RETHINKING RIGOUR, held at Durham University on 4–5 December 2025, brought together scholars, artists, and practitioners to interrogate how creativity and criticality might reshape understandings of rigour within the medical humanities. Across two days, the symposium created a vibrant space for reflecting on creative‑critical methods and their capacity to illuminate marginalised or ineffable aspects of lived experience.
The opening afternoon began with Hannah Hutchings‑Georgiou’s evocative reading of diagnostic temporality in Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, interweaving film analysis with her own experience of cancer. Her paper set the tone for a programme attentive to embodiment, uncertainty, and the affective textures of illness. Harry Meadley followed with a screening of Where Do You Want Us?, foregrounding socially engaged skateboarding as both research method and public practice. Their reflections on institutional exclusion and permissive space‑making offered a compelling model of practice‑based inquiry. The day concluded with Tamarin Norwood’s call to rethink how art is brought into medical education, distinguishing between artistic products, processes, and the more elusive practices of fine art.
Friday’s programme shifted toward participatory and dialogic modes. Gita Ralleigh’s workshop invited attendees to explore ekphrasis as a route into writing the body, while Olivia Turner and Katey Warran’s conversation probed the tensions and possibilities between medical humanities and arts & health. The afternoon’s provocations—ranging from critiques of ableist notions of rigour to ethical questions surrounding creative practice—generated lively debate and underscored the field’s methodological and political stakes.
Across panels, workshops, and conversations, RETHINKING RIGOUR demonstrated the generative potential of interdisciplinary experimentation. It offered not only a critique of inherited academic frameworks but also a vision for more expansive, inclusive, and imaginative forms of scholarly rigour.
