We are delighted to host the first of the new SAHGB/IHR/Wellcome Collections Partnership seminar series.
This occasional seminar series will expand the sharp focus on hospital architecture to understand the history of spaces of sickness and health in wider socio-cultural contexts. Sessions will take varied formats and encourage discussion. The inaugural event - marking the anniversary of the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown - unites art and architectural historians from New York, Seattle, and Alabama, as well as the UK to explore the Art of Epidemics.
Credit: A fruit and vegetable market in Nigeria. Credit: John & Penny Hubley. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
This session explores different types of outdoor space, across time and place. It goes beyond the question of the ‘nature cure’ to think about the spatiality and design of different kinds of outdoor environments. We will explore questions of design in a range of public spaces, including how design is used to promote (and can inhibit) health and wellbeing. We will also challenge and explore the very notion of the ‘outdoors’, by thinking about the physical and virtual thresholds between indoor and outdoor spaces. This session will run with four 15-minute live papers, followed by a comfort break and 30-45 minutes of discussion with an opportunity for Q&A.
Body Conscious Design in Public Spaces contends that people living in urban areas need to have outdoor spaces that safely support activities and rest-- beyond the right angle seated position. This talk outlines the implications for the design of all public spaces, including parks and playgrounds.
Keeping Well in West Africa’s Open-Air Markets: Environment, Design, and Disease in Historical Perspective. Seasonal outdoor markets have a long history in West Africa, and this paper seeks to explore them through the lenses of wellness, sickness and the control of space. While drawing attention to the commodity and social logics that govern the placement of goods and movement of traders and customers, I also examine West African concepts of air, invisible agents, and protection that factor into the abilities and disabilities related to keeping well in the market.
Connecting ‘out there’ with ‘in here’: Sensory experiences of nature across the hospital threshold addresses how in the past nature outside often co-produced the sensory experience of people inside health care buildings, and considers how that relationship has often been severed and changed by contemporary architectural design.
Virtual Natures: Bringing the Outdoors 'in' analyses the rise of therapeutic indoor ‘natures’, from Virtual Reality headsets to computer games, natural representation in design to multi-dimensional sensory immersions. What are the benefits of this attempt to synthesise and stylise nature, and what are their limitations? In a moment of climate breakdown and increasing moves to privatise health care, how can we ensure virtual natures contribute to wider projects of environmental and social justice?
Speakers
Galen Cranz (Berkeley, Calif., US)
Galen Cranz is Professor of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley, a Ph.D. sociologist from the University of Chicago, and a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique. She teaches social-cultural approaches to architecture and urban design, including how the body meets the environment, a new field of research that she calls Body Conscious Design. Her publications include Ethnography for Designers (Routledge 2016), Environmental Design Research: Bodies, Cities, and the Buildings Inbetween (Cognella 2010), The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design (W.W. Norton 2000), The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (MIT 1982), and “Defining the Sustainable Park: A Fifth Model of Urban Parks,” Landscape Journal (2004), which was recently recognized as one of the top ten most cited articles in the Journal’s history. She has participated in several park design competitions, including Bernard Tschumi's Parc de LaVillette, Paris.
Shobana Shankar (Stony Brook, NYC, US).
Shobana Shankar’s work focuses on cultural history and politics in West Africa and Africa-Indian encounters. Most recently, she is the author of An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Hurst, 2021) that examines how Africans and Indians have attempted to understand and negotiate their complicated relationships in spheres like religion, science, and education where postcolonial peoples have sought autonomy from Euro-American power. She’s also written for wider audiences including an essay for The Conversation about what the U.S. can learn about immunization from Nigeria and another in The Washington Post on eugenicist practices at the Mississippi State Penitentiary which began experiencing an epidemic of prisoner deaths in 2020.
Clare Hickman (Newcastle, UK).
As well as being Senior Lecturer in History at Newcastle University, Hickman is currently Co-Investigator on the AHRC project ‘In All Our Footsteps: Tracking, Mapping and Experiencing Rights of Way in Post-War Britain’. She is also leading the AHRC Network ‘Unlocking landscapes: History, Culture and Sensory Diversity in Landscape Use and Decision Making’ and the Wellcome Trust funded network, ‘MedEnv: Intersections in medical and environmental humanities’. Her next monograph, The Doctor’s Garden: Medicine, Science and Horticulture in Britain will be published by Yale University Press in Autumn 2021.
Samantha Walton (Bath Spa, UK)
Samantha Walton is Reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University. Her forthcoming book, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (Bloomsbury 2021) tells the long history of the relationship between nature and wellbeing, in the context of climate change and social and environmental justice. She was a Writing Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich in 2018-2019 and AHRC ECR Leadership Fellow on the project Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing 2016-2018. Her other books are The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought (Bloomsbury 2020) and Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (OUP, 2015).
For the foreseeable future the SAHGB Seminars will be virtual events via Zoom. We will circulate joining instructions via email the morning of the scheduled event. Please complete the form below to register.
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