Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines

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Medical humanities and disability studies are disciplines at the cutting edge of innovative critical work in the study of health and disability, but to date there has been no book-length examination of the relationship between the two. Although each has emerged from different heritages, they share many features, from discussing the complexities of embodiment, identifying processes of exclusion and championing user participation, to a commitment to new forms of critical writing. In/Disciplines explores the connections between the two disciplines in detail. It presents a series of provocations about how they interact, the forms their practice take, and their strengths and weaknesses as working methods. With a focus on life stories that give accounts of health and disability experiences, it mixes creative and critical writing in an accessible manner aimed at a wide audience in both Medical Humanities and Disability Studies, and across new humanities more widely. The book asserts that both disciplines need to evaluate and challenge core assumptions if they are to remain critically relevant in the evolving study of social and cultural understanding of health and disability.

Reviews

Written lyrically and with brilliant clarity across multiple genres, this book continually invites new possibilities, provoking to clarify. I am aware of no other book that sustains an inquiry into the relationship between medical humanities and disability studiesmuch less one that uses the conjunctions and disjunctions between them to critique both disciplines. -- Martha Stoddard Holmes, Professor of Literature and Writing Studies, California State University, USA
Sharp and on target, Stuart Murray offers readers a foray into the intersections of the medical humanities and disability studies, their lacunae, and possibilities. Murray draws on memoir and personal experience to demonstrate how an indisciplined approach to life writing provokes potentials for change through an appeal to agility in our conceptions of ill-health, disability, and disorder and their roles in medicine, care, and social theory. Compelling and compulsive in its argumentationMedical Humanities and Disability Studies is the kind of book we need more of. We should all be so indisciplined! -- Matthew Wolf-Meyer, author of 'Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age' and 'The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and American Everyday Life'
Medical Humanities and Disability Studies argues against insularity and choosing sides in favour of an agile, indisciplined mode of criticism that embraces generative doubt and productive troubling. With a variety of womens life narratives as its strong foundation, and richly affective personal vignettes as its spine, Stuart Murrays book is packed with insights and provocations: from the agile chapter titles and paths taken to find the words and form for his work, to the manifold manifestations of difference/same in experiences of health and disability, and the in/un/ill-disciplined acts of drawing on the working methods of one discipline to critique the success of the other. In modelling the intellectual and creative agility found within its archive, this book offers a sensitive and compelling exploration of the fusions of life stories and critical frames and of the complex interweavings of medical humanities and disability studies. -- Stella Bolaki, Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities and Co-Director, Centre for Health and Medical Humanities, University of Kent, UK
By turns forceful and tender, indisciplined and agile, this book embodies what it might mean to think with and between Disability Studies and Medical Humanities. Holding to the conceptual complexity and political force of lived experience, this is a vital, unsettling, beautiful book. - -- Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Exeter, UK

Author Bio

Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK.