18 May 2023
Supported by the British Academy ECR Network, a workshop was held by Drs Rebecca Wynter and Christina Wilkins on 18 May 2023, and was designed to help establish an ECR Network in Mental Health Humanities. The day allowed for ECRs to present their areas of research, collaborate with others, hear from keynote speakers (Matthew Broome, Head of Mental Health Humanities Network at Birmingham, and Lucienne Spencer, involved with the Phenomenological Psychopathology project funded by the Wellcome Trust), and take part in a roundtable exploring the potential aims of the network. The idea was to construct a set of guidelines for the network going forward. The second event, on 30 June 2023, functioned as the launch for the network.
The Medical Humanities has developed rapidly since initial explorations in the late twentieth century. As it grew, it was problematized, with some scholars preferring to identify as residing in the Health Humanities. More recently, there have been calls for a critical medical humanities, which instead focuses on the potential of what such scholarship might do. Traditionally an area of greater contestation and resistance to medicalisation, mental health has not always been well-served by being bundled together with the physical within healthcare systems, and therefore potentially within the disciplines that study them. In 2020, a Medical Health Humanities (MHH) research cluster was established, led by the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Mental Health, and embedding historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literature, sexuality and gender researchers.
This one-day workshop and follow-up meeting were designed to ask questions around two key areas:
- What is gained by ECRs considering the Mental Health Humanities? What does Mental Health Humanities mean to ECRs?
- How might a dedicated Network serve ECRs? How could a Network shape the field?
Through collaborative thinking and discussions, we aimed together to produce a working document that might inform the development of Mental Health Humanities and with it a Network for ECR scholars [link to page with document].