Shame and Medicine Project Newsletter

Professor Robert Walker, (Beijing Normal University) kicked off the The Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 Seminar Series on the 3rd June with a fascinating seminar about ‘Stigma and Shame in China during Covid-19’ and you can view the recording here. Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster (McGill University) will be talking about 'Frustration, Shame, and Indifference, Surgeons’ Negative Emotions in the Age of Covid-19’ at the next seminar on the 8th July, and you can register here. We hope that you will be able to join us.

The seminar series is organized at the University of Exeter as part of the UKRI-AHRC funded ‘Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19’ project, and addresses the key role that shame and stigma have played in the COVID-19 public health crisis. With talks from established and emerging experts in sociology, anthropology, history and public health, this interdisciplinary seminar series examines the effects of shame and stigma during the pandemic, considering topics such as national responses, professional practice in medicine, community resilience, public health policy and BAME experience.

Prof. Robert Walker (Beijing Normal University)

Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster (McGill University)

Dr Ray Earwicker (University of Exeter)

Dr Hannah Farrimond (University of Exeter)

Dr Tanisha Spratt (University of Oxford)

HOW CAN WE COMMUNICATE BETTER TO AVOID COVID-19 SHAMING?
Luna Dolezal and the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project are featured in this PsychCentral a rticle, published by US journalist Debbie-Marie Brown, discussing COVID-19 shaming.

CALL FOR DOCTORS
The Shame and Medicine Project is looking for doctors who have been disciplined by the GMC and feel shame or other self-conscious emotions as a result of it. Our researchers at the University of Birmingham and the University of Exeter are interested in your experience, and would like to hear about the incident(s), your feelings and how you processed them. Visit our website for further details

NEW RECRUITS
Welcome to our newest recruits. We are delighted to welcome Stephen Williams and Juanita Navarro-Páez to the Shame and Medicine project team. Stephen joins us as the Research Assistant working with our Co-Investigator Matthew Gibson at the University of Birmingham. Juanita is a PhD student in Art History and Visual Culture, and her research project will look at representations of shame in graphic medicine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Our goal is to provide an online bibliographical resource that includes literature from various disciplines that directly considers shame and shame experiences in medicine, medical professional culture, medical training, public health and related areas. This bibliography is a work in progress and will be added to over the course of the project. Please email us with any suggestions for additional sources.

SHAME GLOSSARY
We have been compiling a list of shame terms that we have encountered in the literature about shame and shame experiences. Over the course of the project, we will be writing glossary entries to define and discuss each of these terms. We would love to hear from you so please email us with any relevant terms you would like to see us include in this glossary.

Moving Shame is a two day workshop organised and co-facilitated by University of Exeter PhD candidate and Shame and Medicine Project Collaborator Gemma Lucas, yoga teacher/counsellor Catherine Forrester, writer/psychotherapist/creative consultant Dr Meg-John Barker and illustrator with expertise in communication, mental health and active learning, Elizabeth Fortnum.

A two day workshop based at the University of Copenhagen and co-organized with the Centre for Subjectivity Research. Shame, Health and Lived Experience is an interdisciplinary workshop that will bring together scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines and fields to reflect on how experiences of shame may impact on health, wellbeing and medical practice.

In our latest blog, Ella Nygard (University of Lapland), discusses how she came to study
Shame and Humiliation in Finnish Healthcare.

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THEME ISSUE OF LITERATURE AND MEDICINE

This issue will explore experiences of shame in literary and medical contexts. We invite abstracts that consider the writing and representation of shame as it might appear in fields such as the health and medical humanities, cognitive literary criticism, and narrative medicine. For further details, visit our website.