Health Humanities

Ce travail s’intéresse à la poétique de la dissociation mise en œuvre par Helen Cooper dans sa pièce Three Women and a Piano Tuner (2004). Réunies pour mettre en commun leurs talents respectifs de compositrice, pianiste et productrice autour d’un projet de concert, les trois femmes de la pièce font émerger à la surface un trauma enfoui : en constant désaccord, Ella (figure de la mère), Liz (figure de l’amazone), et Beth (figure de la prostituée) matérialisent en réalité trois versions possibles du personnage unique mais intimement divisé d’Elisabeth, dont le fils possible est accordeur de piano. Dans cette pièce marquée par la prolifération du même – non pas idem, mais ipse – comme figure du clivage, où la métaphore musicale sert à évoquer le phénomène de dissonance cognitive, chacune incarne un mécanisme de défense spécifique en réaction à l’inceste subi à l’adolescence par la protagoniste. A la minimisation (Ella), au refoulement (Beth) et à l’exagération (Liz), s’articulent ainsi trois chemins de vie éventuels ou fantasmés mis en dialogue. Cette concurrence permet de dramatiser un conflit intérieur en quête de résolution, en mettant en scène les forces psychiques contradictoires, conscientes et inconscientes, qui animent ce personnage féminin, dont le choix ultime entre plusieurs options – garder l’enfant de l’inceste, le donner à adopter ou bien avorter – semble simultanément avoir déjà été fait et se reporter à l’infini. C’est autour de cette décision laissée hors du temps, qui se cristallise en creux sur la figure du fils reléguée en arrière-plan, dans l’espace du hors-scène, alors qu’il travaille sur l’instrument désaccordé, que s’élaborent les versions multiples du drame originel et d’un personnage féminin dissocié qui vise sa propre réconciliation. Redonnant symboliquement voix à un drame passé sous silence, le seul personnage masculin de la pièce illustre, par son travail, le patient processus de réparation du trauma, alors même que son existence à lui se révèle incertaine, terriblement « optionnelle ». Figure de hantise, l’accordeur de piano apparaît donc comme le maillon central qui à la fois œuvre à cette intime harmonie et l’empêche, invitant par ailleurs à réfléchir sur le processus d’écriture dramatique et le statut du personnage de théâtre, toujours en attente d’incarnation, jamais pleinement actualisé, suspendu entre la page et la scène. La métaphore musicale qui parcourt la pièce, depuis la présence en filigrane de l’accordeur jusqu’à la scène finale du concert, permet ainsi de travailler la figure du rhapsode conceptualisée par Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, qui traduit ici le travail de réintégration psychologique du Réel dans l’ordre Symbolique (Lacan). À la fin de la pièce, l’apparition de Harold, qui répète les gestes d’un père incestueux qu’il n’a pas connu, offre la vision d’un mimétisme impossible : cette coïncidence signifiante, ou « synchronicité » (Jung), évoque la dimension transgénérationnelle du trauma et laisse présager le retour du même. Elle renouvelle ainsi le sens du tragique sur la scène contemporaine en ouvrant l’espace du doute, des probabilités et du malaise. Dès lors, l’incertitude se donne comme la modalité ultime d’un réalisme traumatique de la scène qui, en interrogeant la vérité impossible du sujet, relocalise le drame de l’humain dans l’indéterminé, ce dont l’accordeur de piano, œuvrant dans l’ombre des dissonances, se fait l’image.

