Arts-Based Methods in Medical Humanities

Relational Approaches to Health, Disability, and Knowledge

Abstract
This talk explores the value of arts-based research methods for the medical humanities, drawing on my work on disability (2009, 2013, 2019), affect (2013, 2023, 2025), and creative practice. Arts-based methods, including participatory performance, visual arts, storytelling, and collaborative media-making, offer ways of generating knowledge that exceed the limits of conventional biomedical and social science research. Rather than treating disability, illness, or care as objects of analysis alone, these approaches position creative practice as a mode of inquiry that produces relational, embodied, and affective knowledge. Drawing on my practice-based research with disabled artists and community-based arts organisations, I argue that arts-based research creates conditions for  “affective pedagogies”: processes through which participants generate new ways of feeling, knowing, and relating to bodies, difference, and care. In the context of the medical humanities, such practices shift attention away from deficit-oriented models of disability toward collaborative knowledge production that foregrounds creativity, agency, and collective expression.

The presentation examines how participatory arts practices can function as both research method and ethical framework. Through collaborative making: dance, drawing, film, and storytelling, participants produce forms of knowledge that are sensory, relational, and situated. These practices enable researchers and participants to explore experiences of illness, disability, and care in ways that resist reduction to clinical categories, instead highlighting the social and affective dimensions of health. Ultimately, the talk proposes arts-based research as a critical methodology for the medical humanities: one that challenges hierarchies of expertise, expands the epistemic scope of health research and foregrounds disabled people’s creative practices as sites of knowledge production. By centring artistic collaboration and affective encounter, arts-based methods offer powerful tools for reimagining how medical humanities research understands embodiment, difference, and care.