This is an Ends of Knowledge reading group and seminar chaired by Professor Richard Hall.

Faced by the realities and lived experiences of intersecting crises, the University has become hopeless, in two respects. First, it has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, and has become an anti-human project devoid of hope. Second, it is unable to respond meaningfully with crises that erupt from the contradictions of capital. Thus, in its maintenance of business-as-usual, the University remains shaped as a tactical response to these contradictions. 

In spite of the uncertainties of life inside the pandemic, these demands increasingly reproduce precarious and proletarianised working conditions. Alienation, anxiety, estrangement unfold inside University workers, through their work, their relationships and their very selves. Whilst institutions focus upon well-being through symptomatic responses related to resilience, mindfulness and well-being. Yet, this is entangled with the reality that University work, like all labour, tends to catalyse ill-being.

Through crises of finance or epidemiology, or at the intersection of both, it is possible to trace how the intersection of socio-economic and socio-environmental crises both enable the structural adjustment of sectoral and institutional structures, and damage bodies and psychologies. As institutional forms develop high plasticity, cultures become pathologies, and activities are defined methodologically, individuals and communities are scarred. In the pandemic, the scars are made visible, in terms of reports of overwork, self-sacrifice and feelings of precariousness, underpinned by a sense of hopelessness and Weltschmerz, with physical and psychological manifestations, including headaches, fatigue, anxiety and depression. In spite of the pandemic, the University demands the internalisation of specific behaviours that become culturally-acceptable, self-harming activities. These subsume the humanity of intellectual work under economic determinations.

This anti-humanist terrain and its resulting, widening circuit of ill-being, serve as an opening for discussion.

Sign up link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ends-of-knowledge-richard-hall-ill-being-and-the-hopeless-university-tickets-603704575637.

Required Reading:

• Boggs, A., Meyerhoff, E., Mitchell, N., and Schwartz-Weinstein, Z. (2019). Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation. https://abolition.university/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Abolitionist-University-Studies_-An-Invitation-Release-1-version.pdf

• Hall, R., and Bowles, K. (2016). Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety. Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labour, 28, 30-47. https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/article/view/186211

• The Institute for Precarious Consciousness (2014). Anxiety, affective struggle, and
  precarity consciousness-raising. Interface: a journal for and about social movements. 6(2), 271 – 300. http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Issue-6_2-IPC.pdf

Professor Richard Hall is Professor of Education and Technology, based in the Division of Education in the School of Applied Social Sciences at De Montfort University. Hall has written extensively on the neoliberalisation of UK higher education from critical and theoretical perspectives, tracing how academics have become alienated and academic work, as a “labor of love”, has become increasingly commodified. His website (http://www.richard-hall.org/) outlines much of his activism and intellectual engagement in this area, and he has authored numerous books on this subject such as The Alienated Academic (2018) for the Marxism and Education series with Palgrave and The Hopeless University (2021) for Mayfly Press. Note that Mayfly Press releases its books for free in PDF form on its website (https://mayflybooks.org/).

Banner photo credited to Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash.

More details soon.

Banner photo credit to R O on Unsplash.

Olivia Banner (UTDallas) will chair this Ends of Knowledge reading group and research seminar on the standardized patient. We’ll discuss questions which revolve around the critical stories researchers might articulate around the history of the standardized (and simulated) patient of healthcare intervention, the practice of standardization and its racializing and gendered consequences, as well as the figure of the proxy in healthcare and health humanities imaginaries.

Readings include a work-in-progress chapter from Olivia Banner’s forthcoming monograph.

 To prepare, we ask that you read the following three texts (PDFs of which are available in the website’s members section):

• Banner, Olivia. Chapter from a forthcoming work.

• Bailey, Moya. ‘The Flexner Report: Standardizing Medical Students Through Region-, Gender-, and Race-Based Hierarchies’. American Journal of Law & Medicine 43, (2017): 209-223. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098858817723660.

• Mulvin, Dylan, ‘Living Proxies: The Standardized Patient Program’, in Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In (London & Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021): 145-181. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11765.001.0001.

Please note that Olivia Banner’s work-in-progress chapter will only be circulated for those who sign up to the event through Eventbrite, link here. For access to other readings, please access the Members’ Area and/or contact James Rákóczi at james.rakoczi@durham.ac.uk or endsofknowledge@gmail.com. 

