We are excited to announce as part of a team at the University of Leeds, we have secured £1 million in funding from global charitable foundation Wellcome to develop medical humanities research. 

The three-year development grant will be used to further understand the relationship between the human body and technologies associated with health and disability as part of a project called LivingBodiesObjects: Technology and the Spaces of Health.

Professor Stuart Murray, Director of the Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities, is joint leader of the research, alongside Dr Clare Barker and Dr Amelia DeFalco in the School of English, Dr Tom Jackson in the School of Media & Communication, Professor James Stark in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, and Faye Robinson from the University’s Research and Innovation Service.

We will lead the creative facilitation to develop an art science lab and host series of six-month residencies with an inspiring group of external partners – the Bhopal Medical Appeal, Blueberry Academy, Interplay Theatre and the Thackray Museum of Medicine.

“The funding is given specifically for groups of researchers who want the time and resources to produce highly innovative research that has the potential to reshape the field as a whole.

“Ultimately, this work will further understanding of the interaction between bodies, technologies and our response to health interventions.”

Medical humanities research at Leeds brings together researchers who work on a broad range of topics across the interaction between literature, history, culture and medicine and health. The group is one of the most active of its kind in the UK and uses the critical thinking practices of the arts and humanities to ask questions rooted in experiences, practices, representations and histories of medicine, health, illness, disability and care.

The Born in Bradford immersive experience explores the potential of immersive technologies to enable users to engage with large, multidimensional datasets in order to promote creative, flexible thinking about the world, society, and one’s place within it.

Born in Bradford is a world-leading longitudinal birth cohort study that tracks the lives of 13,818 individuals from birth to adulthood, and represents a powerful way of understanding the many influences that shape our lives.

The 2nd stage prototype is in early production working with 6 new Born in Bradford datasets and the Holmewood community. The project is sponsored by the Alan Turing Institute.

The Global Food and Environment Institute (GFEI) is an interdisciplinary research community, which brings together members from across academia, industry and public policy. We will be working to tell the story of their data, programmes and policy research using a fusion of drone mounted LIDAR and optical chemistry based sensors and new co-created data storytelling techniques.

We worked with the AHRC funded Landlines projects to co-develop a series of workshop materials exploring our connection to landscape. The story is told through a series of interviews with historians, curators, games keepers, farm managers. These diverse human relationships are juxtaposed with a series of realtime landscape explorations through a series of recorded through the eyes of the artist.