Health in Our Hands: Bridging lived experiences of health from patient, community, biomedical and artistic perspectives. Birkbeck, University London, 25th March 2026.
Sofie Layton (PDRA, Visual & Material Lab) recently spoke at the conference Health in Our Hands at Birkbeck, University of London. The one‑day event brought together Early Career Researchers from a wide range of disciplines to examine how lived experience shapes understandings of health, particularly in a time of global crisis, inequality, and technological transformation. Participants considered whose knowledge is valued, how expertise is constructed, and how stories of health and illness can generate new forms of insight and change.
The day opened with a session on technology, AI, and digital health, featuring papers on digital listening in mental health care, inequalities in digitalised sexual and reproductive health services, and the limitations of digital contraceptive tools. Speakers also discussed co‑production in developing AI for multiple long‑term conditions and the role of assistive technologies for people living with COPD.
The second session explored arts, creativity, and embodied illness knowledge. Performances and presentations considered how creative practices make space for complex experiences of illness. In this strand, Dr Sofie Layton presented her paper on transforming postmortem foetal micro‑CT medical data through artistic remediation as a careful, reflective methodology.
Afternoon sessions focused on co‑production and participatory approaches in health research, addressing ethical questions, emergent knowledges, and the value of lived experience across conditions such as multiple sclerosis, cancer, and housing distress. A further panel on narratives and the health humanities examined pain storytelling, Long COVID life writing, autism narratives, and poetry as a mode of expressing affective knowledge, particularly within Black British mental health contexts.
The conference concluded with a keynote by Dr Siobhan O’Connor, closing a day characterised by interdisciplinary dialogue, creative inquiry, and a commitment to inclusive, experience‑based health research.
