Dr. Anastasia Ebele Ugwuanyi displays on her expertise at Durham College’s Medical Humanities Worldwide Summer season Faculty for PhD researchers, coordinated in collaboration with the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Linköping College, Sweden, in September 2024.
The idea of a carousel, as a metaphor in my writing, displays the concurrent and dynamic occasions shaping my skilled studying journey. Presently navigating an evolving panorama that spans medical medication, tutorial medication, and, extra just lately, an introduction to medical humanities. As a lecturer on the College of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg within the School of Well being Sciences, I deliver this angle into my work as I try and curate a medical humanities angle for the course I coordinate, utilizing an interdisciplinary lens to tell each instructing and curriculum planning. This journey continues to form my skilled id and enrich my strategy to training.
Views from a carousel are multi-dimensional, wanting inwards to repair the gravitational forces and evert vertigo, wanting outwards for frames of references whereas in a state of fixed revolution and, on the identical time, taking within the quickly altering panorama. With some carousel experiences like mine, this fixed revolution is a multi-sensory expertise, there are sounds to soak up, folks on the journey in addition to background music which evoke an environment of pleasure and discovery.
The Medical Humanities Summer season Faculty, hosted by the College of Durham and Linköping College, Sweden, in September 2024, was a charming four-day journey of enjoyable, intrigue, and multidimensional studying. Set in opposition to the scenic backdrop of a seaside location and the tranquil ambiance of a convent-hotel, the expertise was a carousel of feelings and sensory stimulation. Regardless of a pre-flight fiasco and the domino impact of lacking a flight, the eventual arrival in picturesque Vadstena marked a outstanding turnaround, because of the unwavering assist of the organizers. The variety of members, views, and the dynamic disruptions of narratives stemming from the pre-reading sources created a wealthy tapestry of experiential studying. Arriving mentally fatigued, I discovered the course to be profoundly invigorating, providing high-yield conceptualizations and reflections that reawakened my important thought.
The Summer season college seeded new ideas of ‘instrumentality and non-instrumentality’ of literature in medication, the non-linear, non-binary relationship of literature and medication (Woods and Rakoczi, 2024). Medical Humanities is a nubile youth in my College and School of Well being Sciences, and on the time of attending this Summer season Faculty, the Medical Humanities college presence was very restricted. This appears not for lack of students or a course at a post-graduate stage, however for the deeply outlined scientific scholarly positioning of analysis and writing, the reward methods that favour quantitative reasoning and scholarship, the geographical separation of the colleges and solely quiet voices of literary collaborations within the college of well being sciences. Evidently interdisciplinary instructing and studying praxis are nonetheless a haloed flooring with few taking the carry to discover. How a lot intersectionality is ‘measurably’ doable in an area equivalent to mine, the place medical humanities as an idea within the college of Well being Sciences is barely starting to achieve traction? Or, to reframe my query: ‘How can a researcher, when they’re a part of an establishment that’s solely starting to embrace interdisciplinary approaches, guarantee their work within the medical humanities is interdisciplinary and authentically collaborative?’
The analysis carousel comprised of medical humanities course facilitators and members, participating round background readings and the experiential narratives of all current, took me across the Baradian framework of the intertwining of energy, discourse and materiality that co-constitute data and actuality (Barad, 2007). I mirrored on the sting of Barad’s framework of ‘Agential realism’ that posits that objects and topics intra-act and emerge by means of these interactions, difficult the orthodox views of objects and topics being dichotomous (Barad, 2007). I additionally mirrored on the parallel view by means of lens of sociomateriality principle on how follow is constituted by the assembling and reassembling of social and materials forces, and studying and processes of training, are literally sociomaterial forces interacting or reassembling (Barad,1998; Fenwick, 2015). I went across the re-definition of the epistemological interactions between researchers and topics the place house is given to the methodology of second-person views in conveying sufferers experiences in analysis outputs, re-appraising the reductionist approaches of affected person/folks categorizations based mostly on signs. A world of categorization that I used to be conversant in as a former clinician, however someway resented as a result of I had too usually been caught between the traces, eager to have seen folks as a lot extra, past solely a ‘Stage 4 analysis’ however to interact them as father, a good friend and beloved. On the Summer season Faculty, I struggled with the classification of my occupation as one which had the potential to be each uncaring and biomedical, mentioned by a roomful of literary humanities students as fingers had been pointed from the surface at this ‘errant occupation’ (Galbusera and Fellin, 2014).
I left Vadstena questioning my positionality as a healthcare practitioner evolving inside the medical humanities. After the Summer season Faculty I’m nonetheless immersed within the metaphorical carousel, but deeply drawn to a future the place interdisciplinarity in medical training transcends geographical and epistemological boundaries. This imaginative and prescient strikes past conventional college buildings towards a community-centered strategy, the place the affected person’s expertise defines analysis, instructing, and studying, pushed by people whose company resists inflexible categorizations. It envisions competency as non-linear, fostering fashions that equip healthcare practitioners with the instruments to confront the challenges of inequity, bias, and disparities in a posh world.
Reflecting again on this expertise and in addition on a second within the seminar round critiquing the writings of a ‘medical’ humanities researcher, gave me an ‘autoethnographic’ gaze on being the ‘different’ in a room full of sensible ‘non-medical’ art-discipline positioned colleagues. I got here away, with this carousel flip, studying the extraordinary want for epistemic humility within the trans-disciplinary way forward for adopting a redefined skilled positioning.
I’ve allowed myself some room because the carousel continues to revolve, to mirror on how a lot ‘co-ownership’ house has been afforded the colleges of sociology and psychology? Was organising an artwork remedy session, a theatre in training presentation by the School of Arts, lectures by anthropologists and psychologists sufficient? Is there a framework to measure or standardise as ‘acceptable’ globally, an undergraduate course providing as being interdisciplinary sufficient? How do I measure the ‘weighting’ of medical humanities on the growing id of undergraduate medical college students? The carousel turns once more, and I consider my PhD undertaking, how a lot of a medical humanities worldview can I current to assessors as I put together for protocol evaluation that can make it go the grade in an area dominated by biomedical analysis, as I discover competency frameworks of studying in distributed areas from the lens of the scholars in these areas.
Fortunately, the carousel mechanism continues to be revolving and the disequilibrium will present a possibility for assemblage.
Concerning the Creator
Dr. Anastasia Ebele Ugwuanyi is a Lecturer within the School of Well being Sciences on the College of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. They head up the Graduate Entry Medical Programme for fifth and sixth yr medical college students, and is at present engaged on a doctoral thesis with a particular curiosity in community-based studying and social accountability approaches in medical training.
References
Barad, Karen. (2007). Assembly the universe midway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and that means. Duke Up.
Barad, Karen. (1998). ‘Getting Actual: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Actuality’, variations, Vol. 10, Iss. 8, pp. 87-128.
Fenwick, Tara (2015). ‘Sociomateriality and studying: a important strategy’, in The SAGE Handbook of Studying, SAGE publications, p. 83-93.
Galbusera, Laura. and Lisa C. Fellin (2014) The Intersubjective endeavor of Psychopathology analysis: Methodological reflections on a Second-person Perspective strategy. Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 17, Iss. 5.
Woods, Angela. and Rákóczi, James (2024). ‘Literature in Collaboration: The Work of Literature within the Vital Medical Humanities’, in A.M. Elsner and M. Pietrzak-Franger (eds.) Literature and Medication. Cambridge: Cambridge College Press (Cambridge Vital Ideas), pp. 357–374.
