Projects

Led by Harriet Barratt,  this project seeks to transform understandings of complex patient experiences of the practice of donor conception (the use of donated sperm, eggs and embryos to have children). Harriet will be working with patients, clinicians and product designers to understand how people in different roles experience material objects and spaces related to donor conception treatment. She will also be focusing on how medical museums can help to increase public awareness of the material experiences of donor conception, and on trying to broaden the types of patient experience that are reflected in the field’s policy engagement and regulatory work. 

Miscarriage is a common occurrence, affecting one in ten women in their lifetime. Historically, pregnancy and baby loss has largely remained hidden, particularly within certain marginalised communities where women’s experiences of health inequality has been hidden and silenced. Led by postdoctoral researcher and artist Sofie Layton, this creative research by practice project will engage with 3 different groups of women in different cultural contexts who have experience of miscarriage, stillbirth and pregnancy and child loss. 

Curating Cultural Heritage for the Medical and Health Humanities (2024-2025) is a collaboration between Queen’s University, Canada; Uppsala University, Sweden; and Durham University, UK. With a focus on two local medical museums, the project explores how medical cultural heritage, which raises challenging questions about hegemonic ideas of health, illness and disability, can be sensitively curated to support medical and health humanities research, education, and public engagement towards the goal of increased health equity.  

The project is co-directed by Allison Morehead (Queen’s University), Cecilia Rodehn (Uppsala University), and Fiona Johnstone (Durham University).  It is funded by the Matariki Seed Fund.

Confabulations: art practice, art history, critical medical humanities was a two-year series of monthly online events (2021-2023), leading up to the field-defining edited volume Art & the Critical Medical Humanities, to be published in 2025 by Bloomsbury Academic in the series Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities.  

In June 2024, Confabulations will partner with the Health & Care Research Cluster at the Royal College of Art to co-convene an invitation-only, three-day workshop at the RCA Battersea. 

Confabulations is co-directed by Fiona Johnstone (University of Durham); Allison Morehead (Queens University, Canada), and Imogen Wiltshire (University of Lincoln, formerly the University of Leicester), and supported by funding from Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and Leicester Wellcome Trust ISSF.