Sub themes

Bodies and Identities

This subtheme will investigate the mechanisms by which various kinds of knowledge about bodies, identities and human sexuality have been formulated and legitimised, from antiquity to the present day. It aims to expose the ideological and epistemological investments that structure various forms of knowledge about the body and experience – whether scientific, legal or literary, scholarly or popular.

This new theme broadens out to consider how ideas about sex, bodies and identities are authorised, not only through history, but also through other intersecting areas of knowledge, such as science, religion, philosophy, the law and politics. It will identify and explore different authorising devices that operate across these fields of knowledge, including uses of the past and visions of the future.

We hope to draw into our interdisciplinary collaboration scholars in the humanities working on sexuality, gender and temporalities, including uses of the past and future, as well as those working on the history and philosophy of science and the history and sociology of knowledge.

We are particularly keen to encourage dialogue between the humanities and the social, technological and natural sciences.

Mental Health and Wellbeing

Mental health is a particularly fertile site for cross disciplinary collaboration. This sub theme concentrates on historical trends and cultural variations in what we consider as mental health conditions.

Unlike other areas of medicine, psychiatric conditions are usually diagnosed by behavioural symptoms, rather than directly by biological tests or physiological measures.
In many (but not all) cases, exact aetiologies are unknown. A bio-psycho-social causal model is required to address mental illness- inherently requiring interdisciplinary analysis, of both what constitutes disease, illness, health and wellbeing, and in terms of the ways in which treatment should be delivered.

There are several networks which are already active- the Complex Interventions Network provides a forum for researchers interested in treatment. The Health and Well Being network examines risk factors for mental illness and also how to promote wellbeing through protective factors such as the blue gym (aquatic environments).
The Health Technology and Society group examines how emerging diagnostic technologies contribute to shaping social processes of diagnosis, leading to new classifications of disease and illness, identities and experiences, and encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration

Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Health and Disease

This theme will consider how we can throw light on our current models and assumptions about health, disease and medicine by charting systematic variations in the scale and nature of disease, in assumptions about the character of health/ill-health, and the nature, provision and delivery of medical services.

This will not only look at what, if anything, is distinctive about current British experience, but may also encourage us to look for similar variability today, and consider its pros and cons for a national health service.

Philosophy and ethics of life sciences and medicine

Investigations in this sub theme focus on the role of norms and ethical procedures, disciplinary identities and divisions of labour among the diverse agents in the clinic and the laboratory.

Research projects dedicated to images and notions of life and death, of health and human nature, on emerging policies and practices in the clinic, on clinical decision-making and patient activism are included. Yet, the theme also cuts across all Medical Humanities work, in so far as the reflection on the ethical nature of its subject area is concerned.

Medicine and the research into its history, present practice and future imply value-laden understandings of the human in body, mind, and soul. Medical Humanities inevitably becomes involved with these values and has to account for them.

Art, Aesthetics and Creativity

This subtheme explores the multiple interfaces between medicine, the body, art and culture.

Throughout history, artists, writers and medics have shared discourses about health and disease, the normal and the pathological, pollution and contamination, human vitality and wellbeing. Literature and the visual arts have responded – often in surprising ways – to medical findings and new medical technologies.

Artists and writers interpret medical knowledge and represent their own experiences with changing bodies, illnesses and hospitals. But they have also queried the constellations of attitudes that surround, for example, depression, epidemics, and sexuality.

We aim to investigate the legacy of this abiding relationship: How do medicine and the arts represent and influence one another? How do those working in the arts negotiate what we might call medicalised identities?