Dr Xiao Ge, Bridging Fellow in our Narrative Practices Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities writes:
During a recent research visit to China in March, I led a series of workshops exploring how creative and tactile practices can open up new ways of understanding and narrating health and lived experience.
The workshops were part of my Bridging Fellowship, which builds on my doctoral work on the Chinese postpartum practice known as “sitting the month” (zuoyuezi), a tradition that prescribes a month-long period of rest, supervised care with confinement and dietary restrictions after birth. In my PhD, I examined how this embodied custom has been increasingly commercialised through the growth of private postpartum care centres. While shaped by complex medical, familial, and gendered power relations, I found that the practice also creates a rare temporal and spatial pause, a moment of stillness grounded in relationality that allows women to reflect on their experiences of birth, care, and recovery. It investigates how stories about reproductive health and care are powerfully shaped – and sometimes constrained – by language. From this research, I developed the concept of “sitting with”: a reinterpretation of “sitting the month” as a collaborative research practice grounded in rest, care, and collective reflection. My current postdoctoral project develops this idea further, exploring how slowness, crafting, and shared reflection can generate new forms of knowledge about postpartum wellbeing and community care.
A workshop at Xinxiangyue Yuezi Zhongxin
My first invited workshop took place at Xinxiangyue Yuezi Zhongxin – a commercial postpartum care centre. In contemporary urban China, postpartum care services are organised around the practice of “sitting the month” and usually include services such as customised nutritious meals, childcare guidance, and assistance from professional caregivers known as a yuesao, with additional beauty treatments, body recovery programmes, and social activities for both mother and child. (You can find out more about the role of a yuesao in this piece for The Polyphony Meets China by Siyi Chen: ‘Yuesao: A Distinct Postnatal Doula in Contemporary China.’)
In the workshop I delivered, I experimented with alternative narrative methods that combine crafting with embodied, tactile practices, inviting postpartum participants to reflect on their journeys through making a sensory story book for their child(ren). Using simple materials such as yarn and paper, participants created visual maps of their experiences from pregnancy to postpartum care, tracing relationships between family support, medical institutions, digital resources, community networks and their embodied knowledge. Drawing on facilitation skills developed through The Fundamentals of Creative Facilitation training at IMH, the workshops fostered an engaging and collaborative environment in which participants could sit with each other and collectively explore new ways of understanding care, embodiment, and community.
Crafting as reflective practice
Often dismissed as trivial or domestic due to its associations with traditional femininity, crafting offers a slow, tactile, and radical form of reflection that values process over productivity. My workshop invited participants to engage in simple acts of making together, shifting the focus away from producing polished narratives towards shared attention, embodied reflection, and collective presence. Such practices challenge the increasingly individualised model of “self-care” promoted within contemporary capitalist cultures of health, instead foregrounding relational forms of care and meaning-making. The workshop I delivered organically ran over time due to the participants’ enthusiasm to stay and continue to craft and chat. This embodied pleasure echoes what Audre Lorde calls the “erotic” – a creative life-force that empowers through connection, attention, and depth. In pausing and making together, reckoning with structural injustice becomes a shared and erotic feminist knowledge co-production experience.
Working with creative writing students at Peking University
Another highlight of my trip was a guest lecture to students enrolled in the Creative Writing module at the School of Health Humanities at Peking University (PKU). The lecture sprang from an invitation from Dr Rong Huang, a former visiting scholar at IMH, further strengthening academic exchange between the two institutions.
Organised as an interactive workshop rather than a traditional lecture, the session invited students to reflect on their own creative processes through embodied, collaborative mapping activities. Rather than beginning with writing itself, the workshop explored how creative inquiry can start much earlier in the research process, and how narrative ideas often emerge from bodily, relational experience, rather than solely from individual, mind-centred reflection. Students created visual and material “maps” of their own creative processes, revealing the complex networks of memories, influences, and encounters that shape their work. The session sparked lively discussions about the boundaries between creative writing and creative research, as well as the relationality of knowledge making.
The research visit and workshops provided an opportunity for me to test and develop my research methods in an international context. The visit to PKU also created space for dialogue with students and scholars working across different cultural and disciplinary settings. These exchanges highlighted the value of creative and embodied approaches to enrich both narrative practice and academic research, while opening new possibilities for cross-cultural collaboration in medical humanities.
Find out more
- Read Ge, X. (2022). Reclaiming Postpartum Care Practices Among Urban Middle-Class Women in Contemporary China. Cultivate, (Care), 80-96.
- Find out more about Xiao Ge’s research in this written interview: ‘Introducing Xiao Ge: New Bridging Fellow in the Narrative Practices Lab‘
- Explore our Narrative Practices Lab
