Creativity and the Medical Humanities

How can the arts and humanities positively influence our relationship with medicalised environments? Join creative writers, a cultural historian and a digital health sociologist in this episode to explore just some of the answers to this question. You’ll hear from playwright Madeleine Border, currently authoring a play (The Last Supper (TBC)) set in a palliative care ward, Bianca Millroy, currently authoring a work of creative non-fiction (Head of Fog) about Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), and two members from the Queensland Museum Project profiled in the last season of Creative Flourishing, Giselle Newton and Elizabeth Stephens, who use humanities methods to understand issues around health and medicine. Throughout, you’ll grasp how creative and humanities approaches can surface and reshape medical narratives to allow invisible groups to gain visibility and to facilitate community flourishing. This episode is hosted by Emma Cole, and edited and mastered by Anthony Frangi. Matt Bapty is the Creative Flourishing research assistant.  You can find out more about Madeleine Border's work on her website: https://www.madeleineborder.com/. You can listen to Bianca Millroy's podcast, Science Write Now, online here: https://www.sciencewritenow.com/listen (look for the episodes titled “Cognitive Conversations” or visit the curated playlist of episodes on Spotify). You can also read more about Bianca's work here: https://sciencewritenow.com/people/bianca-millroy.

Did you know that the oldest digital humanities project in Australia is the AustLit database? This database of Australian literature and storytelling operates on a networked data model and has over one million work records.  In this episode you’ll hear from AustLit Director Maggie Nolan, Gamilaraay scholar and BlackWords coordinator Dominique Chen, and creative writer, researcher, and AustLit user Matt Bapty. You’ll learn about how this piece of digital infrastructure can reshape our understanding about creative writing in Australia, and about the different datasets and projects it houses, from Blackwords, to the Australian Drama Project, to the in-development Women in Brisbane project. This definitive biographical and bibliographical database not only documents Australia’s literary culture but also makes connections between agents and works. It generates possibilities for future creative arts research and practice, including via the AustLit Creative Writing fellowships, which since recording have been funded by the Copyright Agency and will lead to two new creative works arising out of the AustLit database. This episode is hosted by Emma Cole, and edited and mastered by Anthony Frangi. Matt Bapty is the Creative Flourishing research assistant.  AustLit is available through subscribing libraries, schools, educational institutions, and other organisations and can be accessed online here. 

How does art represent grief? And how can making art help us process trauma? Creative Flourishing returns for Season Two to explore how connecting grief with creativity can help us to find purpose, meaning, and connection in the midst of suffering and pain, preserving vulnerability and emotion and allowing us to be alive, rather than numb, to the full spectrum of our experiences.   Join creative writer Lesel Dawson and filmmaker Jimmy Hay to discuss how creativity can help us process grief and visualise the unnameable. You’ll hear about the work of the Good Grief Festival, Lesel and Jimmy’s collaboration on the film Lost Property, and the way they move between their work as scholars and creative practitioners whilst navigating a field that can cut close to the bone.    This episode is produced in partnership with the University of Bristol’s Centre for Grief Research and Engagement. The episode is hosted by Emma Cole, and edited and mastered by Anthony Frangi. Matt Bapty is the Creative Flourishing research assistant.    Details about the Good Grief festival are available here. The film Lost Property can be watched here. You can read about the Bristol Centre for Grief Research and Engagement here. You can also read Lesel's recent article 'Grief, Creativity, and Ambiguity: The 'as if' of Artistic Play' here. 

Museums are archives which preserve objects that define historical and cultural events. We visit museum exhibitions to learn about the world's present and past and to come face-to-face with artefacts that played a role in history. But what happens when these artefacts only tell part of a story, or give one demographic's perspective? How do we fill these gaps in the archive, to make museums inclusive spaces where all demographics can see themselves reflected?   This episode dives into a reverse collecting project which originated from a gap in Queensland Museum's collection relating to maternity and motherhood. Join Queensland Museum Senior Curator Liz Bissell, UQ's Director of Museum Studies Caroline Wilson-Barnao, and expert on museum experiences outside of traditional museum environments Lisa Enright to learn more about how they are changing this narrative by sourcing more representative objects and stories. We also hear from Margaret Henderson, an expert on women's and feminist writing, who talks about her efforts to bring together a collection of second-wave feminist objects for the National Museum. This episode is hosted by Emma Cole, and edited and mastered by Anthony Frangi. Matt Bapty is the Creative Flourishing research assistant. 

