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.
Thank you so much to our participants and speakers for joining our Creative Writing workshop on “Burnout, Overload, and Resilience,” held at the University of Exeter on June 14, 2024. The event was organised by Prof. Katharine Murphy (Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies), Dr. Sally Flint (Lecturer in Creative Writing), and Dr. Olivia Glaze (AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher) and we were thrilled to welcome such a diverse group to the event – which included teachers, entrepreneurs, NHS practitioners, yoga teachers, a live illustrator, academics, and postgraduate students.
Thanks to all our wonderful speakers from the Universities of Belfast, Boston (USA), Cambridge, Exeter, Kent, London and Sheffield, for our second international Reading Bodies workshop, hosted by the University of Exeter on 23 May 2024. The workshop was organised by Prof. Katharine Murphy (Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies) and Dr Olivia Glaze (AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher). Prof. Nicolás Fernández-Medina (Chair of Romance Studies at Boston University) delivered a brilliant keynote on Health, Disease, and Society in the Early Ramón Gómez de la Serna. The programme included specialists in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and German, and a hybrid Roundtable on interdisciplinary approaches to Reading Bodies in Literatures and Cultures.
We’re looking forward to our second international workshop, hosted by the University of Exeter on 23 May 2024. All are welcome to attend – please reserve your place here.
Highlights include speakers across 4 languages, a keynote by Prof. Nicolás Fernández-Medina (Chair of Romance Studies at Boston University), an interdisciplinary Reading Bodies Roundtable, and a Stage Rehearsal of Multilingual Medical Humanities (with Ants!). There will also be a short talk about Bibliotherapy by Exeter City of Literature. For more information about the programme, please visit our events page.
Thanks to all our fantastic speakers, chairs, and Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán (University of Kent) for a wonderful keynote lecture. Thanks also to members of the research network and all attendees who came along on 26 April 2024 to support our first academic workshop, contributing to stimulating conversations about Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s). The workshop was organised by Prof. Katharine Murphy (Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies) and Dr Olivia Glaze (AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher). A recording of selected papers from the workshop is available on the ILCS website.
The second academic workshop for this project will be held at the University of Exeter on 23 May 2024. All are welcome to attend – please reserve your place here. For more information about the programme, visit our events page.
The Reading Bodies Research Network has met regularly since November 2023 to discuss our project research questions, updates on our chosen topics, and development of shared interests which are grouped into 3 themes: gender and the body; society, illness and representation; transnational and decolonial perspectives. For more information, please visit our Network and People pages.
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 Isabel Cawthorn, PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham
Leopoldo Alas (‘Clarín’) is most prominently known as the author of La Regenta, which was published in two volumes in 1884 and 1885 and is now well ensconced in classic Spanish literature. However, aside from this realist novel, he also published hundreds of experimental short stories, of which ‘Cuervo’ was one, first appearing in the newspaper, La Justicia, in 1888. Clarín begins his short story, ‘Cuervo’, with the following lines: ‘El paisaje que se contempla desde la torre de la colegiata no tiene más defecto que el de parecer amanerado y casi casi de abanico. El pueblo, por dentro, es también risueño, y como está tan blanco, parece limpio’.[1] [‘The landscape that can be seen from the collegiate church has no other defect than appearing slightly affected and almost fan-like. The village itself is also pleasant, and because it is so white, it appears clean’.][2] The quotation foregrounds the importance of the concepts of cleanliness and ‘defect’ in relation to people and places. Specific to this story is how sanitation and disease are used to pathologise the past, making ‘Cuervo’ an interesting example of how, in late nineteenth-century Spain, pathology and illness were given a temporal significance.