Collaborating With Care: A Toolkit for Values-Informed Medical Humanities Research

The Collaborating with Care Toolkit is designed for anyone who is interested in doing collaborative, creative and experimental research with care and accountability. This toolkit emerges from a three-year Wellcome-funded project at the University of Leeds called LivingBodiesObjects: Technology and the Spaces of Health (LBO). LBO involved researchers, artists, educators, activists, creative facilitators and curators who shared a commitment to accessible and inclusive research culture. Our project was focused on stories and experiences related to health and embodiment, and our approach combined different types of knowledge about health and health research, incorporating insights from medical humanities and disability studies, lived experience, embodied knowledge, and health-related professional experience.  We developed a set of project values - care, creativity, and accountability - that we felt reflected our shared ethos and that we could use to help direct project activities. The resources in this toolkit focus on how to design creative research projects and activities that are accessible, inclusive, and responsive. We hope that our methods and approaches will be of interest to researchers across disciplines, facilitators, creative practitioners, and anyone wanting to design collaborative activities with attention to care and accessibility.