Arts-Based Methods in Medical Humanities: Relational Approaches to Health, Disability, and Knowledge

A lecture by Prof Anna Hickey-Moody (Director of the Arts and Humanities Institute, Maynooth University) organised by the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.

This will be a hybrid seminar taking place both in-person and online. Meeting takes place at the Galbraith Seminar Room, TLRH. To join online please join via zoom:
Zoom Link: https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/97859995142
Meeting ID: 978 5999 5142


Abstract
This talk explores the value of arts-based research methods for the medical humanities, drawing on my work on disability (2009, 2013, 2019), affect (2013, 2023, 2025), and creative practice. Arts-based methods, including participatory performance, visual arts, storytelling, and collaborative media-making, offer ways of generating knowledge that exceed the limits of conventional biomedical and social science research. Rather than treating disability, illness, or care as objects of analysis alone, these approaches position creative practice as a mode of inquiry that produces relational, embodied, and affective knowledge. Drawing on my practice-based research with disabled artists and community-based arts organisations, I argue that arts-based research creates conditions for  “affective pedagogies”: processes through which participants generate new ways of feeling, knowing, and relating to bodies, difference, and care. In the context of the medical humanities, such practices shift attention away from deficit-oriented models of disability toward collaborative knowledge production that foregrounds creativity, agency, and collective expression.
The presentation examines how participatory arts practices can function as both research method and ethical framework. Through collaborative making: dance, drawing, film, and storytelling, participants produce forms of knowledge that are sensory, relational, and situated. These practices enable researchers and participants to explore experiences of illness, disability, and care in ways that resist reduction to clinical categories, instead highlighting the social and affective dimensions of health. Ultimately, the talk proposes arts-based research as a critical methodology for the medical humanities: one that challenges hierarchies of expertise, expands the epistemic scope of health research and foregrounds disabled people’s creative practices as sites of knowledge production. By centring artistic collaboration and affective encounter, arts-based methods offer powerful tools for reimagining how medical humanities research understands embodiment, difference, and care.
Works cited:
Hickey-Moody, A. (2009). Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becomings. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Youth, Arts and Education: Reassembling Subjectivity through Affect. London: Routledge.
Hickey-Moody, A. (2019). Deleuze and Masculinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). “Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics and Affective Pedagogy.”
In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (eds.), Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 79–95.
Hickey-Moody, A. (2023). Faith Stories: Sustaining Difference in Troubling Times.
Hickey-Moody, A., Pihkala, S., Coombs, G., & Wilcox, M. (2025). “Joining: A Collaboration between Katie King and Anna Hickey-Moody.”
In New Materialist Affirmations: Creative Research Interventions in Methods and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

About the Speaker
Professor Anna hickey-Moody is Senior Leadership Initiative Ireland Professor of Intersectional Humanities at Maynooth University, Ireland and Director of the Arts and Humanities Institute. Her recent books include New Materialist Affirmations (EUP 2025), Faith Stories (MUP 2023) and Arts Based Methods for Research with Children (Palgrave 2022).  

Research Networking Meeting (After 2pm; Time to be confirmed) 
Prof. Anna Hicky-Moody has kindly agreed to stay with us after the public seminar to engage with Trinity researchers who may be interested in exploring areas of potential collaboration especially in the area of creative and arts-based inquiry. If any of you are interested please email mandy.lee@tcd.ie and we can come back to you with details. 

This event is run in accordance with Trinity’s Dignity and Respect policy, and its commitment to nurturing a respectful and inclusive research culture.
Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: mandy.lee@tcd.ie