Rewriting Belonging: Disrupting Ableism in Medical Education Through Poetry

Presenter: Dr. Megan Brown, PhD

Originally played on July 8, 2025

Description: "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."

Medical education often operates within rigid structures, valuing uniformity and efficiency over individuality and lived experience. For disabled medical students and doctors, our structures of education perpetuate ableist norms and often silence those that challenge established ideas of what it means to belong in medicine.

This talk explores how poetic inquiry—an arts-based research method—can create space for disabled learners to articulate their experiences in ways that go beyond the possibilities of traditional research methods. By privileging voice, emotion, and subjectivity, poetry offers rich potential to challenge established norms, disrupt ableist assumptions, and enable its readers to radically reimagine medical education.

Through considering examples of poetic inquiry in practice, attendees will be invited to consider how engaging with poetry might not only bring new perspectives to their teaching and research but also inspire a deeper commitment to dismantling exclusionary practices and fostering an educational culture where all voices are heard and valued.

Bio:

Dr. Megan Brown, PhD (she/they), is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in Medical Education at Newcastle University, UK. As a multiply disabled, Autistic researcher, Megan focuses on the experiences of disabled learners and the disabled medical workforce in the UK, advocating for systemic changes in education and training. They earned their PhD in Medical Education from Hull York Medical School in 2022, with research on longitudinal models of learning and identity development. Megan specialises in qualitative research methods, including longitudinal research and creative approaches, and is a pioneer of poetic inquiry as a methodology within medical education. She is an ex-clinician, having left clinical medicine to retrain as a medical education researcher.