24 May 2024 –
MHHRN: What is Interdisciplinarity NOW?
This event is the first of an occasional series that asks ‘What is interdisciplinarity now?’. Our query reflects not only how vibrant and fast-moving the field of Mental Health Humanities is, but also how it is adapting to the changing fortunes of academia and the shifting sands of our uncertain world.
We are joined by Drs Jennifer Wallis and Ed Kiely, and Georgia Poplett, who as a panel will discuss how interdisciplinarity features in their work, and explore the benefits and issues that being interdisciplinary brings. The last section of the session will act as a surgery for the Mental Health Humanities Researcher Network, offering an informal space in which to broach problems and seek advice about interdisciplinarity. We welcome anyone who works within the Mental Health Humanities to come along and join the discussion and join our mailing list and network.
Dr Jennifer Wallis is a Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine, and Medical Humanities Teaching Fellow, at Imperial College London. Her roles involve working across the Faculty of Medicine to incorporate the medical humanities into clinical teaching, and designing and delivering History modules for STEM students across the university. Her publications include Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum (Palgrave, 2017) and the co-edited Sources in the History of Psychiatry, from 1800 to the Present (Routledge, 2022). She is currently working, with artist Jason B. Bernard, on the history of atrocity imagery and the ethics of display.
Ed Kiely (they/them) is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, researching mental health and transgender care services. Their work draws on critical geography, public health and political economy to interrogate the relationships between healthcare systems, social inequalities and state violence. Ed’s research has been published in journals including Antipode, Critical Social Policy and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and they have written for Vice, Novara Media and the London Review of Books.
Georgia Poplett is a Postgraduate Researcher based between the Department of English Studies and Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Her practice-led PhD looks at representations of the lived experience of postpartum psychosis in contemporary and Gothic literature, exploring the production of original novel-writing as academic discourse. Through this unusual partnership, her research hopes to disentangle certain stigmatising mythologies around health and birthing bodies, contribute to cultural dialogue around postpartum psychosis, and locate the fiction novel as an important site for thinking and speaking about maternal mental health.
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