Art and research collaborations
In early 2024 the Antitheses platform committed to funding four Arts, Health and Ethics Collective partnerships between researchers and artists to explore novel and creative ways of approaching a range of research questions related to issues which can incite disagreement, polarisation or uncertainty.
AI and Podcasting
This project explores the innovative intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the arts to transform how academic knowledge is disseminated and consumed. At its core, it investigates philosophical themes in ethical, practical, and technical implications of AI in healthcare, addressing crucial questions about patient privacy, the role of AI in augmenting or replacing healthcare professionals, and the potential impact on healthcare accessibility across socio-economic groups. The project will create ‘synthetic podcasts’ that integrate AI-generated dialogues from academic content with music, particularly hip hop, to provide a multi-sensory learning experience. These novel applications can clone the voices of the original authors, providing a more personalised and immersive listening experience. This blend of informative and narrative aspects with emotive and creative musical expressions aims to make academic discourse more engaging, accessible, and relatable. |
Empathising with the monster?
This project will generate new artworks (drawings, writings and small sculptures) that explore the ethics of using medical and psychotherapeutic interventions to rehabilitate criminal offenders. More specifically, the project will look at ‘chemical castration’ and psychotherapy programmes to treat sex offenders, and interventions to treat violent offenders. The ethical dilemmas in this contentious area are rarely discussed in the public forum. Sensitivity to the topic is understandable, but emotional reactions may reduce a general understanding of the current approach to treatment and its efficacy. The project will explore how we should view interventions on such offenders: Are they a form of punishment? Are they a form of therapy or medical treatment? Should or should they not benefit offenders? Does it matter, morally, whether they are punishment or treatment? When is it morally permissible to change someone’s mind, personality, or preferences? |
Ethereal Being
Symbolic violence is a non-physical form of aggression arising from inherent power imbalances. It is not a deliberate act by a dominant authority, but a latent reinforcement of established social hierarchies in institutions, resulting in alienation, devaluation, delegitimisation, and the invalidation of beliefs, values, knowledge, skills, feelings and identities of those ‘othered’ by the system. How do those who have migrated from overseas to the UK working in institutional settings, experience and survive ’symbolic violence’? ‘Ethereal being’ refers to the state of being during fleeting moments of recognition and connection with fellow individuals experiencing symbolic violence that allows migrants to feel and be seen, respected, and valued for who they are. In this project the collaborators combine their migrant identities, academic research, creative practice and experience in an interactive workshop to test an arts-based method investigating symbolic violence and ethereal being. In the workshop fifteen participants (migrant and other minority postgraduate academics) will work with facilitators, to draw upon artistic and anti-colonial pedagogies to co-create artistic outputs related to their experiences. |
A Journey into NHS Data Landscapes
This collaborative project will produce a novel arts-based output, principally an artist publication that responds to, and feeds into, the underpinning research on mapping NHS data landscapes and infrastructures such as Trusted Research Environments (TREs). The resultant work will be an experimental enquiry and representation of these landscapes and environments, offering an alternative, critical and accessible format for different publics to engage with how NHS data is used and shared. This collaboration will seek to explore how one can capture and represent the complexity of NHS data in ways that enhance, rather than hinder, understanding. It will aim to answer the question; how can we animate these NHS data journeys by making their flows, frictions and knots, visible? The intended output will be a visual map that demonstrates the journey of individual health data and encourages conversation on both its use and preconceived trust in the systems involved. |