New Approaches to Care

Up to one in four adults diagnosed with cancer are parents of dependent children. Balancing the roles of a patient and a parent is a stress, with parenting concerns linked to elevated psychological distress.

In my thesis, I explored parenting concerns, challenges, and psychological distress among parents with cancer, assessed psychosocial support needs, and evaluated the feasibility of a psychological intervention for parents. First, a systematic review was conducted to identify existing psychosocial interventions for parents with cancer. Then, parents’ experiences and challenges in relation to cancer was explored in interviews, and a cross-sectional survey examined levels of psychological distress and associated factors, including parenting concerns, self-efficacy, and emotion regulation. Finally, a pilot study of online affect-focused psychodynamic psychotherapy for parents explored its feasibility, acceptability, safety and preliminary effects.

The findings showed that parenting concerns are central in parents’ lives, highlighting the difficulties being both a parent and a patient, and how cancer impacted parenting and roles in the family. Parenting could serve as a source of stress or resilience. Further, one in three parents reported symptoms above cut-off for depression, anxiety, or stress, and 16% experienced all three. Higher parenting concerns, low self-efficacy, and maladaptive emotion regulation were associated with increased psychological distress.

My thesis underscores that parenting with cancer reflects a complex interplay of individual, relational, and structural factors, highlighting the need for holistic psychosocial support that acknowledges parents not only as patients but as part of a family.

In recent decades, medical humanities has undergone a 'critical turn' and subsequently, a 'visual turn'. Such developments have encouraged more creative and productive entanglement between the arts and humanities with health, illness, and medicine. However, these advancements remain largely centred around visual arts and art history, with comparatively limited attention to performing arts such as dance. This paper positions dance as an embodied health practice and creative methodological approach for moving critical medical humanities.

Drawing on a study focused on people living and dancing with multiple sclerosis (MS), dance is explored as a means of both knowledge creation and translation in relation to illness experience. Ten dancers with MS co-designed a dance-based qualitative method, termed 'movement interviews'. Two movement interviews, each with five dancers, were conducted, combining facilitated movement exploration with reflexive discussion. Sessions were video-recorded, and data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Findings illustrate three interrelated movement-oriented processes: expression, in which dancers embodied creative freedom, enabling a visceral, genuine articulation of lived experience; transformation, through which shifting movement patterns reflected changes in bodily capacity and identity; and translation, whereby movement imagery rendered complex sensory experiences communicable, sharing a world beyond words.

Together, these movement processes show the potential of dance to create and translate more embodied, temporal, and relational understandings of illness. The paper contributes to a critical medical humanities by positioning dance not only as an artistic and therapeutic practice, but as an effective and affective mode of inquiry in the context of health and illness.

Within medical humanities, growing attention has been directed toward existential dimensions of health, particularly in response to rising mental health challenges. This doctoral project explores young people´s existential challenges and resources, focusing on existential health and resilience.

Situated within the psychology of religion, the project engages with medical humanities scholarship to explore how experiences of meaning, belonging and existential orientation are articulated and negotiated from young people´s own perspectives. At the time of the conference the project has entered its primary data collection phase, where listening before defining is a central methodological stance. At the conference, I will present initial reflections from the ongoing fieldwork.

Rather than applying a fixed definition, existential health is treated as an open and contested concept, attentive to secular, spiritual and religious expressions, as well as to critiques of medicalization and individualization of responsibility. The project is developed in relation to concrete group-based contexts, enabling examination of how existential health is linked to social spaces for existential communication. By engaging with existing practices, the study aims to generate knowledge grounded in lived experience and relevant to professional practice. In this context, resilience is approached not as an individual trait but as a socio-culturally embedded and relational process shaped by social environments, material conditions, norms and power relations.

By listening to young people´s own existential experiences, the project contributes to medical humanities debates on health, meaning and responsibility, including political and ethical dimensions of existential health.

This paper presents early-stage work from The Learning Disability Art of Care, a Wellcome Trust-funded project that centres actors with learning disabilities to develop a novel movement-based methodology for investigating care as an embodied practice. In doing so, it intervenes in longstanding debates within medical humanities and disability studies about who counts as a legitimate producer of knowledge about care.

Drawing on care aesthetics as a theoretical framework, the project reframes sensory experience as not merely incidental to care, but constitutive of it. Care aesthetics also opens lines of inquiry through which care can be theorised as akin to art: like the performing arts, care is relational, durational, and enacted through and between bodies. It is for this reason that the project is co-produced with learning-disabled actors whose artistic expertise as professional performers uniquely positions them to work in the spaces where care and performance converge and illuminate each other. Where biomedical and policy discourses hierarchise care, rendering it legible through quantifiable outcomes, this project attends to its embodied, relational and interdependent dimensions.

Crucially, the project positions people with learning disabilities not as subjects of care to be studied, but as collaborators whose embodied expertise is epistemically indispensable. This raises broader questions about participation, authorship, and the politics of knowledge production within health humanities research.

The paper will outline the project's conceptual architecture, situate it within literature on care ethics, crip theory, and somatic practice, and reflect critically on the challenges of operationalising an embodied methodology at an early stage of development.