Blog written by Dr Anna Woodham, 11.11.24

A few weeks ago, I was very pleased to speak at the Creative Health: Museums, History, Heritage and Wellbeing conference in Amsterdam. The event was part of the PULSE Network for Medical and Health Humanities (UvA/VU Amsterdam). The two-day event included two key-note speakers (including one by Nuala Morse, one of our RSE project steering group members) and a range of other presentations on topics connected to arts and health. It was a great opportunity to understand more about work in the area of arts and health undertaken by organisations in the Netherlands. As part of the conference we visited the powerful ‘Who Cares’ exhibition on show at H Art created by the Museum van de Geest (Museum of the Mind). The exhibition tells the story of forgotten victims and heroes of WWII in the fields of psychiatry and mental health. We were also introduced to work with medical students to co-curate an exhibition on deafness and hardness of hearing, a contemporary collecting project aiming to empower patients and an oral history project with district nurses, to name a few, as well as considering how psychiatric patients and the history of psychiatry are represented in different heritage contexts.

In my presentation I introduced our Royal Society of Edinburgh project looking at workforce emotions. The topic was, I hope, an interesting contrast to many of the presentations which looked at arts and health in relation to museums/arts policy in more general terms or focusing on specific projects with audiences and communities as noted above. It was great to be able to also turn the topic of arts and health towards cultural workers, to consider their health and wellbeing as well as those of audiences, after all this surely impacts the extent to which museum and GLAM sector workers feel able to undertake this work. Speaking at the conference and talking to some of the other participants reinforced to me how important and little understood this area is. Some of the topics that came up around workforce emotions included whether this topic ultimately concerns improving individual resilience or organisational resilience (or both)? The topic of ethics came up as well, how can cultural workers make sure they are acting ethically in their work with communities. What support do workers need in this area and what is the emotional toll of ethical work?