All Opinions In This Blog Are My Own
Date and time
Location
South Wing University College London
IAS Common Ground, South Wing
UCL Gower Street London
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom
Healthcare Science Week performance based on the weekly 'Girlymicro’ blog by Dr Elaine Cloutman-Green, followed by a discussion on blogging
About this event
“So, this is my first ever blog post. Bear with me as I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m what is known as a Clinical Scientist and I work in Infection Control.”
Thus began the first blog post by Dr Elaine Cloutman-Green, Lead Healthcare Scientist at Great Ormond Street Hospital, in December 2015. It would be five years and one pandemic before her second post, in October 2020, began her weekly blog as ‘Girlymicro’ ('scientist changing the world one swab at a time').
Girlymicro blogged at first about the job, to promote Healthcare Science, offering professional exam or interview advice for HCS trainees, before ranging more widely, into women in science, the challenges facing HCS, exploring the limits of what overstretched teams and individuals can achieve, saving lives in labs through insight, accuracy and interpretation.
Each blog written in a snatched hour, Girlymicro became a mental space populated with personal reflection, meditation on loss, favourite microbes, special guests, puppet shows, and… zombies; always with Elaine’s trademark humanity and humour.
‘All Opinions In This Blog Are My Own’ is a showcase of a devised work in progress based on the Girlymicro blog by The Nosocomial Project, adapted by Nicola Baldwin, performed by two actors, Becky Simon and Peter Clements, and two Healthcare Scientists, Anthony De Souza and Dr Elaine Cloutman-Green.
The short performance will be followed by a conversation on writing and blogging. Why blog? What might you learn along the way? Does writing create a safe space for reflection? Or create new pressures? To blog or not to blog…. That is the question.
All welcome.
Picture credit: Julia Lockheart, DreamsID.com
The painting is of Elaine's dream of shelling quails' eggs to find a cure for Covid-19. The dream was told and discussed online with psychologist Mark Blagrove and a worldwide audience in April 2020, and was painted simultaneously by artist Julia Lockheart. More details of the dream and painting, and the DreamsID pandemic dreams project, can be seen at https://DreamsID.com.
