Abstract
One day, three feminist academics from different disciplinary backgrounds met over coffee on a health sciences campus. Keen to work collectively with medical students, they devised a four-week special study module (SSM) called ‘Intersecting Identities’ that combined a variation of Photovoice, a participatory action research method, with seminars on gender, ‘race’, class, sexual orientation, and other identities. The end results would include a photo exhibition open to the university community, and a portfolio of student’s work. Inherent in the SSM were tenets of feminist research and disciplinary curiosity encouraged by the field of medical and health humanities (MHH). In seeking ethics approval for the SSM, the shared challenges linked to feminist research and cross-disciplinary work in MHH was revealed. The ethics committee suggested that the SSM was ‘inherently biased’ and that there was ‘evidence of minimal objectivity, which is not what research demands’. This article contextualises the SSM in relation to the medical curriculum and the nascent field of MHH and then analyses the committee’s objections and the authors’ replies to them. A discourse analysis and examination of this correspondence provides insights into a case study of inherent epistemic disciplinary violence, pedagogical clashes, notions of ‘risk’ in research, and the long road towards epistemic generosity and reciprocity.
Highlights
One day, three feminist academics from different disciplinary backgrounds met over coffee on a health sciences campus
On an evening in 2016, the usually earnest atmosphere of an academic meeting and lecture venue was transformed by the sound of chatter, laughter, and exclamation, as people examined sketches of bones displayed on pin boards and observed, with varying degrees of interest, a group of students demonstrating a version of surya namaskar, the sun salutation, practised in yoga
A similar scene – one that disrupted the usual use of space and place – had occurred in 2015 in another venue where other images addressing the experiences of being medical students in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT), in South Africa, were exhibited (Figures 1 & 2)
Summary
On an evening in 2016, the usually earnest atmosphere of an academic meeting and lecture venue was transformed by the sound of chatter, laughter, and exclamation, as people examined sketches of bones displayed on pin boards and observed, with varying degrees of interest, a group of students demonstrating a version of surya namaskar, the sun salutation, practised in yoga. The intellectual considerations and orientations of the field, its development in English-speaking countries, and the relevance (or otherwise) of its emergence in South Africa and on the continent in relation to knowledge and other hierarchies, have been debated and considered Some of these discussions, along with examples of MHH in practice, form part of a special issue (SI) of the British Medical Journal’s Medical Humanities Journal to be published at the end of 2018. The primary ‘value’ that humanities, arts, social sciences, and experiences outside of academia bring to health sciences training and health care practices are, as Macnaughton argues education [as] a process, not a single objective’ that facilitates ‘personal development’ by allowing students to ‘consider different ways of perceiving the world’ and ‘encourage(s) a critical and questioning attitude’ (Macnaughton 2000: 25, 26). We were keen to work together on a collective project linked to health sciences education that would bring our individual interests, disciplinary expertise, and engagement with campus politics together while contributing to the development of MHH on the campus
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