Paper short abstract:

The author reflects on their knowledges gained from their artistic-practice, re-training as a healthcare professional after being a patient, and becoming researcher to highlight the need to see experience as a valid research method. Highlighting the potential for criticality and justice it can offer

Paper long abstract:

This paper is written from a position of fractures.

As an artist/(cancer)patient/radiotherapist/researcher - I wanted to use all of these knowledges to critically look at the illness experience.

After falling sick, I realized that the healthcare system creates stories about you, but not with or by you, or even for you. Miranda Fricker calls this phenomena as "epistemic-injustice", in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower.

This paper will critically examine the use of my "double-agent-status", and artistic practice, to highlight the need for incorporating personal-experiences into academic and healthcare practice.

Briefly using Elizabeth Grosz's idea of "Inside-out" and "Outside-in", I will show how the collision of external and internal interpretative perspectives can have the potential to tackle gaps and epistemic-injustices that lie within healthcare pathways and experiences.

Reflect upon my retraining as a healthcare-professional, I originally believed that having 'expert knowledge' would bridge the gap between my experience of illness itself, and the representation of the experience. What I found instead is a lack of meaningful tools to enable agency and autonomy for both my patients and staff.

Fundamentally, autonomy is relational. It's not solely intellectual. It's predicated on interaction and exchange. By borrowing from socially-engaged art-practice history and methods, this paper will show the how using artistic-practice can critically examine these power-paradigms and structures of illness, remission, and recovery. And how using experience as a method is key in ensuring new knowledge to reduce injustice in the future for all healthcare experiences.