Open call for participation
As a continuation of the two-weekend-long workshop on Archiving Health Histories (June’24), we are curating a public showcase and an open dialogue on the subject. This year the public showcase will be held in Bengaluru to sensitize and engage with a wide range of personal, public, or community experiences related to healing and health care. Ensuring ethical clearance as well as rights to data protection critical to this initiative. The public showcase will put out the stories documented, collected, researched, and interpreted by the workshop participants and from participation through this open call.
Email to participate: radhika.h@sjri.res.in
or call on: +91 96321 72577
Last date for participation: Sunday, 21st July 2024
Curatorial Meeting (online): Wednesday, 24th July 2024, 6pm-7.30pm IST
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 10th August 2024 -Sunday, 18th August 2024
Venue: St. John’s Medical College (exact location will be announced at the end of July)
Inviting contributors from all walks of life...
From Bangalore and other cities of India -
To share your stories, any format or medium
Build a public archive of health histories.
Intent
This workshop aims to create a safe space for community members to share their lived experiences and personal health histories, enabling them to voice their narratives and contribute to a people’s medical archive. The workshop will introduce inclusive and accessible ways to archive health histories, be it personal incidences, family history, or community narratives. At the same time, the workshop aims to provide medical students with a deeper understanding of the cultural, social, and human dimensions of health and illness. By curating these stories, we intend to honor the lived experiences of individuals and communities, ensuring their voices are heard and valued in the broader context of medical history. This approach moves beyond clinical facts and figures, allowing the medical fraternity and larger audiences to develop greater empathy and cultural competence; and ultimately becoming more holistic and compassionate healthcare providers.
Approach
Let’s begin with why it’s important to archive people’s health histories - to empathize, to reconnect, to create a safe space; and what else?
Introduction to basics of archiving, documenting lived histories, and self-ethnography
Looking into creative ways to make archiving more inclusive and accessible for data management, dialogue, and dissemination
Being on a historic campus, exploring possibilities of collaboration and sensitization across different community groups
Unpack ethical and moral concerns about remembering difficult memories and understanding the notions of violating privacy and agency of the dead
Exploring ways to engage a larger audience through storytelling and curation
Outcome
In its merit, the workshop will build capacities and empower participants to think critically and creatively about health histories and medical narratives, individually and as a collective. Furthermore, the participants will be guided to think curatorially about the archive-building exercise. Different exercises will be designed to include more voices in the process as well as to make the narratives easily and ethically accessible. A popup showcase will be co-curated with the participant's (and their associates’ consent) at the campus, keeping site-specificity in mind. The curatorial initiative will strive to respond to the context of Bangalore and the historical legacy of the institution as well as generate newer conversations between the participants and audiences.
Ishita Shah
Ishita Shah is trained as an interior designer and an architectural historian. Over the last few years, she has been developing a community-based curatorial practice, which focuses on cultural preservation and creative collaborations across individuals, families, and organizations invested in building a culture for archiving in India and across South Asia. Her work is situated under the aegis of a self-founded collective, Curating for Culture.
Ishita has worked with Biome Environmental Solutions Pvt. Ltd. to curate their recent publication, Biome Diaries: Ecological Architecture from India, as well as collaborated with organizations like the National Centre for Biological Sciences, INTACH Bengaluru, Arthshila Ahmedabad, the Ministry of Culture India; to curate and develop a wide range of public interpretation projects. Before this, she was an educator and the coordinator to the UNESCO Chair in Culture, Habitat, and Sustainable Development at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology. She has also been the founding archivist and oral historian at CEPT Archives and worked with the Royal Institute of British Architects (UK), INSITE Magazine, SPADE India Research Cell, and Design Innovation and Craft Resource Centre. Ishita is also a Graham Foundation Grant recipient (2020), Khoj CISA Fellow (2021), and a fellowship student at The Alternative Art School (2022)."
Radhika Hegde
Radhika Hegde is a curator at the Maj Gen S.L Bhatia History of Medicine Museum, Library, and Archives, and curates the Institutional Museum at St John’s National Academy of Health Sciences in Bengaluru. Her areas of interest are the influence of colonialism on urban landscapes and medical institutions, the history of medicine and ethics, and the interplay of gender, medicine, and indigenous healthcare systems in the princely state of Mysore. Her recent collaborative work with the University of Oxford, London, has explored the history of Typhoid in Bengaluru. She is presently working on the archives of maternal institutions in Bangalore, the representation of disability in South Indian temple architecture, and collating the archival history of Ross Institute of Occupational Health in St John’s. Hegde engages in museum walks and curatorial projects with medical and history students, focusing on disease history, and also conducts educational museum tours for schoolchildren and college students.