Introducing CANI-NET: Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network: How collaborative, arts-based inquiry contributes to our understanding of wellbeing and suffering

A lecture by Dr Melissa Dunlop (PhD, MSc, MA, Dip Creative Supervision, UKCP Reg.d) and Dr Marina Malthouse (MBBS, DipPalMed, MA (Med Hum), EdD)  organised by the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.

Format: In-person and Online (Hybrid)
Venue: Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub
Zoom Link:
https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/97859995142
Meeting ID: 978 5999 5142

Session Plan: 
Part One: Ontological inconsistency, alterity and some positionings of the Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network (Melissa Dunlop)
I often witness and am confronted by a troubling gap between knowledge that is emergent through lived experience and that which is empirically knowable, and the gap is frequently characterised by dispute, misunderstanding and an urge to dismiss the position of the other, whose certainty seems to threaten one’s own.
Acknowledging alterity opens up potential for dialoguing between ontological positions, so that each may find a mutually enriching parallel relation. The Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network exists at ‘the crossroads between scholarship, art, education and activism’ and fosters the ‘imagination-intellect’, which seems to open up a pathway for empathic recognition of what can otherwise be missed. On encountering the network in action, I have found a means to explore what happens between (and through) minds, hearts and bodies, and have begun to understand the relationality of unrelated ontologies as something that can itself be experienced, observed and thought about, enabling recognition and fuller understanding to take place.

Part Two: Exploring What Medical Care Can Mean When Caring for the Dying (Marina Malthouse)
While practising as a palliative care physician, I began noticing that there are particular skills for care of the dying which lack prominence in medical education, its working environment and culture. An EdD in Narrative Inquiry at Bristol University offered me ways to explore and engage with doctors’ narratives and lived experiences of death and dying, and to find meanings from this challenging work. In my analysis of the Narrative Inquiry interview data, I crafted four fictional stories aiming to link the personal, social and cultural, re-present their problems rather than answer questions, and produce another set of truths. Ultimately, the stories helped to find different meanings from the young doctors’ lived experiences, to learn from them differently, and to bridge their personal and professional lives to consciously understand how compassionate care (not only for the dying) comes from within the practitioner.

Part Three: Potentials for engagement with the Collaborative Artful and Narrative modes of inquiry. (Melissa and Marina)
Examples are given of work that has taken place, is taking place, or is currently emergent.

Biographies: 
Dr. Marina Malthouse, MBBS, DipPalMed, MA (Med Hum), EdD
In my early years of working in a medical specialty that only deals with death and dying, I soon realised a need to broaden my horizons of how I cared for terminally ill patients and their families. An MA in Medical Humanities helped me to more fully understand medicine and its narratives, its culture and its practice. An EdD in Narrative Inquiry followed where I researched death and dying in junior doctors’ lives. This expanded both my method as a palliative care educator and practitioner, and also an ongoingness to my emerging sense of being as a palliative care physician in hospice, hospital and community. I retired from the GMC in 2015 and have since been working as an academic for the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London and volunteering in refugee camps (almost) annually in Greece since 2016.

Dr Melissa Dunlop, PhD, MSc, MA, Dip Creative Supervision, UKCP Reg.d
With a background in psychology and psychoanalytic theory, becoming a psychotherapy practitioner invited me to privilege what ‘feels true’ in a way that sat uncomfortably with my belief in catching hold of what actually ‘is true’ as an anchor for shared understanding in the world. I struggled to abandon analytic certainty and to succumb to the unknowable, fearing engulfment in an ultimately psychotic position. At the same time, I felt that what matters most is missed when aesthetic, affective and mysteriously apprehended qualities of life and living fail to be taken seriously or are ignored. After encountering the network and its ways of approaching inquiry, I completed a PhD at the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at University of Edinburgh, examining contemporary psychotherapeutic practice in a British context through the lens of an autofictional inquiry. I continue to write and develop a creative approach to scholarship and to facilitate CANI-Net’s Open Space sessions. I also practice as a supervisor and organisational consult, supporting those in relations of care.


Research Networking Meeting: 
Following the seminar, Melissa and Marina have kindly agreed to stay and have a more in-depth chat with members of our network who are interested in potential research collaborations. Those of you who are interested in this post-seminar research networking meeting, please let me know by email (mandy.lee@tcd.ie). Limited spaces are available. 


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