Reading Bodies
Artist Katharine Howell has illustrated the Reading Bodies collaborative process with Riptide Journal, in preparation for our forthcoming anthology on Burnout, Overload and Resilience. We’re delighted to share her illustration below:
You can find more information about the artist here.
By Dr Sally Flint, Project Partner for Reading Bodies and Creative Lead for We Are the Possible
‘We need / To leap / Right now / To the next stage / Of our evolution.’
Ben Okri
Burnout, Overload, and Resilience are words that in 2024 challenge analysis in literature, healthcare, and the media, especially alongside trending headlines which can often include crisis, doomsday, disaster, pollution, guilt, greenwashing, catastrophe, apocalypse, anxiety – all used to stress the global climate emergency, and the need to urgently change the way we consume and live. It’s like being in a crammed washing machine of words on a fast spin of environmental and societal problems. A recent article shows that neurologists are ‘alarmed’: ‘Everybody has a Breaking Point’: how the climate crisis affects our brains’ (C. P. Aldern, Guardian, 2024). While writing this, the latest pop-up on my PC reads – ‘but don’t confuse burnout with being busy!’
Therefore, it was intriguing and timely to deliver a creative writing workshop where we can create a collection of writing inspired by the Reading Bodies project using Burnout, Overload and Resilience as launch pads. To do this, as a writer, editor, and creative writing lecturer working at the interface of science, health, education, translation, and the arts, I adapted a workshop and editing methodology I established to ‘share insights across languages and academic disciplines.’ At the workshop, we considered different approaches to the theme of burnout, including workplace and caring pressures, strategies for dealing with stress, and connections with individual health.
I used a unique collaborative creative writing approach developed in 2017 when working with Met Office scientists on ways to communicate climate data to the public through the arts and science. On a NERC-funded yearlong project, Climate Stories, led by renowned climate scientist Professor Peter Stott, a group of climate scientists and art practitioners shared and experimented with narrative forms. Both willing and wary, we joined in creative writing, performance, printmaking, and music workshops. As the Creative Writing Lead, I encouraged writing that ‘showed’ working in the field of climate change, and the scientists’ stories that erupted were startling, from ice cracking in the Arctic to fleeing forest fires in South America. This storytelling approach helped scientists understand how using the senses to explain data – what they could see, hear, taste, touch, and smell – brought to life what it’s really like on the frontline of climate change.
Then, as the Covid crisis spread and the world stalled, Cecilia Mañosa Nyblon (Director, We Are the Possible, University of Exeter), had an inspired vision to bring together science, health, education, translation, and the arts to communicate to broad audiences how human health relies on maintaining, restoring and protecting planetary health and ecosystems. Following a unique creative and editorial process, a collection of poems was published, and with the support of the Met Office UK, we delivered One Chance Left – 12 poems co-created by climate scientists and health professionals at an event in the first-ever Science Pavilion at the COP26 climate conference (Glasgow 2021). The poems, underpinned by science and health research, received such a positive reaction that by 2022 our team had grown to include not only scientists and health professionals, but educators, translators, youth leaders, and artists in the UK and Egypt, using a now proven creative collaborative way of working which resulted in We Still Have a Chance – 12 stories for 12 days of COP27 (Egypt 2022) which reached over 28 million people and counting.
By Dr Daniele Carrieri, Lecturer in Public Health, University of Exeter, and Project Partner for Reading Bodies
In preparation for our creative workshop on burnout and resilience, Dr Daniele Carrieri explores research perspectives on related workplace issues. For more information about this research theme, please visit our Resources page.
I have come across, but never investigated, the term ‘quiet quitting’. This creative writing workshop on burnout, overload and resilience offers an excellent opportunity to start filling this gap in my research on mental ill-health and wellbeing in a high-stress work context: healthcare.[1] Quiet quitting is newer and possibly less known than ‘burnout’, ‘stress’ or’ resilience’. It also has some evocative potential – which I hope will inspire creating thinking and writing. I believe there is a poetic flare in ‘quiet quitting’ (perhaps also due to its alliteration?), as well as echoes of cultural references such as Thoreau’s ‘quiet desperation’ (Thoreau, ed. 2006), or, more recently, the introversion highlighted by Cain in her book ‘Quiet’ (Cain, 2013).
