High flying graduates in Arts and Health
Congratulations to Elizabeth Wright and Jessica Maiden, Fine Art MPhil graduates with a research focus on arts and health, who have both been accepted into the PhD program at The University of Leeds, UK.
Elizabeth and Jessica are just two of the students pursuing research topics in the area of arts and health, a burgeoning field of interest for the University of Newcastle which established the ArtsHealth Centre for Research and Practice as a cross-disciplinary centre in 2006.
As part of her Master of Philosophy (Fine Art) at the University of Newcastle, Elizabeth Wright spent four months at The University of Leeds on an exchange. She has now been invited to return to undertake PhD studies there.
Elizabeth – who was born with a congenital impairment in her right arm and leg – is used to achievement in the sporting arena, where she was a medal-winning member of Australia’s 1996 Atlanta Paralympic team in Atlanta. She is now showing the same talent for distinction as a research higher degree student in Fine Art.
Elizabeth delivered a conference paper in November entitled ‘self (un)contained: revealing the authentic experience of disability within a feminist context’ at the Canadian Association for Women’s Public History Conference, ‘Women’s Bodies in a Public History Context,’ in Ottawa. She has just had accepted for publication a paper ‘My Prosthetic and I: identity representation in bodily extension’ in “Forum”, the University of Edinburgh’s Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts.
In 2007, Jessica Maiden was awarded Honours Class 1 in Fine Art. Her research in photo media included a Directed Study project at the John Hunter Hospital, which involved photographing sufferers of Juvenile Arthritis, a condition that she also suffers from. That research formed an exhibition that was shown in the arts health context.
Jessica’s Honours work focused again on the medicalised body where she sought to investigate the notion of sight. Her final examination exhibition and paper were critically acclaimed and lead to her being awarded a highly competitive Australian Post Graduate Award to undertake research study. Jessica’s topic for her MFA is: Feminine Pathos: Examining the Representation of the Afflicted Woman since 1839.
Her international study experience includes an exchange to Leeds University and a fully funded study tour to Japan. Jessica will return to the UK later in 2010 after the award of her MPhil in Fine Art to take up her PhD offer at Leeds University.
ArtsHealth researcher and photo media artist Miranda Lawry has been involved as a research higher degree supervisor with both these high flying graduates.
Other arts and health research higher degree topics currently underway at the University of Newcastle include:
• Choral singing as rehabilitation for adult stroke survivors
• Indigenous spiritual needs in health care
• Performance fitness for singers
• Asthma/Obstructive Airway Disease, A Visual Interpretation
• Art, Social Work and Social Change
• Participation in the Arts and its Relation to Healthy Ageing: a Mixed Methods Study
• The Experience and Effects of Group Improvisational Music Therapy Amongst Women Recently Diagnosed with Breast Cancer: A Mixed Methods Study
• Social Reconstruction of Obesity and the Impact on the Health of Maori and Pacific Migrants in Australia
• "In their own words'. Healthy ageing in late modernity: An analysis of the free-text comments of the older cohort of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health.
• The Mental Health Experiences of Early Retired Males in the Hunter Region
• Social Reconstruction of Obesity and the Impact on the Health of Maori and Pacific Migrants in Australia
• Using Theatre to Promote Change: A Case Study of How Theatre Can Educate, Reduce Stigma and Raise Awareness of Youth Depression and Suicide in Australia