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Australian audiences encountered Greek tragedy in mainstage theatres in domesticated adaptations more than in any other format. Medea was a popular source text, whether in Wesley Enoch's adaptation, which collides Euripides' and Seneca's material with a narrative about intergenerational cycles of violence in Indigenous Australian communities, or Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks' pressure cooker of a play, where audiences watch the last hour of Medea's children's lives play out in real time. This episode explores a new Australian adaptation of Medea which explodes the myth out in the opposite direction, towards the epic rather than the domestic. Co-created by Australian playwright Tom Holloway and classicist Emma Cole, Medea in Exile is a trilogy of plays about Medea, built from lost and forgotten narratives from antiquity preserved in tragic fragments, quotations from ancient mythographers, and material evidence. Join us as we journey through the history of Australian adaptations of Greek tragedy in the twenty-first century, where we touch upon Tom's prior works Don't Say The Words (from Aeschylus' Agamemnon) and Love Me Tender (from Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis), and consider the enduring appeal of using theatre to explore grief and to purge or cleanse us of our emotions.   This episode is produced in partnership with the Assemblage Centre for Creative Practice Research at Flinders University and is guest hosted by Professor Chris Hay, Director of Assemblage. 

Symmetry is all around us. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, from the legend of Pythagoras through to Galileo and Descartes, it has been theorised through science and embodied through music. But how are the creative arts responding to symmetry today? Can the concept help communities to flourish, enriching them through the arts whilst educating them about maths? In this episode mathematician Artem Pulemotov and musicologist Denis Collins join host Emma Cole to discuss how the concept of symmetry can bridge the divide between arts and science. We explore Artem and Denis' unique partnership and how it has led to the commission of two new compositions, by Nicole Murphy and Robert Davidson, which seek to render the transformations behind multidimensional symmetry systems sonically. Join us to hear excerpts from both compositions, performed by acclaimed ensemble Topology, and to consider the public engagement benefits behind rendering mathematics through music.  This episode features performances from Christa Powell (violin), John Babbage (soprano saxophone), Robert Davidson (bass guitar), and Therese Milanovic (piano). Geoff McGahan is the recording engineer for the musical excerpts from Typology, and Anthony Frangi edited and mastered the overall episode. Matt Bapty is the Creative Flourishing research assistant. 

How do we live in an age of uncertain futures? Can we reconcile the different strategies people deploy to future-proof their lives, from the billionaires building bunkers through to prepper subcultures and sovereign citizens? And might the creative arts, if not answer these questions, provide a way into thinking through these questions, to help us live with our anxiety about humanity's future?   In this episode creative non-fiction author Tom Doig and playwright Oliver Gough join hosts Matthew Bapty and Emma Cole to discuss how creative writing intersects with the theme of apocalyptic futures. Tom shares insights into the work he is doing for his next book, We Are All Preppers Now, playing field recordings for listeners from prepper communities and humanising the individuals behind the headlines. Meanwhile, Oliver explores the particular valency of playwriting as a form of creative writing for thinking through the climate crisis. We end the episode with a reading of Oliver's monologue I am the Oil. Lend us your ears as we explore how creative writing for the page and the stage can help us grapple with unknown and even apocalyptic futures.

Archie Moore's kith and kin took the 2024 Venice Biennale by storm, winning Australia its very first Golden Lion for best national participation. The exhibition, curated by Ellie Buttrose, involved Moore turning the Australia Pavilion into an immersive genealogical history, with his chalk-drawn family tree covering the walls and ceiling of the venue and documenting 65,000 years of First Nations history. Contrasting against the personal documentation was a political one; in the centre of the Pavilion, atop tables stood in a pool of dark water, lay coroner reports from 1991-2023 dating between the release of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and when the artist produced the work.  In this episode art historian Andrea Bubenik joins theatre historian, dramaturg, and translator Emma Cole to discuss this monumental artwork, to coincide with the exhibition's opening at QAGOMA. Andrea takes listeners to Venice, where we hear UQ students' first impressions upon emerging from the Pavilion, and interviews Buttrose about her collaboration with Moore and the process behind curating kith and kin. Dive into this exploration of curation and creation as artistic practice, and come with us as we consider the flourishing dimension to artworks that encourage contemplation and empathy to help us live generously.