Rethinking Rigour: Conditions of Creativity & Criticality in the Academy

Please note: this event takes place over two days.
The hybrid symposium takes place on 4 Dec, 2 - 5 PM GMT at the Institute for Medical Humanities & online.
The in-person workshop takes place on 5 Dec, 9 AM - 5 PM GMT at Collingwood College.

The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research (NNMHR) is pleased to present RETHINKING RIGOUR, a two-day symposium exploring creative-critical research in medical humanities.

The medical humanities offer fertile ground for the convergence of creativity and critical inquiry. With its orientation towards ‘blue skies’ interdisciplinarity, the field encourages and rewards creative experimentation and methodological innovation. Researchers often turn to imaginative methods to illuminate experiences of health, illness, and wellbeing that may otherwise remain obscured or taboo. For example, the tradition of narrative medicine engages with the gaps, elisions, and contradictions inherent in illness narratives through literary forms such as life-writing and autofiction. Likewise, visual art and performance can render visible the aesthetic textures of experiences that defy conventional articulation.

What is creative-critical? Creative-critical research frequently challenges the traditional frameworks and metrics of academic excellence. Its power lies in its capacity to engage with complex, often personal themes through abstract and radical forms. This work may be confronting, but it is not without intellectual rigour. As Rita Charon, Amy Ship, and Steven M. Asch (2020) remind us in relation to narrative medicine, critical-creative methods are themselves ‘a rigorous discipline, rooted in the literary study of the complex relationships between doctor and patient, doctor and colleague, doctor and self, doctor and the cosmos’.

Why rigour? Coalescing around the concept of ‘rigour’, this symposium asks:

- What forms does creative-critical research take within the medical humanities?
- What are the challenges of aligning creative-critical methods with established academic frameworks of assessment and output?
- What new opportunities might we identify for scholar-practitioners working at the intersection of creativity and criticality within (and around) the medical humanities?

RETHINKING RIGOUR aims to move the creative-critical medical humanities conversation forwards by challenging the privileging of critical over creative in certain disciplinary modes. Instead, it invites participants to explore how creativity and criticality might be understood as mutually generative in illuminating hidden, marginalised, or ineffable aspects of lived experience. Bringing together scholars and practitioners grappling with complex questions about health, embodiment, lived experience and wellbeing in the registers of creative writing, visual arts, moving image, performance, and more, this two-day event explores what a reconfigured framework of ‘rigour’ might look like in creative-critical medical humanities research spaces.

Image credit: glass mermaids’ purse and cyanotype projections © Sofie Layton 2023

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This event is free to attend; the Zoom link for 4 December will be circulated closer to the date.

This conference is co-hosted by the Visual & Material Lab of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities and the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research.

If you have any accessibility requirements, please get in touch with us at imh.events@durham.ac.uk.