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Author:Anna Harris

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October 2, 2026

Clinical Tools: A DIY catalogue for the creative

Instead of encouraging the purchasing of new technologies for medical training, this textbook, in the form of a catalogue, focuses on sharing examples of creative tools that already exist. This issue also offers a practical guide for how to make these tools, encouraging using local resources. Ever considered where your learning tools come from as you study or teach medicine? So many teaching materials in medicine are mass-produced, environmentally unfriendly, and reproduce the same kind of bodies. We need a drastic rethinking of our teaching tools. But rather than new inventions, what if the innovations we need are already out there? Our first issue of Clinical Tools: A DIY Catalogue for the Creative celebrates the abundance of ideas for teaching materials that already exist in medical education. Inside you will find gorgeous illustrations, clear instructions for how to make tools and insightful essays exploring the ideas behind DIY in medical education. Get your making supplies ready! This open textbook is designed for nursing, medical and other healthcare students and teachers across bachelor’s, undergraduate and postgraduate, master’s level, especially those enrolled in courses on clinical training. It is also relevant to other practitioners and learners working in healthcare contexts who continue to engage in educational activities. The textbook is intended to help students learn about and create their own teaching tools, whether they are working in obstetrics, surgery, or general medicine. The book supports learning by doing: students and teachers can read and adapt the instructions, use the included suggestions, and connect to what is available and relevant in their own healthcare contexts. It is also suitable for instructors seeking accessible, reusable teaching material that can be integrated into classroom teaching, assignments, and research-led education across healthcare education settings. In plaats van het aanschaffen van nieuwe technologieën voor medisch onderwijs aan te moedigen, richt dit studieboek, in de vorm van een catalogus, zich op het delen van voorbeelden van creatieve hulpmiddelen die al bestaan. Deze uitgave biedt daarnaast een praktische handleiding voor het maken van deze hulpmiddelen en stimuleert het gebruik van lokale middelen en materialen. Heb je je tijdens het leren of onderwijzen van geneeskunde ooit afgevraagd waar je leermiddelen vandaan komen? Veel onderwijsmaterialen in de geneeskunde worden op grote schaal geproduceerd, zijn belastend voor het milieu en tonen steeds weer dezelfde soorten lichamen. We moeten onze manier van denken over onderwijsmiddelen drastisch herzien. Maar in plaats van nieuwe uitvindingen te ontwikkelen: wat als de innovaties die we nodig hebben al bestaan? Ons eerste deel van Clinical Tools: A DIY Catalogue for the Creative viert de overvloed aan ideeën voor onderwijsmaterialen die al binnen het medisch onderwijs bestaan. In deze uitgave vind je prachtige illustraties, duidelijke instructies voor het maken van hulpmiddelen en inzichtelijke essays waarin de ideeën achter doe-het-zelf (DIY) in het medisch onderwijs worden verkend. Maak je materialen maar alvast klaar! Dit open studieboek is bedoeld voor studenten en docenten in de verpleegkunde, geneeskunde en andere zorgopleidingen, op bachelor-, undergraduate-, postgraduate- en masterniveau, en in het bijzonder voor degenen die onderwijs volgen of geven binnen opleidingen en cursussen gericht op klinische training. Het boek is ook relevant voor andere professionals en lerenden die werkzaam zijn in de zorg en zich blijven bezighouden met onderwijsactiviteiten. Het studieboek is bedoeld om studenten te helpen bij het leren over én het zelf ontwikkelen van onderwijshulpmiddelen, of zij nu werkzaam zijn binnen de verloskunde, chirurgie of algemene geneeskunde. Het boek ondersteunt leren door te doen: studenten en docenten kunnen de instructies lezen en aanpassen, gebruikmaken van de opgenomen suggesties en aansluiten bij wat beschikbaar en relevant is binnen hun eigen zorgcontext. Het is ook geschikt voor docenten die op zoek zijn naar toegankelijk en herbruikbaar onderwijsmateriaal dat kan worden geïntegreerd in klassikaal onderwijs, opdrachten en onderwijs dat gebaseerd is op onderzoek binnen verschillende zorgopleidingen en -contexten.

Open (Access) Text Book

Anna Harris

November 7, 2025

The Matter of Hospitals

This book invites readers to discover never-before-told stories of hospitals through an unusual assortment of materials, offering a unique and timely glimpse into one of society’s most feared, essential, and sensorially rich institutions. Hospitals, with their distinctive smells, acute pain, births, writhing bodies, incessant beeping, endless waiting, cardboard food and never-ending corridors, have fascinated writers for centuries. Edited by the prize-winning author of A Sensory Education and Making Sense of Medicine, this book shares a never-before-told story of hospitals through an unusual collection of objects. A great deal that matters happens in hospitals – from new life to the end of life. There is also a great deal of matter, in its material form, within hospitals. Sometimes there is too much: when we see the mountains of clinical waste with dirty syringes and used gloves. Sometimes there is too little: when we saw empty pharmacy shelves during the pandemic. More often, matter circulates in ways that are taken for granted, invisible yet critical to how hospitals function. Each essay in this book takes the matter of hospitals as a starting point to explore broader themes. Organised alphabetically, The Matter of Hospitals investigates what we can learn from the institution’s materiality about creativity, waste, patient care, community, attention and design. From ‘A’ for atmosphere to ‘Z’ for zips, each essay is a close sensory study of what seem, on the surface, to be mundane things. Beautifully illustrated with artistic photographs and hand-drawn illustrations by the editor, The Matter of Hospitals offers an inspiring and unique examination of the stuff that so many of us take for granted, in a place that we never do.

