on a Wellcome Trust-funded project on women’s experiences of ‘everyday health’ in Britain between the 1960s and the 1990s. We explore issues around researching ‘everyday health’, including the generation and interpretation of source materials, and the role of empathy and emotion in interactions with different audiences as we share these materials in public engagement activities. We discuss three case studies of engagement activities to draw out potential uses of source materials and the responses of different audiences to these materials, and reflect on what we have learnt since embarking on these public engagement activities. We took into our interactions with different audiences the belief that fully historicised understandings of ‘health’ enrich individual lives and create new capacities for meaningful action now. The public engagement activities we carried out reinforced this belief, but also caused us to question some of our assumptions. In particular, an activity with trainee healthcare professionals designed to demonstrate how active and empathetic listening can prevent the unintentional infliction of harm in healthcare settings achieved this end—but did so in a way that was itself unintentionally insensitive to the pressures healthcare professionals face. Medical humanities can help to contextualise, nuance and improve healthcare practice—but only through active listening and dialogue across medicine and the humanities. We conclude by considering how these activities, which currently rely on the interpersonal relations of the team with audiences, might be adapted and preserved in digital form beyond the span of the project.

‘Please help me, I am so miserable!’: sexual health, emotions and counselling in teen and young adult problem pages in late 1980s Ireland

“…All letters were published with the exception of letters which may have been suspected to be hoaxes, for example, a letter to Jody in 1987 from a 15-year-old at boarding school who claimed to have seen two nuns 'naked, kissing and embracing each other', and a letter to Sex Aid in 1988 where the author asked if 'sexual intercourse with a sheep' counted as losing his virginity. As we know, the voices of individuals in problem pages 'do not appear unmediated in this form' (Loughran 2020;Loughran, Mahoney, and Payling 2021). In the case of these two columns, letters were sometimes edited for length, but their appearance in the magazine was usually faithful to the content of the original letter.…”

We Are Oulu: Exploring Situated Empathy through a Communal Virtual Reality Experience

“…In this study, we would like to measure human empathy regarding the hardships and stories we collected. Also, there is a discussion on how speakers' voices, tones, genders, etc., affect empathy in humans [146,147]. Therefore, employing voices for avatars would lead us through a new study with many new factors that could affect our participants' empathy.…”