Depuis quelques décennies, les théâtres du traumatisme et de la maladie mentale donnent une visibilité de plus en plus accrue à la souffrance psychologique et au trouble psychiatrique sur la scène contemporaine. Dans cette mouvance, un certain nombre de pièces de nature souvent expérimentale insèrent des thèmes, des références et des matériaux issus du domaine de la santé mentale dans les multiples formes qu'elle prend aujourd'hui pour donner la parole à une psyché en détresse – celle, le plus souvent, de personnages féminins. Qu'il s'agisse de psychiatrie, de psychologie clinique, de psychanalyse ou encore de psychothérapie, on trouve ainsi dans des pièces récentes de la scène européenne une assimilation des discours de la médecine et des sciences cognitives. Ces théâtres offrent ainsi une réflexion sur les traumatismes psychologiques et les difficultés existentielles du sujet féminin malade, dont le corps s'efface et dont la voix fragile s'élève sur scène pour dire le drame intérieur de l'errance mentale et/ou du trouble psychique, voire de la pathologie identifiée. Le présent article propose une étude des diverses approches de la maladie mentale et des troubles post-traumatiques adoptées par quatre auteurs contemporains de la scène européenne : les auteurs britanniques Sarah Kane et Martin Crimp, l'homme de théâtre français Gildas Milin, et la dramaturge italienne Francesca Volchitza Cabrini. Les pièces de ces auteurs illustrent à différents niveaux et de différentes manières mais non sans points de convergence forts la façon dont des objets empruntés aux champs de la médecine et de la psychiatrie sont récupérés, dramatisés et mis en scène par le théâtre contemporain. L'originalité commune de ces écritures réside dans le fait qu'elles puisent toutes dans la littérature théorique ou clinique de la psychologie pour recycler des matériaux essentiellement verbaux issus du domaine de la santé mentale et les transformer en poésie de la scène. Cette « psychopoésie » dit la gravité du malaise qui hante l’individu en ce début du XXIème siècle, tout en explorant la nature et les limites de l’humain poussé dans des situations psychologiques extrêmes. Par contraste ou en dialogue avec les discours et les pratiques de la médecine, la psychopathologie devient ressource psychopoétique et se donne ainsi comme une matière qui renouvelle, dans leurs formes aussi bien que dans leurs contenus, le langage, l’écriture et la structure du drame contemporain.

This article considers nineteenth-century Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s portrayal of pediatric illness in his renowned collection of poetry, 'A Child’s Garden of Verses' (1885). Stevenson, who suffered frequently from poor health, drew upon his own experience to give voice to youthful narrators whose resilience is due in part to their ability to conceptualise and interact with generative spaces beyond the physical limitations of illness-induced isolation. For these children, the enactment of therapeutic adventuring into imaginative realms leads to vibrant engagement with the world beyond their immediate settings and, ultimately, to a more hopeful outlook.

Ce livre propose un regard novateur sur les liens entre la littérature et le monde de la santé contemporain. Les façons traditionnelles de représenter et surtout de raconter le corps humain sont bouleversées par le progrès des technologies de visualisation médicale qui vont s’accélérant aujourd’hui. La notion même de personnage littéraire se voit confrontée à des images et des aspects du corps qui, morcelées, atomisés, amplifiées, ou transplantées, lui sont devenus problématiques. Conscient des siècles d’interrelations ente la littérature et la médecine qui nous précèdent, il n’en faut pas moins réapprendre à lire ce corps biomédical qui nous embrasse et sans doute plus que jamais, aujourd’hui, nous définit de la naissance à la mort. À partir du contexte Canadien exemplaire pour son système de santé en Amérique du Nord, les dix collaborateurs à ce livre offrent des textes qui entendent faire date en ce domaine. 

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This book offers a new look on the relations between literature and the domain of health today. Today the progresses in health care visualization technologies are widening the scope of our knowledge of the human body by breaking it down into its smaller components: limbs, organs, molecules. But from the standpoint of storytelling and the literary character, there are consequences that we are barely beginning to perceive. While mindful of the rich tradition of literary writing and the representations of medicine, we must nonetheless learn to read the biomedical body anew in our day and age where it arguably contributes more than ever before in defining who we are, from birth to death. Drawing on a corpus of contemporary Canadian works that dare to question this country’s exemplary health care system, the ten collaborators to this book propose ground-breaking new paths in the approach of the biomedical body in literature.

In this issue, we have drawn together the voices and perspectives of stakeholders in baccalaureate education: from first-year college students to medical residents, practicing dieticians, pharmacists, and nurses; program administrators; and educators with diverse back-grounds in clinical practice and humanities scholarship. Each brings a fresh perspective to the practice of the field. Placed in conversation, these voices raise key questions about the field as a whole: its scope, disciplinary positioning, aims, methods, and assessment of impact. This introduction documents the growth and diversity of Medical/Health Humanities education as of 2017. Since then, programs have continued to increase at the baccalaureate level (see Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs in the U.S. and Canada, CWRU, 2021 update).

While New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology have provided frameworks to consider human relationships to nonhuman beings and objects in the twenty-first century, scientists and authors explored similar ethical dilemmas brought about by the newly identified presence of microorganisms in what had previously been imagined as a human world at the turn of the twentieth century. This essay considers Mark Twain's later fiction alongside contemporaneous American bacteriologist, Herbert W. Conn. Already invested in undermining human exceptionalism through scalar differences in his Mysterious Stranger manuscripts (1897-1908), Twain adapts Conn's bacteriology to experiment with microbial ethics in Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes (1905). While Conn uses microbes to assert scientific mastery and professional authority, Twain uses them to experiment with ethical structures on inhuman scales. This essay argues that the failures of Twain's imaginative experiment dramatize the practical challenges to radically inclusive ethical structures proposed by New Materialists and others.

