Catherine Hurcombe, Regional Engagement Assistant, interviews Associate Professor Katharine Murphy and Dr Liv Glaze on their Reading Bodies project. This project demonstrates the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach to public engagement, combining research from across faculties, departments, and languages.
CH: Would you like to introduce yourselves?
KM: I’m Katharine Murphy, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, and I’m the Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies.
OG: And I’m Liv Glaze, an academic in Medical Humanities, Gender Studies and Portuguese Studies, and I’m the Post-Doctoral Research Associate on Katharine’s AHRC project.
CH: So tell me a little bit more about the Reading Bodies project.
KM: We’re based in Modern Languages, but we’ve brought in specialists from other disciplines. The project considers representations of illness in cultural texts from the late-19th to the mid-20th century across five languages. One strand of the project is an international research network, and another is the public engagement activity.
What we tried to do was link late 19th-century Spanish texts looking at fatigue and nervous exhaustion, and afterlives of understanding in the present.
OG: We wanted to think about chronic fatigue and burnout still being stigmatised, and people not having the necessary language to talk about it. We also wanted to prove it’s not just something that happens in the workplace; it also can be linked to home responsibilities. That’s where the creative writing workshops came in, and the corresponding anthology.
CH: It’s a very wide-reaching project then! How have you found navigating research approaches across so many disciplines?
KM: It can be very challenging to bring disciplines together, because we tackle these issues from different perspectives. But that was also one of the really interesting things about the project. It takes time and a willingness to collaborate, but it was so helpful to have that input.
CH: Given that the focus of this project is on linguistic and literary barriers, how important was it to you that it not only bridged the gap between disciplines, but between the academic and public spheres?
KM: We really wanted to move beyond theoretical models, to make authentic links between our research and the present. We were keen to bring in health professionals, and we had creative writers and the general public as well. The interdisciplinary approach elicited a range of responses, which was one of the real aims of the exercise.
OG: That approach was not only baked into the process, but also the output. In the anthology there’s collage and photographs, and we had an illustrator in situ during the workshop. That was especially helpful for people to see that we weren’t just looking for writing, we wanted a range of visual culture too.
KM: We chose to bring in people who didn’t have experience of creative writing or illustrating. We have some award-winning writers, including Kit de Waal, and Hannah Berry on the illustrating side – she was the former comics laureate. But we also aimed to give voice to people who were previously unpublished.
CH: So getting people involved through different creative methodologies – do you think that made people feel more welcome, and made the project more accessible?
KM: I certainly hope so. People shared quite personal experiences, actually. We had to make sure people were consenting to publication – the fact we’ve managed to interweave over 40 submissions shows it did put people at ease, and made them comfortable with the approach.
OG: You’re already asking people to be vulnerable through their creative writing; that’s difficult for us to do, and we’re academics who write all the time!
We spent a lot of time considering those points to create a safe space for the workshop. Those considerations are really important, and I hope people feel they were taken seriously – that was certainly the indication we got from the feedback forms.
CH: That leads us nicely into the preparation aspect. One of the problems with public engagement is you can plan, but you don’t actually know what the reception is going to be like. How did you prepare to engage the public, and how did you balance this with the interest you received?
KM: We did a lot of planning, and communication with participants in advance. But some of it is just trial and error, so you do have to stay quite flexible and adaptable.
OG: There’s an element of hoping it’ll be alright on the night, and that everything will come together.
CH: You’ve highlighted some real successes from this project. Is this something you’d like to continue with? And are there aspects you would change going into public engagement activities in the future?
KM: We’re thinking about Being Human Festival in the autumn, and other pots of impact funding. The idea of inviting people to join creative initiatives, I find really exciting and inspiring. I would really like to continue with that, and with the links to health and wellbeing.
OG: We’ve also been inspired by the potential use of these creative outputs for policy work – and are thinking about how to turn them into resources for medical practitioners. It’s really important for us to show the utility of Modern Languages research in addressing wider societal issues.
CH: Have you got any advice for those looking to bring public engagement into their research, particularly from that interdisciplinary perspective?
KM: Going back to what we said about preparing – if you want to bring disciplines together, you need to work to find synergies between your specialisms.
OG: I have two main ideas. One is to not think you have to do it all alone. Katharine and I were grateful to receive so much help from the public engagement team in Exeter. I didn’t know that wealth of advice existed, so make the most of all those experts who are here to help.
And secondly, don’t feel the public engagement has to be directly linked to your exact research area – it can cover more broad and adjacent themes. It’s about doing some blue sky thinking, and not getting trapped in the details.
KM: And be ready for the unexpected, because you can’t plan exactly what’s going to come out of this. And that’s interesting in itself.