Professor of Performance, Nicola Shaughnessy and Lecturer in Film and Media, Dr Dieter Declercq, are working on a new collaborative project with Professor Ian Sabroe, Consultant in Respiratory Medicine (Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust) and Honorary Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Sheffield in the form of a series of free, online interactive events, ‘Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health‘.
The hopes for the initiative are to create meaningful dialogue and connection between arts and humanities and medicine, through a series of online events where scholars, health professionals and the public discuss how arts and humanities can inform healthcare. The team share, “Each conversation will feature a central guest who will comment on the fruitful interaction between arts, humanities, and health in their career. Attendees will be able to ask guests for insights about best practice, challenges, and pitfalls. Afterwards, we will disseminate the conversations as podcasts, alongside a summary of key ideas on this website and through social media.
The partnership began following the BSA Conference: Art, Aesthetics and Medical Humanities which Dr Declerq co-organised in 2020. Dr Declerq shares, “We wanted to create a space to continue the valuable exchanges between researchers in arts and humanities and health professionals we had at that conference.”
The next event will take place on Wednesday 5 May with Dr Esther L Jones (Clark University) from 16.00 – 17.00. Dr Esther L Jones is Associate Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Clark University, where she is a Professor in the Department of English and the E Franklin Frazier Chair of African American Literature, Theory and Culture. Her research and teaching specialisations include black women’s health and medical ethics as represented in literature. She is the author of Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2015), and the editor-in-chief for Global Critical Health Humanities: Race and Ethnicity, a reference text with Palgrave MacMillan.
You can register for the free event, and find out more about Dr Jones’ important work at the intersection of black speculative fiction, medical humanities, and gender. The topics of conversation will include systemic racism and medicine; empathy and its limits; speculative fiction and its role in shaping ethical frameworks; and the understanding of race and racial differences.
Future guests in the series include Dr Lauren Barron (Baylor University), Dr Alyssa Burgart (Stanford University), Professor Paul Crawford (University of Nottingham), Professor David Magnus (Stanford University) and Dr Chris Millard (University of Sheffield).