Open (Access) Text Book

Anna Harris

September 24, 2025

Amateur Craft as Method-in-the-Making:

This research output documents a pandemic-era experiment in which academic researchers used knitting to record and reflect on their digital screen time, exploring craft as a critical research method and a tool for data sensitisation, feminist activism, and embodied knowledge making. Project Overview: A group of academics and amateur knitters from Maastricht University and partner institutions met online during 2020–2021, using knitting to document their own screen time over a week of lockdown. Their creative outputs—a collection of individually knitted rectangles—were later assembled as a tactile "knitted book" to display in arts and crafts contexts, as well as academic contexts. The project linked technofeminist thinking, craftivism, and artistic research practices, aiming to make visible both quantitative and qualitative aspects of technology use during social isolation. Main Topics and Learning Objectives: • Explore how amateur craftwork (knitting) can act as a research method to sensitise and interpret personal data. • Engage with concepts from technofeminism and critical craft studies to understand the role of tactile, embodied methodologies. • Foster social connection, experimentation, and reflection on digital dependency during the COVID-19 lockdown. • Develop awareness of how materials, technique, and individual interpretation shape both method and outcome in collaborative research. Audience: This work suits students, educators, and researchers interested in qualitative and artistic research methods, feminist theory, science and technology studies (STS), and creative digital-literacy pedagogies. It models interdisciplinary practice and encourages engagement with data, methodology, and making as interconnected experiential processes. Authors and Licensing: Authors: Denise Petzold (first and corresponding author), Laura Barendregt, Ruth Benschop, Anna Harris, Laudy van den Heuvel, Bernike Pasveer, Veerle Spronck, Sally Wyatt, affiliated with Maastricht University, TU Delft, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, and HKU University of Arts Utrecht. The text is suitable for publication in open educational repositories and supports open, collaborative engagement with academic craftwork. The pictures of the digitised version of the book were taken by Eric Bleize. Suggested Citation: “Amateur Craft as Method-in-the-Making: Experiments in Knitting Screen Time during a Pandemic” by Denise Petzold, Laura Barendregt, Ruth Benschop, Anna Harris, Laudy van den Heuvel, Bernike Pasveer, Veerle Spronck and Sally Wyatt (2025), Maastricht University, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This license permits reuse, distribution, and adaptation, provided appropriate credit is given.

Document

Denise Petzold, Laura Barendregt, Ruth Benschop, Anna Harris, Laudy van den Heuvel, Bernike Pasveer, Veerle Spronck, Sally Wyatt

September 12, 2023

Who Nose? A workshop on smell and 21st Century Learning

Smell has long been part of education. Doctors for example would learn how to smell urine samples and diagnose based on the smell, sight and (yes) taste of the urine. A wine taster needs to learn how to tell the differences between types of wine and to describe the bouquet of the wine, and a perfume maker needs to train their ‘nose’ too. Histories of smell show the importance of odour in understanding issues of class, hygiene and sanitation. Smell has however been a more neglected sense in education and research more broadly, despite its strong links to emotion and memory. In these workshops, you will train your sense of smell and consider how sensing in a different way might help you to address the issues of your challenge owner and the challenge they pose. How might a sensitivity to smell help you address the challenge? How might you use smell to inform your investigation, and maybe even make it part of the intervention? How smell as a research tool and could inform investigation, specifically to think about how smell might be important: During the research phase (as a tool to take other people’s perspective, to come up with new questions for the Challenge Owner and other stakeholders involved); For analytical purposes to think through their challenges more conceptually; And also as a potential factor for the interventions that they will come up with further along their trajectory. Activities: Tutorial 1 Part I Introductions – in pairs, discuss a strong smell memory from “home” (whatever that means to you), and share this with the group Smell kit exercise – a commercial smell kit is passed around and we will describe the smells Anna will introduce some different research on smell, from interdisciplinary perspective, including her own research in medicine education as well as examples from other fields (e.g. marketing), as a way to lead discussion Part II We will then brainstorm what it might mean to make a smell kit relevant to your challenge owner and challenge. Each presents their challenge, while this student presents, the others jot down questions and smell impression on post-its and share afterwards. Encourage students to identify areas that they would appreciate feedback on. Then as a group they brainstorm together using the following questions as prompts: – What might attention to smell open up? – How might smell open up questions about the material things that they challenges are made of? – What kinds of smells would elicit some of these questions/solutions? – How might you go beyond discussion of how smell features in their projects to thinking critically about this together? – What are the histories of some of the smells (we can use tools in class such as the Odeuropa Smell Explorer to explore this: https://explorer.odeuropa.eu/) – How smell is relevant at different times in their project, or for different people? Between tutorials collect materials to bring to the next class to make a smell kit. These may be literal or representative connections to the challenge. Students are encouraged not only think about smell in a literal sense but how it connects to theory. Tutorial 2 – Making a smell kit* Part I We head out to the FASoS garden (weather permitting) and see if there are any more materials to collect. We walk in pairs, reflecting with each other on the materials we’ve brought to the session. We form as a group and share what we would put into our kits and why. Questions for each other. Anna will introduce some different interventions using smell, public health to museums, as a way to lead discussion on the possibilities of how smell might be used with their challenge owners. Part II Everyone assembles their kits. Make a small explanatory text accompanying the kit (form open to your creativity), explaining why the smells were chosen and how to use the kit. Group discussion on how the kit/smells may be brought into your group’s challenge. *students may also want to make a smell map instead, see https://sensorymaps.com/

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Anna Harris