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. Her first monograph Communicative Biocapitalism: The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health Humanities (2017) was a key part of conversations in forming the Ends of Knowledge network and her article ‘Structural Racism and Practices of Reading in the Medical Humanities’, Literature and Medicine, 34.1 (2016) remains one of the most significant interventions attending to race and racism in medical humanities.

Suggested Further Reading.

·      Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays (Graywolf Press, 2014) 

·      Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, eds., Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Cornell University Press, 2009)

·      Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT Press, 2000)

Cover photo credited to Tim Cooper on Unsplash.

Ends of Knowledge Project Lead Jamie will be speaking at a CRASSH-funded conference at Cambridge University. If you’re in the area, do come along!

The Functions of Criticism.

19 May 2023 - 20 May 2023

CRASSH, Cambridge University, Faculty of English

‘The form of experience and the critical turn: a view from the health humanities.’

For health humanities researchers in the UK, debates about critique crystallised around a ‘critical turn’ in the mid-2010s. Motivated by a concern that prior models of the medical humanities acted only as a ‘helpmeet’ to the biomedical industry, this turn seeks a ‘closer engagement with critical theory, queer and disability studies, activist politics and other allied fields’ as well as a more active entanglement with ‘biomedical cultures’ (Viney, Callard, Woods 2015). Building from recent scholarship by Merve Emre (who traces the ‘exit’ of literary studies from literature departments and into the medical school), this paper considers the working of criticism as it operates in ‘boundary’ spaces (Knights 2015) between healthcare, medicine, and literary humanities. Drawing from data derived from interviews conducted in 2022 with literary scholars involved in large-scale critical medical humanities projects (see Rákóczi and Woods, 2023), I outline: i) how recent collaborative and health-related projects have sought to exemplify this critical turn, ii) what challenges they have encountered in doing so on the ground, and iii) how such encounters are shifting definitions of literary value and form. Then, I argue that there is a particularly productive tension at work between critical approaches to texts and the operationalisation of “lived experience” in medical humanities research. Much is at stake for literary scholars who feel compelled to critically disrupt the ethical economies into which lived experiences are drawn (by social scientists, cognitive philosophers, policymakers, arts and health practitioners, and so on) and the text becomes a key site from which to adjudicate and communicate this unease. Through a reading of how two texts (Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen and Samuel Beckett’s Company) are treated in medical humanities work, I argue that surprisingly therapeutic understandings of textual form are therefore appearing – and making mischief – at the heart of critical/use imaginaries.

Suggested Reading.

Beckett, Samuel, Company (Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated, 1981).

Emecheta, Buchi, Second-Class Citizen (Heinemann, 1994).

Emre, Merve, Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

Knights, Ben, ‘English on Its Borders’, in English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future, ed. by Niall Gildea, Helena Goodwyn, Megan Kitching, and Helen Tyson (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015).

Viney, William, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods, ‘Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks’, Medical Humanities, 41.1 (2015).

Woods, Angela, and James Rákóczi, ‘Literature in Collaboration: The Work of Literature in the Critical Medical Humanities’, in Medicine and Literature, ed. by Anna Elsner and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

The Future(s) of Medical Humanities is a special series produced and hosted by Ends of Knowledge collaborators Mona Baie, Swati Joshi, and Annabelle Olsson.

What does the future of the medical humanities look like to YOU? And what are the obstacles you encounter in shaping that future? In a report commissioned by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, Sarah McLusky (2022) states that one of the main challenges medical humanities researchers are facing is ''to feel isolated lacking like-minded peers''. With this mini-series we want to open a networking and discussion space for anyone working or interested in the medical and health humanities, but particularly so PhD students and early career researchers from across the globe. We hope to lay grounds for a fruitful conversation about the present state of our field, and our hopes and visions for its (multiple) future(s). We encourage people from non-anglophone countries, and countries where medical humanities as an (institutionalised) field is barely existent or just emerging, to participate and express ideas and concerns.

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Developing Strategies

Chaired by Mona Baie and Anabelle Olsson.

In the third session, we take a final and practical look towards the future of the medical and health humanities, seeking to collect ideas that help us work towards said future in collaborative, empowering, and joyful ways. We hope to end the miniseries having built a diverse and growing network of people interested in all things #futuremedhum and ready to go on more intellectual adventures soon.

Group discussions might revolve around topics such as:

·      How can we foster future medical humanities research, teaching and reach in (trans)national and global contexts? What topics (concerning research, teaching, activism…) do we want to focus on?

