Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities

Launched in October 2021, Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities is a series of urgent conversations on health, medicine, and medicalized bodies triangulating three areas of practice and scholarship, each with their own lineages, disciplinary ambits, and trajectories of remembering and forgetting.

Consisting of talks, workshops, readings, performances, and works-in-progress presentations, the series intends to make explicit the contributions that artists and art historians can make to debates and developments in critical medical humanities and, in turn, to offer ways of expanding the possibilities of art practice and art history.

Calling on artists and art historians who are ‘medical humanities curious’ as well as those who already identify with medical humanities, Confabulations aims to make and hold space for experimentation, risk, and dialogue in the hopes of fostering a community of practitioners and scholars interested in shaping future relations and interdependencies among art practice, art history, and critical medical humanities.

Confabulations is co-directed by

• Dr Fiona Johnstone (IMH Research Associate, University of Durham),
• Dr Allison Morehead (Queens University, Canada),
• Dr Imogen Wiltshire (University of Lincoln, formerly the University of Leicester), and supported by funding from Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and Leicester Wellcome Trust ISSF.

Find out about the forthcoming events in the Confabulations programme.