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Public Health, Humanities and Magical Realism: A Creative-Relational Approach to Researching Human Experience

Marisa de Andrade is currently thinking out loud about the ‘value’ of post-qualitative research in policy and practice. Fresh from a talk to the United Nations Development Programme on how to measure change in complex systems, she’s wondering how magical realism can bring about ‘real change’ in the ‘real world’?

Imagine public health is on the cusp of a paradigm shift and about to take the words of Pablo Picasso quite literally: ‘everything you can imagine is real’. Imagine it is your task to sift through and make sense of what public health research, policy and practice says is real (evidence, objectivity, validity, truth) and unreal (opinion, subjectivity, weakness, falsehood) in this contradictory, liminal space of science and fiction.

Join Marisa – Joint Winner of the 2023 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Book Award for Public Health, Humanities and Magical Realism: A Creative-Relational Approach to Researching Human Experience – as she reflects on her work described as ‘a reflexive, practical, and paradigm-shifting text that espouses important messages about relationality, research practice, and well-being’.

Fantastical realities based on ‘truthful’ research findings are intertwined with traditional public health approaches through artistic engagement with so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ groups. Working with their (sur)real life stories, Marisa notices how the population’s breadth is inadequately reflected which threatens validity and generalisability in public health research and decision making.

We’ll think about the power of art to challenge policy makers and academics to reassess what counts as evidence when developing policies, practices, and recommendations.

How can post-qualitative research cross the policy bridge and ‘do something meaningful’ in the ‘real world’?

 

Marisa de Andrade is an academic in health policy at the University of Edinburgh. She is Programme Director for the MSc by Research in Health Humanities and Arts; Programme Director for the PhD in Health in Social Science; Associate Director for the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry; and a Co-Director at the Binks Hub working with communities to co-produce a programme of research and knowledge exchange that promotes social justice, relational research methods and human flourishing. Marisa has led several traditional and community-based arts-informed public health studies. She is currently PI on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) collaborative place-based grant putting the arts at the helm of strategic decision-making across multiple sectors including health and social care, employability, education and social justice.