The Global Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Hannah's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

About Hannah

Hannah Drayson is an artist and researcher whose work focusses on transdisciplinary approaches to complex problems in media, technology, and medicine. She is co-convenor of the Transtechnology Research group and associate editor of Leonardo Reviews, for Leonardo Journal of the Arts, Science and Technology. She is currently CI on a collaborative project that explores anxiety and simulation in dental care, funded by the Medical Protection Society. Her research combines practice-based, interview, sensory and auto-ethnographic methods and since 2018 she has been training and working with micro-phenomenological interview and analysis.

Since the beginning of her career, Hannah’s work has been situated at the intersection of arts, science and technology. Her PhD, completed in 2011, explored epistemological and aesthetic questions relating to bio-sensors in medical instrumentation. This work led her to an ongoing exploration of the paradoxical phenomenon of the placebo effect and the role of affect and creativity in medicine and healing. Her current research develops these concerns with the aesthetic and phenomenological dimensions of biomedicine, she is currently in the analysis stage of a project about experiences of tablet taking. 

As an artist and designer, she has explored a range of media as platforms for creative enquiry, including; web and digital design, vjing, interactive art, live coding, reconstructed psychological instruments, hypnotic performances, lists, and live events– mainly parties. Her explorations of suggestion as medical and psychological practice led her to train in hypnotism (stage and hypnotherapy) and microphenomenological interview techniques, which offer research topics as well as methods in her work. She has written on the theme of taste, medicine and the everyday which have involved desk research across a range of disciplines, as well as collaborative workshops and experiments in cooking and recipe writing. This work has been published as “Don’t Sugar Coat It” in the online journal Feast and “To the Bitter End” reflects on how human co-evolution with plants can help us to think about what it means to “take a bitter pill”. She has an upcoming paper on object agency, matter, and affect, exploring mug use as a form of metaphorical communication in intentional community. She is also working on a project titled PARTY SCIENCE which combines microphenomenological and microsociological perspective on celebration and gathering (Drayson, 2020).

Research interests/approaches.
Key theoretical influences include pragmatism, 4E, systems theory, STS, post-phenomenology, new materialism, affect theory, and neurophenomenology.

Research themes/projects
MPS funded Anxious ‘tells’ (AngST)
Media and Placebo, (taste and healing, microphenomenology of tablet taking)
Intentional community, sharing and object agency
Interaction ritual, atmosphere, and affect in simulation
Digital arts and sensor-based performance
Alternative higher educational communities (Schumacher society, Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research)

Teaching

Contact Hannah

( B321, Portland Square, Drake Circus, Plymouth, PL4 8AA
+44 7832 996253
hannah.drayson@plymouth.ac.uk