Review of the HBO film that premiered on April 22, 2017; includes interview comments by a Lacks family member.

Citation: Berry, Sarah L. "_The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks_." Review of _The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, HBO, directed by George C. Wolfe. _The Pharos_, vol. 80, no. 3, Summer 2017, pp. 47-49.

Syllabus for a first year writing course at Georgia Tech where students analyzed print and digital comics about mental illness in preparation for creating their own digital research-based comics designed to raise awareness about mental health issues and resources for the Georgia Tech Counseling Center. Taught in Fall 2018.

Graphic medicine embodies a nuanced understanding of illness about the
undercurrents in the systems of healthcare and society. Depression narratives
in graphic medicine, a conspicuous subset of mental illness narratives, work in
tandem with the existing oeuvre of verbal narratives and move beyond them to
deliver and map the disordered mind’s complexities. These graphic expositions
inculcate an ethos often glossed over by biomedicine and, in so doing, validate
the patient experience either for its universality or singularity. Reflective of the
widespread attitudes towards the illness, Clay Jonathan’s Depression Comix (2011),
a webcomic on depression, deals with the intricate inner lives of subjects
belonging to a heterogeneous society. Depression Comix is a saga of telltale
clues of depression covering the sufferers’ intrapersonal and interpersonal
lives in elaborate ways. From an impersonal point of view, the author deftly
employs conventional and innovative metaphors to concretize the mental
conditions and emphasize the diversity of illness experience and its challenges
as perceived by the general population. The use of metaphor, the article argues,
accentuates, and facilitates the visual narration of illness as it concretizes the
phenomenologically intense experience of depression. The present article
revisits the theoretical postulates of George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson theorizes
verbo-visual metaphors as deployed in Jonathan’s Depression Comix to delineate
the representational, aesthetic, and figural aspects of depression.

Pandemics and epidemics have always shaped our history. Throughout recorded human history, periodic outbreaks of catastrophic pandemics and epidemics have threatened human existence on this planet and have been a regular reminder of our mortality and vulnerability in the face of nature’s calamities, including deadly diseases. These episodes have often shown the limitations of human knowledge, particularly advancements in science to fortify against the violence of new and often deadly pathogens. At the same time, pandemics and epidemics have also been formative moments of human history, ushering in momentous transformations in the ways in which we live and relate to each other. They have provided opportunities to gain new insights into the human body and how it functions, as well as reflect on the ways in which societies and communities form and interact.

Mental disorders affect not only individual well-being but also community health, which pushes mental care professionals to investigate various solutions to accommodate different needs. The exercise of Baduanjin, a form of Qigong, facilitates improvements in psychological health, potentially serving as an alternative choice for interventions. This comprehensive review analyses 28 publications, among which three are in English and 25 in Chinese, these indicating enhancement in quality of life and mental health for a variety of participants, including college students, middle-aged individuals, the elderly, and patients who suffer from different mental problems or chronic physical illnesses. The outcomes suggest that this cost-effective, learner-friendly and self-pacing exercise should be promoted in individual and group settings for both curative and preventive measures, and for which further investigations are also recommended.

Disability memoir writing, and especially disability autobiography, is one of the most high-profile forms of disability narrative, frequently reaching wide audiences. Typically, disability positions are marginalized positions, where identity (especially medical identity) has been the product of outside examination and classification. In life writing, disability autobiographers work from this initial position of pre-inscription and seek to destigmatize their conditions, responding to wider cultural misrepresentations about the nature of a life lived with disability. This chapter will explore a variety of life writing narratives, covering physical, cognitive and learning disabilities, intersecting with chronic illness, and written by friends/family members as well as those who are themselves disabled. It will introduce readers to the methods through which disability life writers assume the subject position in the process of reclaiming their own narratives, a form of autoethnography that revises generic ideas about what life and memoir writing are, and will reveal this to be a political as well as an aesthetic act, a process of speaking for as well as speaking about the experience of a disability life. It will have specific foci – on the body, questions of metaphor, the paradigm of self representation, and the complex questions surrounding ‘collaboration’ or co-authored stories – as they are narrativized in texts. It will collect these under the umbrella idea of signification and assert that a major product of disability of life writing is the emphasis on the presence and significance of people with disabilities, acknowledged both as skilled writers and in the wider context of society.

