Fostering Interdisciplinarity and Creative Methods: Showcasing CHASE

Posted on: 17 October 2023 by Jacky Waldock in 2023 Posts

CHASE – the Centre for Health, Arts, Society and the Environment provides an interdisciplinary platform at the University of Liverpool. It fosters collaborative research with a focus on health, medical and environmental concerns. On July 13th 2023 we hosted a welcome event that showcased examples of projects across the Centre.

Driven by the social sciences and humanities, CHASE, the Centre for Health, Arts, Society and the Environment, responds to a range of interconnected contemporary challenges related to health, medicine, environmental and climate change and the interactions between them - for examples: the complex histories of and social and creative responses to medicine, climate change and environmental contamination; the rise of environmentally induced (dis)ease; the persistence of chronic conditions and mental illness and creative responses to these; the significance of postcolonial feminist, disability and crip theories; the political economies and philosophies of wellbeing and health; the imperative of social justice and the politics and pragmatics of intervention and recovery.

Critical to our work as a Centre is genuine collaboration with communities of practice, people with lived experience of illness and degraded environments and various publics and activist communities across the city of Liverpool, the region and beyond. And central to our commitment to methodological creativity is the catalysing role of the arts: poetry, music, literature, film and creative and participatory arts.

On July 13^th 2023 – we hosted a welcome event that showcased examples of projects across our three centre themes: Critical Medical Humanities; Arts, Mental Health and Wellbeing and Environmental Humanities, in addition to our cross faculty MA in Health, Cultures and Societies. We introduced the work of three artists whose work is shaping new ways of researching mental health in the community (Philharmonic Cellist, Georgina Aasgaard); environmental histories (Environmental Artist, Byrony Benge-Abbot) as well as new ways of reconfiguring recovery (Award winning filmmaker Melanie Manchot).

Georgina Aasgaard

Melanie Manchot

The welcome event was well-attended across all three faculties at the University of Liverpool, in addition to non-academic partners in the City. You can watch the introductory talks below.

We would like to thank all those who participated in the day, and who attended our interdisciplinary workshop on objects – Things Provocations – as an heuristic for interdisciplinary working.

Watch highlights from the workshop activity:

For further information please contact: Dr Jacqueline Waldock Jacqueline.Waldock@liverpool.ac.uk

To join the mailing list email listserv@liverpool.ac.uk with the subject: chase first_name second_name

With warm wishes from the CHASE management team,

(Ciara Kierans, Bethan Evans, Jacqueline Waldock, Nicole Vitellone, Sam Solnick, Stephen Kenny, Josie Billington, Georgia Petridou, Lena Theodoropolou, Chris Pearson, Claire Pierson, John Hogg, Serena Saligari)