Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities in the School of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Health and Medical Humanities at the University of Kent. She is the author of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture(Edinburgh University Press, 2016), and articles on the lived experience of illness and disability across different art forms. Stella’s research has a collaborative and public engagement dimension and has received funding from the Wellcome Trust and the British Academy. Her interdisciplinary project “Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities” (2016-2019) established the “Prescriptions: Artists’ Books” special collection that has informed exhibitions, creative workshops, and teaching provision in the medical humanities.
The Arts, Creative Expression and Wellbeing
Co-presenting with Lindsey Zelvin
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.