Disrupted breath, songlines of breathlessness (Malpass, Dodd, Feder, et al., 2019)

A ‘songline’ is a song used within Australian Aboriginal culture as a way to navigate across the land…

Health research is often bounded by disciplinary expertise. In a paper recently published in the journal Medical Humanities, members of the Life of Breath team come together to present their pluralistic, interdisciplinary analysis of part of a single interview transcript with a patient with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). They discuss the variation in their responses and interpretations of the data, why research into breathlessness may particularly benefit from an interdisciplinary approach (the “disrupted songlines of breathlessness”), and the wider implications for interdisciplinary research within health and medicine.

Read the full open access article here:

Malpass A, Dodd J, Feder G, et al. (2019), Disrupted breath, songlines of breathlessness: an interdisciplinary response, Medical Humanities, 2019;0:1–10. doi:10.1136/medhum-2018-01163