“But How Does It Feel?”

Reading Groups as Affective Practice

How can we create academic environments that are both lively and liveable? How can we build spaces of collaboration and intellectual exchange that bring us joy, and empower us? How can we contribute to the future of a discipline, a field of research, or a community in meaningful ways?

These questions matter to many academics in different ways and to varying degrees. They matter most to doctoral students and early career researchers whose position – and positionality – within the academy is still in flux and who will live longest with the futures that are currently imagined, hoped for, or feared. And they are arguably even more important to doctoral students and ECRs in an “emerging field” such as the medical humanities where disciplinary natures, limitations, and possibilities as a field of research, an activist community, or a teaching tool are notoriously up for debate.

Between March and May 2023, we – Mona Baie, Swati Joshi, and Annabelle Olsson – organised a three-part online reading group entitled “The Future(s) of Medical Humanities” as part of the Ends of Knowledge network. The aim was to offer a space for PhD students and early career researchers in particular to reflect together on the past, present, and futures of our field – with ‘futures’ deliberately phrased in the plural. As doctoral students from Germany, India, and Sweden, we were especially interested in inviting diverse and international perspectives – knowing that the umbrella term ‘medical and health humanities’ can mean many different things depending on the country, institution, and context. 

We were lucky enough to be joined by wonderful people with whom we had lively conversations about the current and future structures, logics, and politics of (international) medical humanities. Guided by articles from Jane Macnaughton, Johanna Shapiro, and Sarah McLusky, we discussed, amongst other things, the challenges posed by the unclear institutional status of the field, the perceived need (or lack thereof) to locate ourselves within a single discipline, and the crux of adopting or establishing new and interdisciplinary methodologies. We also considered issues of translation and joined Steven Wilson (2023) in his call for more cultural and linguistic sensitivity in our research.

All of these topics we had more or less expected. However, what surprised us – in a good way! – was how many feelings came up in the process. In both the first and second sessions, discussions about the status quo and possible futures of the (international) medical humanities quickly evolved into intimate conversations about some very personal concerns that shape our daily lives and work – be it experiences of loneliness and isolation, the emotional toll of working on ‘difficult’ research topics, or feeling unappreciated in one’s department or university. A reading group that was supposed to be about the boundaries of disciplines, language, and the futures of a field became a space to express, listen to, and acknowledge what it feels like to work, research, and teach in the institutional contexts we find ourselves in.

As a result, we decided to dedicate the last session of the miniseries to the affect of ‘hope’, which, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is a ‘feeling of trust’ or a ‘feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen’. Reading the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop collectively, we tried to think of hope as something complicated and hard – not a ‘good vibe’ to maintain, but an attitude of critical hopefulness to obtain that allows us to remain alive and keep striving for better futures (see, e.g., Duncan-Andrade, 2009).

What we learned from our miniseries, in a nutshell: paying attention to what working in the medical and health humanities feels like – for oneself and others – are meaningful practices of affective solidarity and academic world-making. Let’s do it more regularly?

– Mona, Swati, Annabelle

References.

Bishop, Elizabeth. (1976). “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Online, used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art.

Duncan-Andrade, Jeff. (2009). Note to educators: Hope required when growing roses in concrete. Harvard Educational Review, 79, 181–194.

Wilson, Steven. (2023). Manifesto for a Multilingual Medical Humanities. The Polyphony, 30th May 2023, https://thepolyphony.org/2023/05/30/manifesto-multilingual-medhums/.

Cover Photo by Artem Shuba on Unsplash.