Mark (00:01.496)
Well, welcome to the postgraduate research conference at Durham University. And we are using Pedagodzilla as the hosting platform for it, but it's one of our Pedagodzilla on tour podcasts. And I am, as usual with these things, I'm starting off with one of the keynotes. And our keynote for this conference is Mary Robson. So Mary, do want to tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Mary

Thanks Mark and great to be here. Yes, I'm the senior creative facilitator at the Institute for Medical Humanities here and I also work on the discovery research platform that we host there. So also in medical humanities, my job is to both bring together communities of researchers and but instill creativity at every level in what is essentially

interdisciplinary research.

So you're a facilitator, your outputs aren't necessarily the research, it's identifying what the research is and what people do, and you've got lots of different creative techniques for bringing people together. Do you want to talk about what some of those creative techniques are then for getting things off the ground?

I'll tell you the story of the plan of St. Gall. I told that in the keynote and it's when I was asked to work on a big interdisciplinary research project over 10 years ago now called Hearing the Voice and wondering how best to do what I was asked to do, which was to build the community of the researchers. And I was looking for something that wouldn't be just bringing the kind of 
coloured pom poms and felt tip pens into the room, which would instil a lot of rolled eyes and possibly put people off from the outset. And when I heard the PI of the project, Charles Ferneyhough talking about the work of a medievalist called Mary Carruthers and her interpretation of a ninth century monastic plan called the Plan of St. Cole. And then I just had the light bulb moment because it was used in medieval times for monks to situate their knowledge. And so I took that into the first of our research meetings called voice clubs that we used to run on Friday afternoons and invited everybody to make their own can of Sincol, but importantly about their knowledge of voice hearing. And in that way, that really helped, I think, to level the playing field. It meant that that people at all career stages, but with very varied novel knowledges of voice hearing could share what they knew and where they were at without it being intimidating.

Mark
your background's theatre direction.

Theatre design actually, No, it's fine, I have directed as well, but my degree is in theatre design. So I went to art school for four years and then worked in theatre and film for over a long time. I had a very varied freelance career, but ended up really loving doing 20 foot square touring stages that went to places that other theatre pieces couldn't get to. working with companies like Major Road and Red Ladder in Yorkshire who were interested in involving communities and young people in work. I worked with a company called Welfare State International for some years who pioneered really the bringing together of people from very, very different backgrounds to produce site-specific work. For example, let's build the houses of Parliament and burn them on bonfire night Et cetera. So I came with all of this experience that eventually got funnelled into work that was at the intersection between arts and health. I became very interested in a growing field of that in the UK and then found myself being brought in under the auspices of the dear departed Mike White into the into what was then the Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine which is now the Institute for Medical Humanity.
Mark
So what does the medical humanities, what is that overlap between those two things? Because we hear a lot about medical humanities here and you've got a booklet. I love booklets. know, one of the things that I think we missed out as we move into more and more online stuff and web resources and all that is having a nice bit of physical artifact to wave around and hand out and carry around. I've got another one on creative facilitation here and it's just great having the 
the pictures and the pages and all that sort of stuff. Sorry, we're going off track a bit now, but do you think that's key to this part of what you do? Does that tie in with the whole creative facilitation thing to some extent?

Mary (05:15.214)
think it ties in with creativity being at the heart of how we operate. And interesting this came up yesterday, we had four new in practice fellows join the platform yesterday. And these are people who've got a year long fellowship with us. Two of them actually work in the NHS and one of them works in a charity and the other in a community interest company. And they all commented on the tactility of having having the books. So all of our information is online but we always do print runs too and we find it really useful when people come to visit or like today if we're going to tell of our work that you can pick something up. Our digital and comms lead Dr Victoria Patten does an absolutely brilliant job on the design. are the fact that they're matte.

Mark
Yeah, they're nice glossy, although this is a glossy, but it's nice thick chunky paper. It's yeah, all that sort of stuff that tactile feel. Yeah.

Mary
And great imagery too. She spends a long time looking for images. It's good. So medical humanities, I suppose, if you'd asked that question 25 plus years ago, it would be that it was situated in medical education. So the idea that by teaching doctors about humanities, a lot of the time through literature at the time, this was a way of them gaining more holistic knowledge into the human condition and that with that knowledge that that would necessarily make for better clinicians. Ken Kalman who ended up coming here, he was the chief medical officer and he was VC here. He came from Glasgow and was a passionate believer in medical humanities, in medical education and it's through his offices that the first centre was settled. So now, though, I think it took what is called a critical turn some years ago. And now we've just produced this, the aforementioned brochure called Medical Humanities One-on-One. And in there, it makes clear how the arts and humanities and social sciences can really help to our understanding of health and human experience in particular. So taking it out of merely the realm of medical education, not knocking that at all. We still do bits of work with medical students, but also that it, in the words of the brochure, embraces radical interdisciplinarity. So we're really up for being about as interdisciplinary as you can get. And that's not simply about the other academic disciplines. It's about recognising knowledges that come from expertise and experience across across the piece and also that are in other areas of life and work. Therefore, it can add to what is considered to be evidence in health research. And for us and for it, we centre lived experience as part of it. So we, for example, I think Vinu Gupta may be the first assistant professor in lived experience. works on the platform in one of our sites.


Mark
Because that's my kind of introduction to this was the patient voices project way back in 2000s now is it? Digital storytelling. I guess one of the initially interdisciplinary, you've got different things like what counts as evidence, how do we gather evidence? So you need different ways to share those sorts of ways of doing the world. But then that's still within academia. I mean, my creative.
I've got an MA in creative writing and I thought, well, that's going to make me creative. And it does to some extent gives me storytelling, but it's still more words, you know, and words. If you're going out and reaching to people, I guess words aren't necessarily their main way of all the particular academic ease isn't their main way of communicating. So you need to get different ways of doing it. Is that creative facilitation? Yeah, I those two challenges.

