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Posted Sun, 1 Mar 2009 13:15:58
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Two forthcoming What is Medicine? seminars by Fiona O'Neill and Monica Greco
at Goldsmiths, 12th fl Warmington Tower:
Uncanny Belongings: Bioethics and the technologies of fashioning flesh
Wednesday, 11th March 4- 6pm
Fiona K. O'Neill, Lancaster University
Most of us will at some point experience bodily engagement with, and
embodied support through, a 'biotechnology' ~ broadly understood here as any
technology designed to work intimately with the human body and to some
degree with its embodiment. Such biotechnologies not only affect a person's
identity, but their overall sense of belonging.
So how might we experience, appreciate and understand some of these
variously intimate human-technology relations, as with transplantation,
prosthetics or hearing aids? What are the mimetic or animating
potentialities of biotechnology? (Can Aristotle's work on psuchº and philia
give us some means to acknowledge these individual experiences?) And what of
innovative and convergent somatechnics?
Such experiences of medical technologies and techniques can leave one with a
certain disquiet. With reference to medical phenomenology and Wittgenstein's
On Certainty, one can come to appreciate such experiences as speaking to our
uncanny canniness ~ our bodily knowing. Thus, suggesting the clinical and
ethical significance of such experiences for patients and practitioners
alike, in a profession dominated by rational, evidence based practice. And
how might our embodied experiences of uncanny illness, health and medicine
background our ability to trust?
Looking from standard to future-present biotechnologies we see developments
which treat the human body as a plastic resource ripe with potential. How
might we appreciate the reasons, affects and effects of fashioning flesh?
Indeed, what happens when we enter our bodies into the paradox and conundrum
that is fashion? Might medicine already be caught up in the politics of
fashioning bodies?
Dr Fiona O'Neill has an eclectic professional background as an educator,
facilitator and researcher. Presently, she tutors medical students in the
School for Health and Medicine at Lancaster University, is conducting
freelance research for the Probation Service and is a member of the North
West Research Ethics Committee. She recently conducted research for Nowgen /
Cesagen on young persons' perspectives toward the treatment-enhancement
debate, whilst developing her transdisciplinary doctoral studies; with
several publications to date and forthcoming.
Her present work considers human-technology relations; the bodied and
embodied bioethical issues within and beyond standard, innovative and
convergent technologies of medicine. Thinking through public and personal
experiences, narratives and expectations of well-being and uncertainty with
regard to the clinical and ethical impact of biotechnological protocols and
practices.
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Interrogating the logic of care: the case of medically unexplained symptoms
Wednesday, 18th March 4-6pm
Monica Greco, Sociology, Goldsmiths
This paper responds to an invitation by Mol (2008) to articulate multiple
varieties of the 'logic of care' in relation to situations, conditions, and
examples other than Type 1 diabetes (which is the object of her own
ethnography). Medically unexplained symptoms are chosen here as a case
defined by much greater ambiguity, controversy, and arguably by the greater
significance of dimensions of care that are purposely excluded from an
object- and practice- centred approach. On this basis, the paper explores
how we might think about the affective dimensions of (self-)care, and seeks
to articulate some methodological implications with a view to investigating
such dimensions empirically.
Monica Greco lectures in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She
is the author of Illness as a Work of Thought (Routledge 1998), and of
articles on aspects of psychosomatics, vitalism, and medical humanities. She
has coedited The Body: A Reader (with M. Fraser, Routledge 2005) and The
Emotions: A Social Science Reader (with P. Stenner, Routledge 2008).
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