Prototyping a Plural Archive of Care is a collaborative project that brings together health research, artistic practice, and community engagement to explore how care, health, and personal histories are shaped in a society where health is increasingly defined through data. Vincent Straub’s research on population health and data governance intersects with Deshna Shah’s artistic exploration of symbolic language and identity, including her Twilight Language script, which encodes memory and emotion across Hindi, English, and Gujarati. Alongside Dr Mehrunisha Suleman’s expertise in bioethics and cultural perspectives on health, the project creates an interdisciplinary space where art and research work in dialogue.
Through a curated programme including a planned community workshop, installation and future exhibition, the project will test creative, participatory formats that invite people to reflect on their personal understandings of care, family health histories and cultural memories, drawing on sculpture, multimedia, and storytelling. By fostering inclusive conversations across communities and disciplines, it seeks to model pluralist approaches to care, health, and medical ethics.
Vincent Straub is a multimedia artist and D.Phil. candidate in Population Health at the University of Oxford. As an early adopter and Research Scholar for Our Future Health, the UK's largest ever health research programme, his research focuses on men’s health, social epidemiology, and research ethics. He is committed to collaboration and participatory approaches, having served as a member of the European Cultural Parliament Future Generation. His works have previously been exhibited by the Tate Collective and Stedelijk Blikopners art collectives.
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Deshna Shah is a London-based artist and recipient of the Plachte Award for MFA Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. Her interactive practice explores identity, taboo, language, and symbolic systems through immersive media including installation, wax, food, sound, and print. Committed to community arts, Shah regularly leads workshops at museums, Jain centres, shopping malls, care homes, and children’s centres.
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Mehrunisha Suleman is an Associate Professor and Director of Medical Ethics and Law Education at the University of Oxford. A medically trained bioethicist and public health researcher, her work spans healthcare systems analysis to empirical ethics evaluation. Her research interests intersect global health research ethics and clinical ethics, particularly where religious and cultural views and values of patients, clinicians, and researchers are pertinent.
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This project emerges from the shared research interests of the project team in care ethics, memory, health, and community. Mehrunisha Suleman’s work in global bioethics and clinical ethics has focused on how health systems often fall short for racial and ethnic minority communities, particularly due to misaligned epistemic and cultural assumptions. Vincent Straub’s research investigates the potential of large-scale biobanks to improve population health and how family structure, gender norms, and social environments influence health risk behaviours and mental health, with a focus on young men. This dialogue is extended through collaboration with Deshna Shah, whose artistic practices explore language, symbolic scripts, ancestral archive, and the politics of memory. Deshna’s Twilight Language, a script drawn from Hindi, English, and Gujarati, serves as a core motif for encoding and decoding memory, emotion, and identity.
This project has recieved initial seed funding from the ANTITHESES Wellcome Discovery Platform Arts, Health and Ethics Fund 2025 , in partnership with Fusion Arts — a University of Oxford initiative that supports arts-based research collaborations exploring themes of disagreement, polarization, and uncertainty.
Vincent Straub is additionally supported by a Culture Fund Award from St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.