Mary

I think so, importantly. think we're interested in not just, and patient stories is a great example. So we're delighted that Tony Sumner and Pip Hardy, who are the instigators of the Patient Voices Project, are affiliated to the platform and they've been working with our Narrative Practices Lab. And I'm thrilled to say that we are going to be hosting the archive of all of those digital stories and there are over a thousand of them here at Durham. So watch out for more news about that. I'm hoping it'll be in the autumn. I think it's also about not only looking at the role of stories in whatever form they are and storytelling, but it's also critiquing it and looking at how that can be expanded. I think therefore we're able to be really flexible and look at how different methods can be applied. I think there's a creed occur from a lot of researchers that I find, which is they tell me how to do it on one side of A4. And I think one of the things that we are interested in is beyond, here's the list of methods.

So beyond the what, we're really interested in the how. So for example, when we do our training in creative facilitation, we include quite a hefty section of it on the disposition of the facilitator. And importantly, that shouldn't be like the Stepford wives. We shouldn't all be operating in the same way. what is currently a Mary Robson-shaped space need not be the model for that at all. But it's important also because I think a lot of people are more fretful about the how than the what. And I think that's for lots of reasons. think, for example, if you're used to running a focus group in a particular way, to then throw in a creative method without thinking about the how is entirely problematic because it can create more problems than you're seeking to solve, if that makes sense.

Mark
Absolutely, and it's that you're moving out of your comfort zone because you don't have control over everything because it's different. And embracing the chaos, I mean, that's one of the things about podcasting is we spent about five minutes trying to get the headphones to work and it's like, and I go, hey, it doesn't matter. We can do it without headphones. I'm going to assume the tech's working.

introducing I don't know sticky walls and you might I did put a sticky wall thing and one at one place and they said we can't go in there because of the smell of the glue and they're really hot on health and safety so we did something else but having that's what you call it spinning on a ..

Mary

Turning on a six-piece. Turning on a It's an old phrase.

Mark

Yeah, turning on the sixpence. That whole thing becomes unique. I think, indeed, to be more comfortable with appearing like you don't know what you're doing about accepting change and being flexible to all those sorts of things. I think that and the other thing you saying there is that tactile thing. You know, what you do differently that's not about words, it's not about sounds. Putting it on one piece of paper doesn't capture what you're doing because you're doing something that is different from capturing things on bits of paper.

Mary

I think so. I think I think you're right, Mark. I think it's also that it's constantly learning from whatever situation you're in. So I've learned a huge amount from my neurodivergent colleagues and and helping run events like back in the day, we ran an event for people who were contributing to a shared collection, an edited collection.

And I learned so much from that experience. just to know that there is no, again, there is no fixed way of doing things. You can do things entirely differently. And one of the things that comes up in medical humanities is this, is questioning what it means for bodies and minds to be so-called normal. And in an age where there's a lot that medicine cannot and will not explain. We feel it's really important to include those voices and those ways of working in what it is that we do. so that's where being open and receptive and ready to work with those things is really crucial.

Mark

You you're getting different sorts of data as well by actually having different ways of interacting with research participants and those sorts of things.

Mary (14:45.186)
Completely. And again, one of the challenges of medical humanities has been that it's been situated in the global north, so to speak. It's been populated by largely white scholars. And so by making diversity up front and center as one of the barriers we know we have by including people from low and middle income companies, countries by by having our scholars work and develop networks that wouldn't otherwise exist. That means not only are we getting different data, but importantly, we're getting different research. So that's the thing about the platform. It's not just about researching a topic or three, it's about where can that research happen? How can that research?

Mark
particularly within medicine because all most of the medical models are male, white, straight, elderly, neurotypical, rich and that if you're looking at a medical model particularly when you're talking about the what was it the deep end of... then that's not going to translate to what people need so it's going to

Yeah, deep end practice.

Mary (16:10.986)
I think a lot of the time it's about overturning myths. mean, interestingly, at the Deep End practice, which is one of our sites of research, there, is apparent in general is there are more female doctors than male doctors at the minute. I think whilst people have in their heads ideas of what doctors look like, and I think you're right, I think that pertains to

The reality is that there are more female doctors than male doctors in the UK at the minute. But I think we, but I also know through working on another project called Shame and Medicine about the difficulties for medical students, doctors and patients around the myth of the good doctor, for example, and the complications of those relationships. So I think being able to critique and question and kind of illuminate some of those corners makes for a different experience. So one of the GPs at Newcastle, it's Anthony's and Johnny Quartz and myself and others last year ran an elective module for medical students, but we did it in the practice. We did it around medical humanities and

We involve a poet, an author, and this year we're involving the anthropologist and hoping to loop back into some reflective writing for the Lancet. So in that way, we're kind of doing something that's seemingly outwith our remit, actually holding it back in to what it is, to what medical humanities can bring.

Mark

Thank you, Mary. One final question then is if people want to take advantage of your work or connect with you or what would be your main messages to leave people with at the end of our chat?

Mary (18:18.67)
I think no question is too small really. I think come with a spirit of curiosity. If you want to certainly if you want to know more about what we do please take a look at the websites Institute for Medical Humanities and Discovery Research Platform in Medical Humanities. But also you're very welcome to come for a chat at the Institute.

Mark

Okay, and we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Okay, so thank you, Mary. That was a really interesting chat. Hopefully be the start of many more chats because it sounds like really interesting work. And thanks for doing the keynote for the conference.

Brilliant, thank you.

Mary (19:01.96)
Well, you're so welcome. I was delighted to be asked. was thrilled to be asked. So, yeah. And thank you for asking me to do the podcast. I must appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks.