17 December 2018 Say AAHH #2: “Nothing about us without us!”

Date: 17 December
Time: 17:00 – 18:30
Location: Spui 25, Amsterdam

Say AAHH #2: “Nothing about us without us!”: Radical participation and arts-based methods in health research.

The carer and the cared-for, the healer and the sick, doctor and patient: one has historically been seen as invested with the knowledge and often the power, the other as taking on a passive role. But the focus is shifting. As bridges between the humanities, the arts and medical research connect and inform each discipline, disrupting traditional hierarchies and blazing a trail towards participation and inclusion.

This evening we discussed how arts-based and creative methods in participatory action research can question exclusionary understandings of legitimate medical knowledge, question oppressive medical hierarchies, and disrupt the patient-researcher binary. The following brief lectures invited a roundtable and audience members to subsequent debate:

1. KLIK. Photovoice and photography in community health promotion with children, by Tineke Abma and Janine Schrijver.

2. Negotiating health. Intersections of ethnicity and gender in precarious work, by Saskia Duijs.

3. Participatory art-based health research with unemployed people: lived experiences as legitimate knowledge, by Barbara Groot-Sluijsmans.

What does it mean to be healthy? How can we promote better practices of wellbeing and care? In what ways can the arts and new technology challenge stigmas about mental and physical health? These were but a few of the questions the Arts and Health Humanities series “Say AAHH!” addressed in a series of five sessions from November 2018 – May 2019.

“Say AAHH!”
This event was part of “Say AAHH!”: 5 evenings on Arts and the Health Humanities organised by ARIAS & SPUI25, convened by Erin La Cour and Maaike Muntinga.