Plenary Session 1

What can the Medical Humanities Achieve, and for Whom? 'Hearing the Voice' as a Case Study

Date: 27 October, Friday | Time: 8:45am - 10:00am | Venue: LT4, Gaia, Nanyang Technological University

Speaker: Prof Angela Woods

Programme Description 

Hearing the Voice was a large, interdisciplinary research project on voice-hearing funded by the Wellcome Trust from 2012 to 2022. The project brought researchers in anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, history, linguistics, literary studies, sociology, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology and theology together with experts by experience, clinicians and artists to improve the way people understand, clinically treat and live with experiences of hearing voices.

This talk will present Hearing the Voice as a case study in radical interdisciplinarity by focusing on two key initiatives: Voices in Psychosis, a major longitudinal study with users of Early Intervention in Psychosis services in the North-East of England, and Hearing Voices: Suffering, Inspiration and the Everyday, the world's first exhibition on this topic. By starting with the experience of voice-hearing – as distinct from the clinical symptom of auditory verbal hallucination, or a diagnostic category such as schizophrenia – Hearing the Voice was able to pose new research questions and develop new methodological approaches. These, in turn, enabled us to reshape clinical understandings with tangible health benefits to individuals and communities. My talk will conclude with reflections on how Hearing the Voice has influenced other projects, including The Life of Breath and Shame and Medicine, making a major contribution to the wider landscape of the medical humanities.

Speaker Bio

Prof Angela Woods

Professor Angela Woods is a Professor of Medical Humanities and the Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Her main research interests and expertise span three areas: the interplay between clinical, experiential and cultural-theoretical accounts of voice-hearing and psychosis; narrative and its role in understanding health; and the dynamics of interdisciplinary and collaborative research. Her first book The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory was published by Oxford University Press, and her co-edited volume The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities is regarded as inaugurating the field's second 'critical' wave. Professor Angela was the Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, a project which won the prize for Best Research in the 2020 Medical Humanities Research Awards. From September 2023 she will direct the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities funded by a £9m award from the Wellcome Trust.

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