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We write when there is something worth reading — a new comic, a workshop, a call to take part.
How can healthcare become more attentive to individual patient experiences? How can we talk with and talk back to practitioners and systems? What tools are needed to open productive dialogue?
The European Research Council grant “Where are the Humanities in the Medical Humanities? How Comics Can Improve Healthcare Training, Practice, and Dissemination,” led by Dr. Erin La Cour and her team of researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, aims to address these questions across four individual projects that explore healthcare experiences, practices, and systems in The Netherlands, Belgium, France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
The team will critically elaborate the benefits of further integrating the Humanities within the Medical Humanities by examining and expanding the discourse on Graphic Medicine—a flourishing field attentive to the study and production of comics about health and healthcare that holds enormous potential to positively affect healthcare scholars and practitioners, comics artists, patients, their families, carers, and the public.
The four projects
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Graphic Medicine in the Classroom: The Medical Humanities in Healthcare Training
Led by PhD candidate Tanne Harris-Nijmeijer
Comparatively assessing current courses and programs in the Medical Humanities within Medical Faculties across the project’s six countries. It aims to uncover what is being taught, how and by whom, to what aim, and to what outcome, and will develop best-practices guides for higher education based on its findings.
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Graphic Medicine as Research: Developing Theory through Practice
Led by PhD candidate Lucie Morel
Developing the theory and artistic research practice of Graphic Medicine through the production of a PhD dissertation on Graphic Medicine in the form of a comic—a meta-Graphic Medicine project that will be the first artistic research PhD of its kind in The Netherlands.
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Graphic Medicine in Practice: “Talking With” the Medical Humanities to Improve Healthcare Dissemination
Led by postdoctoral researcher Dr. John Miers
Mapping and evaluating Graphic Medicine comics that have been or are currently being collaboratively produced by comics artists and healthcare institutions in the project’s six countries. Taking up the notion of “talking with,” it aims to bring comics artists and institutions into productive dialogue to create new insights and innovative ways of working.
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Medicine in/as Discourse: “Taking Back” and “Talking Back To” the Medical Humanities
Led by principal investigator Dr. Erin La Cour
Critically engaging with recent popular and underground Graphic Medicine comics and their creators across the project’s six countries. Taking up the notions of “taking back” and “talking back to,” it will commission comics artists-patients to co-produce short-form comics about their experiences navigating their local healthcare systems.
