Time Being, film screening at MakeTank, Exeter, 24-26 September 2020
Messages in Bottles: Showcases at Honiton hospice
As part of our ongoing partnership with Hospiscare, Messages in Bottles, we held three showcases of work produced by service-users of the Honiton day hospice.
These three events presented written stories, pictures, songs and short films made in our storytelling and story sharing collaborative workshops. We had participants – service-users, staff and researchers – as well as family, friends, carers and other members of the Hospiscare team come along for an afternoon of reading, thinking, talking and sharing at the King’s House day hospice in Honiton.
We also had plenty of tea, cake, laughter and the occasional tear.
Our next planned event is a tour of local libraries. We’ll be taking interactive displays of the stories to Honiton, Seaton, Sidmouth, Axminster and Exeter. We had planned to start this tour in April 2020, but we had to postpone for obvious reasons. Hopefully, libraries will re-open after the summer and we will be able to take take our show on the road then.
Until then, you can listen to some of the stories here.
The Power of Sequential Narrative w/ Sarah Lippett and Lucy Sullivan
Saturday, 30 November, 3:30 – 6:30pm, Women’s Art Library (WAL), Goldsmiths University Library
Join graphic novelists Sarah Lippett and Lucy Sullivan for an afternoon of discussion on the power of sequential narrative for approaching the topic of illness, loss and physical and mental health. Hosted in the context of the Women’s Art Library (WAL), curator and lecturer Samantha Lippett will chair a debate, paying specific reference to Sarah’s latest Jonathan Cape published graphic memoir, A Puff of Smoke, that explores her experience of growing up with an undiagnosed rare disease and Lucy’s graphic novel Barking, that draws upon her experiences of mental illness following the loss of her father in her early twenties. Framed within the genre of graphic medicine, together they will consider the radical potential of books like these to discuss the life topics that are often too complex for words alone. Followed by a Q&A.
There will also be a temporary display of the books and associated ephemera that will later be donated to the Women’s Art Library archives. Both graphic novels will be available to buy and free drinks for all.
With thanks to special collections librarian, Althea Greenan.
FREE, booking recommended – please follow the link to book
A Puff of Smoke Talk and Workshop with author and artist Sarah Lippett
Date and Time: Fri, 22 November 2019, 13:30 – 14:30 GMT
Location: The Centre for Better Health, 1A Darnley Road, London, E9 6QH
FREE, but registration is required, please follow the link to register.
A Puff of Smoke (published by Jonathan Cape 7th November) is a graphic memoir about what it is like to grow up with an illness that no one can diagnose. Sarah Lippett spent eleven years suffering with symptoms from an unknown condition, until she was diagnosed with the rare disease Moyamoya at the age of 17.
For the month of November (1st – 29th November) an exhibition will be held at The Centre For Better Health that will explore the wider themes of the memoir.
Join Sarah as she talks through the process of revisiting her past and piecing it back together as a graphic memoir. The talk will be followed by a short workshop where participants are invited to create sequential narratives based on their own lived experiences. No drawing experience necesssary.
Read a recent Observer review of “A Puff of Smoke” book:
Conversations on Care and/in the Community, 6 June 2019
Our PI Lisa will be talking as part of this event at Birkbeck.
Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD
Thursday, 6 June, 2019
12.30-18.30
Experiences and practices of care have changed dramatically in the past three decades. Since the passing of the NHS and Community Care Act (1990), healthcare, social care and short-term psychiatric care have been increasingly decentralised and delivered ‘in the community’. This shift has been both practical and discursive: altering the pathways by which care is accessed and the sites in which it is received; and changing perceptions surrounding the role of those receiving care in wider society. In the case of mental healthcare for example, it has led us to move from the ‘mental patient’ to the ‘service user’ as labels that define the relationship between persons receiving care and those providing it.
Thirty years on, community care continues to be a fraught subject. On the one hand, it has been seen as having a democratizing influence, opening up the possibility for greater patient choice, and of integrating patients’ and service-users’ voices into care provision. On the other, it continues to be viewed as a chaotic cost-cutting exercise which leaves vulnerable people to fall through the cracks.
‘Conversations on Care and/in the Community’ symposium invites researchers to engage in a series of conversations surrounding these new social and spatial conditions of care in the twenty-first century.
The event is wheelchair accessible. Please contact the organiser if you have any other access requirements.
[Image credit: Hedley Finn, The Kings Fund, Wellcome Collection]
For tickets and more info click here.
Lisa’s Birkbeck’s Big Ideas talk on 31 October in Stratford
Begin your Allhallowtide celebrations by getting along to Lisa Baraitser’s talk on Waiting and Care in Rushed Times at University Square, Stratford Campus, 1.18-1.19 on 31 October, 6pm – 7.30pm.
Waiting is one of healthcare’s core experiences. It is there in the time it takes to access services; through the days, weeks, months or years needed for diagnoses; in the time that treatment takes; and in the elongated time-frames of recovery, relapse, remission and dying. Drawing on research generated by the Wellcome Trust funded project, Waiting Times, this talk will open up what it means to wait in and for healthcare by examining lived experiences, representations and histories of delayed and impeded time.
In an era in which time is lived at increasingly different and complex tempos this talk addresses both the difficulties and importance of waiting for practices of care. The main point of the talk is to raise the question ‘can the offer of waiting be a form of care?’ and it aims to challenge assumptions about the value of waiting, counteracting the current political use of ‘waiting times’ as a tool for dismantling the NHS.
It’s part of the Birkbeck Big Ideas series of talks and you can find more information and book a free place here.
Lisa Baraitser: ‘Saying Yes to No’ discussion in London, 27 September
Our PI Lisa will be leading a discussion in a private house in London as part of the Deptford X group’s ‘Saying Yes to No’ common study programme of events.
The discussion will be on Lisa’s recent book, Enduring Time, and will be taking place at 114 Breakspears Road, Brockley, SE4 1UD this Thursday, 27 September from 12:00 – 15:00.
For more details about this talk, the programme of common study and the work of Deptford X, visit their website.
NHS 70th Birthday Bash, Exeter Library Castle St.
You’re invited to a very special birthday party – Saturday, 30thJune 1-3pm at Exeter Central Library, Castle Street (click here for map)
The National Health Service is 70 this year. To celebrate, the Wellcome Trust-funded Waiting Times team and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health are collaborating with colleagues at the Exeter Library and University of Warwick to organise a birthday party.
This will be no ordinary do, however. As part of our public engagement strategy, we will be organising a host of activities to mark the occasion, to explore the history and future of the NHS, and to collect memories and narratives of service use (and waiting) over the past 70 years. Stalls for the public will include:
- Card-making – create everything from birthday to “get well soon” cards
- Video reel – marking 70 years of the NHS on and through film
- A consultation room – diagnose the NHS, prescribe it treatment, and prognosticate on its future
- Message recording – leave a message for the NHS or record a memory for our archives
- A waiting room and buffet area – like a GP waiting room, only with birthday cake, crisps, squash and token carrot sticks.
- Creative-writing workshop – with the possibility of getting your story/poem published in Riptide new-writing journal
- Children’s story-time – a medicine-themed story read by Library staff.
It will be fun for all the family and finished in time for the football too!
If you are interested in volunteering, or hearing more about the event, then please email:
martin.moore@exeter.ac.uk and m.flexer@exeter.ac.uk
We are particularly keen to hear from anyone else who is turning or has turned 70 in 2018. We’d love to celebrate your birthday at the same time!
