Critical University Studies + Theories of Medicine
What does it mean to be a practitioner of the critical medical humanities and health-related knowledges in an era of geopolitical instability, entrenched inequality, and impending climate breakdown? What forms of knowledge can the critical medical humanities produce within a ‘university-system’ (Wilden 1972) structured by crisis managerialisms and uncaring metrics of evaluation? What kind of relationship to power is assumed through the invocation of critique (Cherniavsky, 2017), and what kinds of social and political agency do academics invested in the critical medical humanities have?
The Ends of Knowledge network brings together a community of practitioners loosely identified or dis-identified (!) with the (critical) medical humanities. We seek to think-with and remain alive within the perilous junctures of the present academy and world.
Meet the Team
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Project Lead
James Rákóczi is Honorary Research Fellow at Durham University, although he is also an early career researcher with lots of jobs in lots of places. He researches and writes about forms of neurological experience and how therapeutic knowledges circulate in contemporary culture.
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Founding Member
Harriet Cooper is Lecturer in Medical Education at Norwich Medical School, with responsibility for sociology and humanities teaching, where she is also Course Director for the MA Medical and Health Humanities at UEA. Her research is at the intersection of medical humanities, critical disability studies and medical sociology, with particular interests in: the figure of the disabled child, auto-ethnography and the uses of lived experience in contemporary culture, shame and stigma, and the material context of knowledge production.
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Affiliated Researcher
William Viney is a Research Associate in the Patient Experience Research Centre, Imperial College London. He currently conducts participatory research in health data practices and infrastructures. With Celia Lury and Scott Wark, he is the editor of Figure: Concept and Method (2022), and the author of Twins (2021) and Waste (2014).
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Affiliated Researcher
Swati Joshi is pursuing her doctoral studies on Samuel Beckett and Carescapes that sits at the intersection of Beckett Studies and Medical Humanities at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. She spent a semester at CHSTM, University of Manchester, as a visiting doctoral fellow. Her research is published in Humanities | MDPI, Medical Humanities BMJ, The Polyphony, among other places. Currently, she is co-guest-editing a double special issue of Journal of Medical Humanities.
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Affiliated Researcher
Mona Baie is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Prior to joining the humanities, she completed a medical degree at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, where she is still involved in undergraduate teaching. She is also a UCL alumni. Her research interests include: German and English literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, medical space and ‘the clinic’ from historical, literary and cultural perspectives, medical didactics, & critical university studies.
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Affiliated Researcher
Olivia Banner, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Critical Media Studies and Affiliate Faculty of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research centers on digital health technologies and media, mental health technologies and media, and histories of health activism, and foregrounds how disability justice and crip theoretical analytics pressure the currents ends of knowledge production.
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Affiliated Researcher
Ally Day is Associate Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. Her book, The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir and Crip Positionalities (The Ohio State University Press 2021), addresses the complicated interactions between those living with HIV and AIDS Service providers. She is currently working on her second book project, Gestational Ableism: Disability, Pregnancy and Radical Crip Futures.
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Affiliated Researcher
Annabelle Olsson is a Research Assistant at The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute, University of Cambridge, where she works across various research projects on mental health and mental health care services. Annabelle has a background in Psychology and has also completed an MA in Health Humanities at UCL. Annabelle is interested in the social, political, historical, and cultural context of mental illbeing. She is also interested in contemporary and historical forms of democratic therapies, which emphasise critical consciousness, community, and agency.
