Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Luna and Will about shame. Key themes include: understanding shame, the role shame can play at work and shame competence.

Luna Dolezal is Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. She has been researching shame for over 15 years, and is PI of the Shame and Medicine Project (2020-2025), funded by the Wellcome Trust, and was PI of the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 Project (2020-2022),funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Luna has developed training in ‘shame competence’ in collaboration with the Devon &Cornwall Police, and worked with Will Bynum to set up The Shame Lab. See Luna’s University of Exeter Staff Profile here.

Will Bynum is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and and a veteran of the United States Air Force. He received his M.D. at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in 2010 and Ph.D. in Health Professions Education at Maastricht University in the Netherlands in 2023, where defended his thesis entitled “Out of the shadows: a qualitative exploration of shame in medical learners.” Along with Luna, he is a co-creator of The Shame Space, a global consortium that advances open communication about the role of shame in healthcare, a co-producer on the award winning “Shame in Medicine” podcast series produced by The Nocturnists, and a co-founder of The Shame Lab, which catalyzes research and training to advance shame competence in healthcare and beyond. He is the author of over 30peer-reviewed publications and has given over 150 workshops and presentations to top hospitals, conferences, and organizations such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, and the American Hospital Association. He has received numerous awards for his research including Best Paper by the AAMC Research in Medical Education Committee in 2021 and Best Doctoral Report by the Association of Medical Educators of Europe in 2023.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Ria and Stuart about Uncertainty. Key themes include: imposter syndrome and participation in academic/institutional culture; pressures of speaking with authority; precarityand career development; the uncertainty of the current HE environment; vulnerability and humility as research positions; generative possibilities of uncertainty as a critical tool; uncertainty and anxiety; and disciplinary uncertainty.

Stuart Murray is Professor of ContemporaryLiteratures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he was the Founding Director of the Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities. He haswritten six monographs and edited/co-edited five collections on topics ranging across postcolonial literatures and film, disability representation, embodiedtechnologies, and wider depictions of health. His most recent book is Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines, published by Bloomsbury in 2023 and he has just started a new research project on Sleep and Modernism.

Ria Cheyne was a Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University until April 2024, when she tookvoluntary severance from her permanent position. She is now a fixed term researcher on the Disabled Researchers Network project at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research interests include genre fiction, neurodiversity, and representations of disability and health. Her monograph, Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction (LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2019) is available open access. She identifies as a literature scholar, a disability studies scholar, and/or a medical humanities scholar depending on the time of day.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Dr Arya Thampuran and Prof Sarah de Leeuw about decolonizing our practices. Key themes include: decolonial practice in academic spaces (non-extractive methodologies and representational labour); capitalism and extractive decontextualization; depoliticization of indigenous knowledges and practices; feminist queer-informed anti-colonial methodologies; critical poetics; medical education; and rural, remote, northern, and marginalized geographies.

Dr Arya Thampuran is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University and co-lead of the Black Health and the Humanities Network in her day job, and a yoga instructor pre-sunrise/post-sunset. These roles capture her interests in mental health and healing, engaging with communal knowledges and practices around wellbeing. Her work is broadly situated at the intersection of the medical humanities and critical race studies; she is interested in how creative practitioners in contemporary African diasporic contexts express distress and healing, in ways that re-script prevailing psychiatric narratives of illness and wellness. Principally, her work is committed to a decolonial and intersectional approach.

Sarah de Leeuw, a Professor and Canada Research Chair (Humanities and Health Inequities) with the Northern Medical Program (a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine) is an award-winning researcher, creative writer (poetry and literary non-fiction), and multidisciplinary scholar studying why some people and places have better health than others. Trained as a historical-cultural geographer, de Leeuw’s research, activism, and creative practices have for more than 30 years focused on anticolonial, feminist, and queer-informed understandings of overlooked people, communities, and geographies. She grew up in Haida Gwaii and Terrace (Kitsumkalum territory) and now divides her time between Lheidli T’enneh/Dakelh Territory (Prince George) and Syilx Territory (Okanagan Centre).