2025 Creative Enquiry
SUBMIT FOR CREATIVE ENQUIRY HERE
Creative Enquiry Presentations: exploring ‘caritas’ through creative or artistic media
At SAPC 2025 we will once again give an opportunity for delegates to extend engagement with the complexity and inter-subjectivity of primary care through a creative enquiry. This is an opportunity to engage with different forms of evidence, knowledge-creation and meaning-making.
Creative Enquiry was first introduced to the SAPC ASM in Bristol in 2011 and then again in London in 2018. View the gallery from SAPC ASM 2018.
Work selected for presentation will be allocated a workshop slot.
You may use any creative medium for your presentation, for example: music, dance, monologue, painting, photography, prose, poetry, sculpture. You must submit some evidence of the created work at the time of submission and this must be accompanied by an abstract/reflection (limited to 350 words). The created work on which your abstract/reflection is based may be your own. Alternatively you may choose to present something which is not your own creation but which has deepened your own engagement with, or understanding of, primary care. We are primarily interested in the quality and depth of your accompanying engagement and thought.
What is Creative Enquiry?
We are drawing inspiration for this new kind of presentation from what is sometimes known as ‘arts-based inquiry’. This has been described as ‘the making of artistic expressions…as a primary way of understanding and examining experience (McNiff 2008, p29) Arts-based approaches invite extension of cognition and expression beyond the limitations of literal language, giving feeling form (Langer, 1957) and embracing metaphor, symbol and imagination. The arts facilitate the emergence of voice, perspective and reflexivity (Younie, 2013, 2014) as well as inviting multiple forms of knowing (Eisner, 2008) thereby extending epistemology (Seeley, 2011).
The motto of the Royal College of General Practitioners is ‘Cum Scientia Caritas’ (science with compassion). It is usual at academic conferences to focus predominantly on the science and it can be very easy to lose sight of the ‘art’ or ‘practice’ of medicine. Caritas: Creative Enquiry is an opportunity to enrich and extend our engagement with the art and practice of medicine. The aim is not to displace our attention to academic rigour, but to enhance it…and it is not about creating entertainment, but about entertaining creativity in how we think about primary health care.
References
EISNER, E. 2008. Art and Knowledge. In: KNOWLES, G. J. & COLE, A. L. (eds.) Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
LANGER, S. K. 1957. Problems of art: Ten philosophical lectures, New York, Scribner.
MCNIFF, S. 2008. Arts-based research. In: KNOWLES, J. G. & COLE, A. L. (eds.) Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
RICHARDSON, L. 2000. Evaluating Ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 6, 253-255.
SEELEY, C. 2011. Uncharted territory: Imagining a stronger relationship between the arts and action research. Action Research, 9, 83-99.
YOUNIE, L. 2013. Introducing arts-based inquiry into medical education: ‘Exploring the Creative Arts in Health and Illness’. In: MCINTOSH, P. & WARREN, D. (eds.) Creativity in the Classroom: Case Studies in Using the Arts in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Bristol: Intellect Publishers.
YOUNIE, L. 2014. Arts-based inquiry and a clinician educator's journey of discovery. In: C.L.MCLEAN (ed.) Creative Arts in Humane Medicine. Edmonton: Brush Education Inc.