Award-winning creator of graphic novels and former UK Comics Laureate 2019-21, Hannah Berry, has collaborated with Reading Bodies to illustrate our research theme of Burnout, Overload and Resilience.
By Dr Jordan McCullough, Associate Editor at The Polyphony and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland
Established in 2023, The Polyphony’s ‘Multilingual MedHums’ series seeks to challenge ‘the Anglocentric nature of much medical humanities scholarship by showcasing the work of scholars based in and working on non-anglophone countries.’[1] The series encourages readers and contributors to engage with the rich entanglement of language and culture, as the media through which health and illness are lived and communicated, and to reflect on the significance of this intersection for their own research agendas and those of the wider field. Following the recent trajectory of other multilingual scholarship in the field, calling us in the direction of a global Medical Humanities,[2] the series seeks to push beyond the boundaries of the Anglosphere; introduce new research trajectories developing across the world; and demonstrate the value of multilingual and translational approaches for the future of the Medical Humanities. The ‘Multilingual MedHums’ series thus resonates with the ‘Reading Bodies’ project on multiple levels.
By Katharine Murphy, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Exeter, and AHRC Principal Investigator for the ‘Reading Bodies’ project.
Prof. Katharine Murphy has published an invited piece on ‘Reading Bodies in European Literatures and Cultures’ in the Multilingual Medical Humanities series of The Polyphony, hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University.
By Dr Kit Yee Wong, Postdoctoral Researcher in French Studies
How do European languages and literature intersect with the modern human body and identity? Can literature help us re-think the classification of bodies into social and racial categories? Surveying the history of medicine in Europe from the nineteenth century will assist with these questions.
The mid-1800s was the start of the ‘golden age’ of clinical medicine across Western Europe, when medical sciences became professionalised. Disciplines were created in new medical institutions, such as physiology, pathology, gynaecology, and anthropology, to name a few. People were measured and categorised on a grand scale.
By Danielle Hipkins, Professor of Italian Studies and Film, University of Exeter
Drawing connections with the AHRC-funded project A Girl’s Eye View 2021-2024, Prof. Danielle Hipkins reflects on audience responses to the genre of the ‘sick girl’ film.
The romantic film depends on the obstacle. Otherwise, what happens? Two people meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after. That is the outcome we want, but it’s not the story we want. It’s far too short, and likely boring.
Serious, terminal even, illness presents a narratively rich obstacle, and the canon of romantic films is strewn with lovers lost, slowly and painfully, or sometimes recovered through the sheer power of love alone. There are variations in outcome, and also in the distribution of illness: maybe he’s ill, maybe she’s ill, maybe they’re both ill. Sometimes they both survive, but usually it’s just one of them.
By Dr Olivia Glaze, AHRC Post-Doctoral Research Associate, University of Exeter
References to madness, insanity, melancholia, and hysteria have long plagued the diagnoses of female mental illness. The crazed, raving, and unstable woman is a prevalent trope that has long persisted within Western literature, from Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1601) and Bertha Mason in Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) to Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Historically, madness, hysteria, and melancholia have been considered female afflictions due to an assumed inherent feminine proximity to wrecked nerves and sexual disorders – indeed, the word hysteria is derived from the Greek word “hysteron” or womb. In the late nineteenth century, understanding the ‘female’ illness of hysteria was a central focus of studies, led by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at his infamous Parisian asylum, Salpêtrière. Charcot transformed the hospital into an internationally renowned site of neurological teaching, with Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet amongst his students.
By Dr Kayleigh Darch, Clinical Psychologist, Yoga Teacher, Founder of Body and Mind Therapy, and Project Partner for Reading Bodies
Responding to our project strand on burnout, stress and resilience, this article reflects on two of these terms from a psychologically-informed perspective, and explores the powerful connections between mind and body.
In this short article, I would like to offer you some observations and reflections on how we understand stress and what contributes to our individual resilience. This is drawn from my experiences working as a Clinical Psychologist supporting people who are struggling with their mental health and my roles in supporting the teams who care for others. It also stems from my personal practice, ongoing learning and work as a Yoga Teacher. My two worlds of psychology and yoga are drawn together continually in my holistic approaches to supporting the body and the mind simultaneously. I hope that there is something helpful or interesting for you in this article.