This edited volume analyses how artists, authors, and cultural practitioners have responded to and represented episodes of epidemics/pandemics through history. Covering a broad range of notable epidemics/pandemics (black death, cholera, Influenza, AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19), the chapters examine the cultural representations of epidemics and pandemics in different contexts, periods, languages, media, and genres. Interdisciplinary in nature and drawing on perspectives from medicine, literature, medical anthropology, philosophy of medicine, and cultural theory, the book investigates and emphasizes the urgent need to reflect on past catastrophes caused by such outbreaks. By delving into cultural history, it re-examines how societies and communities have responded in the past to species-threatening epidemics/pandemics. Sure to be of interest to lay readers as well as students and researchers, this work situates epidemics and pandemics outbreaks within the contexts of culture and narrative, and their complex and layered representation, commenting on intersections of contagion, culture, and community. It offers a cross-cultural, global, and comparative analysis of the trajectories, histories and responses to various epidemics/pandemics that impacted people worldwide.

Indian Folk Art and COVID-19 blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2022/01/18/indian-folk-art-and-covid-19/ Blog by Sathyaraj Venkatesan The present piece offers a brief graphic analysis of two COVID-19 related folk painting representing two major artistic traditions in India-patachitra and mithila-in order to demonstrate how these paintings, through using Hindu religious codes and stories, imagine the current pandemics. Before I do so, it would be instructive to offer a brief background of these art traditions.

Abstract
          The Mahabharata is generally interpreted as a discourse on caste construction and the respective duties. However, I have attempted to examine the Mahabharata to show how it projects the wild as an indispensable entity even for the existence of the urbanity amidst the growing human fascination of cultivation, possession, and empire formation. My argument has grown up after a thorough study of the text in which the characters living in the wild forests come out to be more powerful and more knowledgeable whereas those in the palaces and cities meet a destructive end. While exploring in this problem, the research came to a finding that the cause behind this problem is in cultivation. Cultivation, on the one hand leads to the notion of possession and hence inclusion, exclusion, deprivation, conflicts, and wars. The uncultivated wilderness does not include or exclude any creatures or humans on the basis of caste, class, nationality or sexuality. Nor does it have the exclusive anthropocentric notion of rationalism. In the wild, all creatures live abiding by the law of nature privileging true equality, inclusion, freedom, harmony, and justice contented with their real share. On the other hand, artificial cultivation leads to lack of the basic thing provided by nature. The artificially cultivated food stuffs are far weak in their nourishing and healing capacity compared to the wildly self-grown plants and food supplements. Thus the uncultivated self-existent wild is to be redefined amidst our notion of the wild as something barbarous, uncontrolled, fierce, dangerous and should be established as something really essential. Without the wild, existence of no life is possible. To convey such a message that the wild is truly essential for the sake of human health, for ecological harmony, and thus for the health of the planet, it is necessary that the ancient texts like the Mahabharata in which characters spend their significant life spans in harmony with wild nature should be preserved, translated, reproduced, and disseminated along with which new art genres including films and documentaries about the wild should be juxtaposed in university courses.

La question de l’utopie est appréhendée de façon critique dans les textes dramatiques que nous abordons ici. Tout en s’inscrivant dans des perspectives différentes, les pièces contemporaines des Britanniques Martin Crimp (Atteintes à sa vie, Face au Mur) et Sarah Kane (Purifiés, Manque, 4.48 Psychose), celles du Français Gildas Milin (Anthropozoo, L’Homme de Février) et de l’Italienne Francesca Volchitza Cabrini (Si tu me regardes, j’existe) renouvellent l’angle d’approche de l’utopie sur la scène européenne en interrogeant les ressorts des pathologies qui peuvent découler des utopies collectives ou individuelles que notre époque voit apparaître. Ecrites entre 1997 et 2008, ces pièces nous offrent, par-delà leurs divergences, des tableaux ou des discours utopiques qui donnent lieu à des situations pathologiques, ou bien inversement réfléchissent des situations pathologiques favorisant des projections utopiques. Sans constituer pour autant des dystopies, elles pointent du doigt notamment les pathologies mentales qui se développent chez le sujet contemporain, soit en les dénonçant derrière l’affirmation satirique d’apparences sociales heureuses et prospères (l’harmonie de façade dans les comédies de menace de Crimp), soit en exposant la tragédie d’idéaux fantasmés et hors d’atteinte dans un cadre explicitement pathologique (la psychose chez Kane, l’anorexie chez Cabrini), soit encore en proposant d’investiguer « la part d’incertitude, de chaos, d’aléatoire que la science accepte aujourd’hui pour décrire au mieux la créativité de la nature » à travers des visions futuristes techno-scientifiques du monde qui se révèlent profondément ambivalentes (Milin). Il s’agit avant tout de travailler une écriture réflexive qui, autour de personnages principaux féminins, « soulève des questions essentielles sur le monde dans lequel nous vivons » (Martin Crimp) dans des registres allant du satirique au tragique en passant par une vraie poésie du langage. Au final, le rapport ironique de ces pièces à l’utopie reflète essentiellement l’angoisse sous-jacente, caractéristique de notre époque, qui est aussi bien la source que le produit des projections mentales et des fantasmes pathologiques qui constituent le motif central de ces textes pour la scène.

