Lindsey is a prose writer whose practice-based PhD in Narrative Nonfiction, I Think I’ve Been Here Before: A Memoir in Fragments and Footnotes, draws on narratology, medical humanities, memoir and trauma theory to craft a methodology for approaching a more authentic and ethical representation of her lived experience of chronic mental illness within her own memoir. Lindsey has published articles in the Journal of Medical Humanities and Brief Encounters, the CHASE peer-reviewed, postgraduate journal. She is also a contributing author to the anthology Women Write Now: Women in Trauma (2022). Since 2022 she has served as one of the Postgraduate Representatives of the University of Kent’s Centre for Health and Medical Humanities. As of March 2025, she is an associate editor for The Polyphony, a web platform hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University.
Presentation: Ongoing Conversations: Digital Blind Dates as a Method of Inquiry and Connection
Co-presenting with Dr Stella Bolaki
Ongoing Conversations was launched by the Centre for Health and Medical Humanities (CHMH) in January 2024 with the support of an ‘Impact Accelerator Award’ from the University of Kent. It aims to demonstrate the importance of health and medical humanities outside of academia in a series of four videos which pair professionals working in fields related to health and medicine—such as the NHS, comedy, and non-profits—with academics from the CHMH at Kent. Unaware of who they would be conversing with, participants’ goal was to figure out why they had been paired together over the course of their filmed conversation. This was intentionally designed to stimulate continued engagement and collaboration after the videos. This project resulted in four vides, each ten minutes in length, which we will be showing over the course of this presentation. Many of the pairings went on to collaborate further after filming.
Ongoing Conversations uses the medium of film and the art of conversation to demonstrate the value of medical humanities outside of academia and create connection between diverse professionals, many of whom are creatives and/or make use of creative methods within their work. By pairing them together and capturing their interactions, we established productive intersections of collaboration and creativity, developing a novel new approach to academic inquiry through creative methods. We plan to create a resource detailing how we produced these videos to encourage other Centres to attempt similar projects expanding on this method.
