Welcome to Harriet Barratt, who joins us as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Visual & Material Lab.
Harriet researches the material cultures, patient narratives and psychosocial contexts of medicine, taking an object relations theory approach. Previous projects and collaborations include a Research England-funded evaluation of the Converge mental health outreach programme, the Wellcome-funded Sensing Spaces of Healthcare Research Collective, and the UKRI-funded ART/DATA/HEALTH project. Between 2013 and 2022 Harriet was a member of the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust’s Onward Arts Group, helping to advise on the arts and culture programme across the Trust, and from 2016-17 was resident in the Science Museum’s Medicine team, researching objects across both their holdings and the Wellcome Collection.
Harriet’s new research project, “Donor Conception Materialities: Object Relations in the Clinic, the Home and the Museum”, seeks to transform understandings of complex patient experiences within the UK’s assisted reproductive technology (ART) sector, focusing on the practice of donor conception.
If your research was a film, what would the title be?
It might be something like ‘Imagined Kin’, as my research deals with the ‘internal objects’ – mental representations of people, objects or ideas – of donor conception. Donor conception is the use of donated sperm, eggs or embryos to conceive a child, and I’m really interested in the complex symbolisations of the donor/s carried by patients and donor-conceived people. Such a close genetic connection is so often (though not always) accompanied by a very strong familial, social and emotional connection, but for those conceived via donor conception the biological link contrasts with donors’ closely protected anonymity, which in the UK is in place until the child turns 18.
What will you be doing during your postdoctoral research?
Via interviews and workshops, I’ll be working with UK fertility clinic patients who have successfully used donor conception to start a family, or who are still undergoing treatment. My focus is on their experiences of material objects and spaces – from scanning devices and injection kits to domestic settings and talismanic belongings – and how these may drive the symbolic processes I’ve talked about above. I’ll also speak to staff at clinics, donor banks and ‘femtech’ product design agencies about their own relationships to these material objects at different stages of their life cycle. This data will help to inform a set of collaboratively-developed psychosocial guidelines for UK fertility clinics, whose patient satisfaction rates are relatively low. Alongside this, I’ll be working with medical museums in the UK and Denmark to try to broaden the scope of their reproductive object collections beyond the purely clinical, and to think about how we can use museum engagement practices to widen understandings of the complexities of donor conception. These activities all rely on thinking deeply about both the potential and the limitations posed by material methods and personal narrative in conjuction, something I’m really passionate about and can’t wait to develop further.
What expertise and experiences will you be drawing on?
My research to date has focused on ‘object relations’ approaches, which is an area of psychoanalytic theory concerned with how we relate to the ‘other’. While the field’s theoretical focus has understandably often been on internal mental processes, I’m interested in people like Donald Winnicott and Christopher Bollas who have extended this to thinking about how we relate to real material objects. This work overlaps with fields such as material culture and the philosophy of technology, but brings the ‘psychical’ (in the sense of unconscious processing) to the fore. Alongside my research roles I’ve done a lot of work on arts and health initiatives, public engagement, and cultural partnerships, so I’m excited to bring the theoretical and the practical sides of my interests together. I’m also looking forward to getting my nitrile gloves on and getting back into medical museum collections for the first time in a good few years!
Why are you excited about working on The Platform?
The Institute for Medical Humanities has done so much for the field of medical humanities in the last decade, and the Platform is a truly unique opportunity to build on this work and make a lasting difference in specific areas. I’m so excited to be involved in progressing visual and material methods, working with people I’ve known and respected for a long time, as well as making links across the different thematic Labs and to see what might come next for the discipline.
What changes would you like to see as a result of your research?
First and foremost, I’d like to be part of a much-needed shift in how UK fertility clinics value the non-clinical aspects of the care they provide, particularly in relation to patients’ material and sensory experiences. It is a highly regulated, lucrative, and intensely technology-focused sector, which can mean that biomedical concerns often eclipse patients’ everyday psychosocial experiences and needs. I’d also like to help to define what we mean by material methods in the medical humanities, and to progress and develop these methods and their applications. Finally, I want to demonstrate the value of using object relations theory to think about material culture – it has so much to bring to discussions in so many areas.
What interests or hobbies do you have outside your research that might surprise people?
I’m not sure I’d class it as a hobby, but I spend a huge amount of time sitting on the floor building rockets with magnetic tiles, instructed/critiqued as I do so by my very lovely and rather bossy nearly-three-year-old. I’m also quite the expert at watching him play Connect 4 with himself five times in a row (“Oo don’t play; oo watch”) and maintaining the same level of enthusiasm and delight when he seems to win each time.
We warmly welcome Harriet to Durham University and the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, and look forward to working with her.