This essay reads Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) against the backdrop of the United States’ well-documented patterns of unconstrained experimentation on racial-minority patients. The essay focuses specifically on contexts of mid-century eugenics, which exposed black Americans, often women, to nonconsensual and nontherapeutic surgical procedures. I argue that Home is not only informed by these traumatic histories of medical violence but is also able to construct an ethics of care out of them through the imperative of loving mean–a de-idealized love concerned less with sympathy than with survival. In so doing, the novel advances intersubjective forms of healing that challenge the systemic roots of reproductive racism and make possible the potential for meaningful recovery from both physical and historical trauma.

COURSE DESCRIPTION This seminar examines the history of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the U.S., including religious and moral constructions of AIDS amid the infamous (and ongoing) "culture wars." We pay special attention to the work of feminist and queer AIDS activists and artists in fostering alternative moral and political visions of disease, sexuality, and health. We will read academic scholarship on the AIDS crisis, religion, and art alongside AIDS memoirs and literary and artistic texts. In addition, we will watch several AIDS documentaries over the course of the semester, from higher-budget productions to grassroots films. While this course is focused on the AIDS crisis in the U.S., we will also keep COVID in view and think through comparisons and contrasts between these two global pandemics. This course meets the BU Hub learning outcomes for Historical Consciousness, Oral/Sign Communication, and Critical Thinking.

While there are several studies that focus on care settings in relation to verbal narratives, only a few studies have paid attention to how comics in general, and graphic medicine in particular, engage critical care environments and settings. Drawing strengths from the underground and alternative comics and capitalizing on health humanities, graphic medicine, a recent development in the comics genre, concentrates on the issues related to health, illness, and care. Coined by Ian Williams in 2007, graphic medicine refers to the intersection of comics and concerns of healthcare. Graphic medicine has always engaged informal, formal, and biomedical caregiving settings. Against this backdrop, the present article, drawing on relevant theoretical debates on spatial studies and care, examines Stan Mack's Janet& Me (2004), Joyce Farmer's Special Exits (2014), and Sarah Leavitt's Tangles (2012). In so doing, the article seeks to delineate care facilities (family, hospitals, among others) and their impact on patients.

Though COVID-19 is touted as a great leveler, it has disproportionately
impacted the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities
putting them more at risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19. Taking this
cue, the chapter through close reading selected graphic medical narratives (intersection
of comics and healthcare) seeks to foreground the experiential and affective
responses of the BIPOC sufferers. In order to do so, the article utilizes the concepts
of precarity (Judith Butler), syndemics (Merrill Singer), and intersectionality. The
chapter concludes in showing how graphic medical narratives mark the health of
BIPOCs as a decisive consequence of our relations within the complex architectures
of various actors, networks, and (racial and colonial) histories.

This publication documents an international exhibition and symposium that offer frameworks for examining linkages, experiences, visualisations and productive imaginings at the nexus of the health humanities, design and community engagement. 32 international designers and artists are featured with an introduction by Alan Bleakley.

Exhibition curated by Aidan Rowe, Bonnie Sadler Takach and Pamela Brett-MacLean.

