Medicines of uncertainty: in a more-than-human world, how might polyvocal, practice-based performance methods reimagine spaces of hope following spell

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Medicines of uncertainty: in a more-than-human world, how might polyvocal, practice-based performance methods reimagine spaces of hope following spells of illness?A diagnosis of cancer is essentially a diagnosis of uncertainty: it undermines an imagined future. This enquiry responds to the University of Exeter Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) call for engaged medical humanities research, exploring the complexity of health experiences beyond the scope of evidence-based medicine (Williams & Carel, 2018). A strength of my approach lies in the symbiosis of engaged practice-based methodologies, critical academic thinking, polyvocal narratives and lived-experience of cancer. The research is supervised by Dr Bryan Brown, University of Exeter Department of Drama, and Dr Maria Vaccarella, University of Bristol Department of English.In an ever more uncertain world, I propose that this research affords nuanced academic enquiry together with outputs, including artworks, delivered in engaging formats. Leading performance scholars, Heron & Kershaw argue that such open-ended material and embodied research foregrounds perception, awareness and intuition rather than more explicit cognitive processes. This creates space for uncertainty and ambiguity, what they call 'play-space', where novel insights can emerge. In this way, the creative practice as research - which emerges from uncertainty - performs the research question (as artist William Kentridge, explores with such clarity).Drawing on my transdisciplinary background in archaeology and visual art, I am aesthetically inspired by archaic magico medical artefacts, including Renaissance pop-up anatomy books and folding almanacs worn on the body of Medieval doctors. I plan to study collections in the Wellcome Library, the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museum. These agentic, social objects join a collective of human and more-than-human research participants, invited into dialogue. My community partners include Soundart Radio 102.5FM Dartington and Maketank performance space, Exeter. Performative theories, including New Materialism, are concerned with relational flow, blurring boundaries between subject and object in a reconfiguring of agency, causality and becoming. This research seeks to model tacit and multifaceted ways of knowing located in the interference patterns between "the body as experiential landscape" (Reid, 2010), and dialogue with others. It braids together studio and community arts practice, attentive listening, writing and diagramming, and engaging with materialities to enact and query knowing, thus bringing unrecognised or marginal realities into view. This is a productive route to explore unimagined ways of thinking, depicting and talking about transitional health points within the life course, grounded in lived experience. The study seeks to activate a redistribution of performative agency in more-than-human narratives of illness. Ultimately, performance medicine provokes this "not only by embracing dialogue, discomfort, uncertainty and open-endedness, but also by mobilising hope [...] that imagines how things could be different and then tries to effect change" (Bolaki, 2016).