On Monday, 1st July 2024, the IHSS Health and Humanities Research Forum convened the last event in their series Future Collaborations in the Health Humanities supported by the Enhancing Research & Innovation Cultures Fund (ERIC): a half-day workshop to collaboratively decide on a future direction for this platform at QMUL. Following two wonderfully productive interdisciplinary events earlier in the term—one on the future of the Barts Pathology Museum, the other discussing the concept of ‘empathy’—the workshop discussed how a cross-faculty health humanities research platform might be sustained. Building on the networks grown through the first two workshops, Forum's third event attracted attendees from across QMUL: from the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences to Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry (including the Wolfson Institute, the Blizzard Institute and the Centre of the Cell).
The ERIC funding enabled the workshop organisers to bring in creative facilitator Dr Bentley Crudgington of the Institute of Medical Humanities at Durham, who has extensive expertise in guiding productive, collegiate interdisciplinary discussions. With Bentley’s help, they collectively drew up a plan for where they wanted the HHRF to be in two years' time. As with the previous two workshops, Monday’s event again illustrated the variety of exciting and necessary ‘Health and Humanities’ work already existing at QMUL but also the potential for fresh research with an ever-expanding list of stakeholders and potential collaborators. Ideas for how to steer the Forum forwards include: a monthly newsletter, regular online writing slots, and a new website. The Forum conveners started creating a steering committee (which started the work in September 2024) to lead the Forum’s future activities.