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The blood notebooks
Novelist Rupert Thomson explores his unusual behaviour during a time of self-imposed isolation.
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Performing my disability
Caroline Butterwick explores the idea of disability as performative, and the pressure to act out what we think others expect.
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Audrey and her family
In working on Audrey Amiss’s archive, Elena is getting closer to understanding her. But the way her niece and nephew remember Audrey adds essential detail to the picture.
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Cataloguing Audrey
Work begins in earnest to restore order to the archive Audrey Amiss kept of the minutest happenings in her life. Like detectives, the archivists search for subtle clues to chronology in the mass of materials.
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A reflection on art in a mental hospital
Artist Beth Hopkins explains how she used her experience of researching the Adamson Collection to create an embroidered wall hanging.
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Walk, interrupted
By listing all the things that get in her way, Caroline Butterwick wants to create an embodied experience of disability and convince you that inclusion is everyone’s responsibility.
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How the Peckham Experiment inspired my fiction
Find out how an unruly mass of archive material from a 1930s radical health centre has inspired brand new writing.
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Seeking the hoarder in literature
As she strives to deepen her understanding of hoarding, Georgie Evans turns to books. But depictions of hoards and hoarders are few and often sparse, except in one surprising place.
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Collecting pandemic stories
Find out how personal notebook jottings from two flatmates became ‘Journals of a Pandemic’, a comprehensive diary-keeping project encompassing dozens of writers from a wide variety of backgrounds.
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Life lessons across the digital divide
What could 86-year-old Tony teach 20-something Adele as she showed him how to use his smartphone? Rather a lot about digital exclusion, it turns out.
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In the tracks of Derek Jarman’s tears
Researcher E K Myerson shares her moving encounters with the personal papers of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman.
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My rainforest upbringing
In the introduction to her serial, research biologist Nataly Allasi Canales charts the influences that led her to passion for preserving the species of the Peruvian Amazon, where she spent her childhood.
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Coleridge’s hypochondria
An intense focus on his own bodily sensations led poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to self-medicate with narcotics. But this fascination also put Coleridge ahead of the medical sensibilities of his day.
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Picturing mental health
Ron Hampshire created artworks while resident at Netherne psychiatric hospital. What can we learn from them?
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Conserving Audrey
Elena describes how specially designed storage allows Audrey’s scrapbooks to retain all traces of her creative process, although their intrinsic fragility means deterioration is almost inevitable.
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A walk through other people’s expectations
The steep path isn’t the only thing Caroline Butterwick has to navigate on her Lakeland hike. Always aware of other people’s expectations, she continually monitors how her disability might seem to strangers.
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How the mental health system fails Black people
Accessing mental healthcare as a Black woman can be a challenging experience. Rianna Walcott shares her story, alongside those of three other women, to reveal the barriers she faced.
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Digitising Audrey
Building digital images of what Audrey created means that her work can be frozen in time – for the digital version, at least, the process of decay is halted, and any number of people can view it without the risk of damaging it.
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Who was Audrey Amiss?
Elena Carter introduces the vast collection left behind by artist Audrey Amiss, who documented her life in astonishing detail.
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The indelible harm caused by conversion therapy
With first-hand evidence from two powerful testimonies, neurologist Jules Montague explores the destructive history of conversion therapy, a punitive treatment designed to ‘cure’ people of homosexuality.
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The food diary and the power of unhealth
Food diaries might appear to present a strictly factual record of dietary choices, but what they don’t include is the more revealing story, as Virginia Hartley suggests.
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Audrey in the world
As the collection is fully catalogued, the archive is opened up to the public. A feature film about Audrey premieres, and Audrey gets her own Wikipedia page, so people can learn about her. For archivist Elena, it’s time to step back.