A considerable amount of research has reported on the effects of Taiji exercise on physical health, which also benefits psychological welfare.  The present comprehensive review delves into the effectiveness of Taiji on mental well-being from 21 projects (n=13 in English, n=8 in Chinese) conducted in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Results indicate marked outcomes of this body-mind exercise, as associated with mental wellness across various age groups, including general mental health and particular mental illnesses.  They therefore reveal practical, theoretical and methodological implications, which also hint at future research directions.  In conclusion, Taiji is likely applicable to mental health promotion in the sense of both curative and preventive purposes, although further exploration is proposed.

The mental illness narratives in graphic medicine navigate us through the experience of the patients and caregivers and complement the clinical perspective. These illness narratives showcase distinct challenges the patients face through the various phases such as diagnosis and treatment, including medication and institutionalisation. The neoliberal market advances in medicine have promoted indiscriminate commercialisation in healthcare. As the medical speciality dealing with mental illnesses, psychiatry’s increasing affiliation to chemical cure has realigned the treatment system in the latter half of the twentieth century towards increased pharmaceutical consumption. Graphic pathographies, Clem Martini and Olivier Martini’s Bitter Medicine, Rachel Lindsay’s Rx, and Tatiana Gill’s Head Meds and Other Stories explore the experiential aspects of mental illness emphasising the authors’ predicament with psychiatric drugs. Drawing theoretical insights of Nikolas Rose and Elizabeth Freudenthal, this research article examines the impact of relentless commercialisation of pharmaceuticals and its impact on individuals with mental illness as visually deliberated in the above graphic memoirs. By closely reading several instances from the texts, the present article highlights the complex networks of biomedicine, commercialisation, and contested selfhood.

This article aims to theorise the human experiences of time during the lockdown (in the first phase of the pandemic) and the COVID-19 pandemic through the verbo-visual exposition of graphic medicine that combines the medium of comics and healthcare. The event of the pandemic has not only bifurcated our perception of time in terms of a 'before' and an 'after' but also complicated our awareness and experience of time. Put differently, an epochal transformation caused by pandemics has shifted our temporal experience from the calendar/clock time to a queer time situated outside of formal time-related constructions. The pandemic also implies a dismantling and rearranging of the fundamental structures of time within which human beings interacted with the world. Such a discontinuity in the linear trajectory of chronological time engenders an epistemic and ontological reconfiguration of the very sense of time itself. Through a phenomenological close reading of various sequential comics, single panelled images and graphic medical narratives, this article investigates how visual narratives in the form of comics communicate the passage of time. Categorically speaking, pandemic graphic narratives on time draw attention to stagnation, repetition, acceleration, loss of referentiality and the queerness (strangeness) of pandemic time. The article argues that a shift in the perception of time precipitates an altered spatiotemporal awareness that informs postpandemic discourses and power structures.

Historicity is a key epistemological component of the definition of “science” proposed by authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, and partially accepted by the Brazilian Collective Health builders. What we call the “historicity awareness” of Collective Health is the field’s recognition that there is no knowledge of health without history and that its history interferes with its results, with the conceptualization of its objects, its cognitive and technological practices, and the feasibility of its promises of enhancing the quality of life towards an equal society. This helps explain why Humanities in general and History, in particular, are ubiquitous to Health Education, where they are known as Health and Medical Humanities or, as is more usual in Brazil, Human and Social Sciences in Health. They helped to imagine an equitable health care system of which the concrete manifestation, however imperfect, is the Brazilian Unified National Health System, the SUS. Health Humanities, Medical Humanities, and History of Science and Technology are all interdisciplinary fields that challenge historiography and theory of history to look beyond the borders of our normative understanding of the historian’s professional identity – which legitimacy is achieved through specific academic training – to properly evaluate the multiple expressions of society’s relationships and engagements with history and time.

To grasp the connectedness of our thoughts, feelings and senses as they are implicated in embodied movement we need more nuanced ways of thinking sport and physical culture as phenomena that materialize through complex biopsychosocial relations (as distinct from biopsy models of illness and treatment). In this chapter I take up the question of how embodied movement matters in mental health with respect to the materiality of all knowledge practices (science and social science, qualitative and quantitative research). I argue through a diffractive analysis that embodied movement practices can be thought of as phenomena that are co-implicated in the performance of recovery from depression. I draw together several trajectories of thought that emerge from Karen Barad’s (2007, 2003) diffractive analysis as well as Deleuze and Guattari and feminist readings concerned with affective relations and assemblages (Fox & Alldred, 2016; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Coleman and Ringrose, 2013). Through post-qualitative inquiry I explore how embodied movement is co-implicated in the affective, entangled relations that shape women’s recovery from depression in an Australian study.