·      How can we build lasting, sustainable and meaningful connections between anglophone and non-anglophone researchers?

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Suggested reading (for all three sessions):

• Macnaughton, J. (2017). The past, present, and future of medical humanities. Postmedieval 8, 234–239. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0050-6

• Shapiro, J. (2012). Whither (Whether) Medical Humanities? The Future of Humanities and Arts in Medical Education. Journal for Learning through the Arts 8(1). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3x2898ww

• Crawford, P., Brown, B., Tischler, V. & Baker, C. (2010). Health humanities: the future of medical humanities? Mental Health Review 15(4). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236851204_Health_humanities_the_future_of_medical_humanities

• McLusky, S. (2022). Overcoming barriers to progress in medical humanities research. Report commissioned by the IMH at Durham University, UK. https://www.durham.ac.uk/media/durham-university/research-/research-institutes/institute-for-medical-humanities/Overcoming-Barriers-to-Progress-in-Medical-Humanities-McLusky-2022.pdf

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You can access the event Zoom link and readings in this website’s password-protected Members section which will be regularly emailed out via our mailing list. Alternatively, please email James Rákóczi or Mona Baie at endsofknowledge@gmail.com for the Zoom link and let us know if you have any questions.

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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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Image used for event banner Credit: Two people hugging, with list of ways of taking care for people with HIV/AIDS. Colour lithograph for the National AIDS Strategy, Health Canada. Wellcome Collection. In copyright. See: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/.

This research seminar will be led by Ends of Knowledge collaborator Dr Ally Day (UToledo).

In this discussion, I ask the question: Do institutional structures over time create a slow violence of (humanities) scholarship?

In the first half of this discussion, I provide 3 case studies from my own work in the health humanities (published and in-progress) that allows us to interrogate institutional infrastructures such as U.S.-based health nonprofits, U.S.-based federal funding grants, and University Institutional Research Boards (IRBs). These case studies include a state-wide AIDS healthcare nonprofit, a local low-income health center’s doula (birth assistant) care initiative, and national training programs for birth assistants. All case studies provided challenges for government funding and ethics approval because the projects’ open-ended humanities-based research frameworks challenged the infrastructures built for positivist science.

In the second half of this discussion, I ask how we can subvert, change, or, when necessary, dismantle these infrastructures to create space for enthusiastic and creative health humanities research.

Sign up through Eventbrite by clicking here.

Ally Day is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Chair of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. Her book The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir and Crip Positionalities (OSU 2021) addresses the complicated interactions between those living with HIV and AIDS Service providers, as well as the neoliberal production and exploitation of narrative within the Medical Industrial Complex. The Political Economy of Stigma was the National Women’s Studies Association 2022 Piepmeier Prize. In addition to co-producing a feature length film about an HIV hospice in Toledo OH, she is also working on second book project about the intersection of disability and birth where she analyzes several sites of pregnancy and disability, from Zika to doula trainings, home birth movements to infertility industries; this project is tentatively titled Grappling with Gestational Ableism: Disability, Pregnancy and Radical Futures.

Banner Photo image by Earl Wilcox on Unsplash.

CRITICAL is the theme of the fifth annual congress of the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research (NNMHR), an event co-hosted by NNMHR and the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University.

For a closing panel, Ends of Knowledge will stage a workshop, encounter, and conversation between James Rákóczi and Harriet Cooper with leading health researchers Stan Papoulias and Felicity Callard.

Access to this event requires your (free!) registration to the NNMHR Congress 2023.

What was the University? Medical Humanities, Communicative Labour, and the Job Market
James Rákóczi and Harriet Cooper
This workshop panel will lay out the goals and strategies of the NNMHR-funded Ends of Knowledge network, a research project which brings critical university studies into dialogue with medical humanities research. We will invite panel participants to consider how examining the material conditions of the contemporary university (including our own precarious situatedness as early-career and/or striking lecturers) might impact our understandings of medical humanities and health-related knowledge-production, especially in terms of its orientation towards – or away from – a notion of ‘the critical’.

The session will be split into two sections. James Rákóczi will present an overview of the field of critical university studies (CUS), inviting participants to reflect on two of its most incisive observations. First, how the rhetoric of the university (or the humanities) in crisis serves to produce an imaginary of an ideal university, an ideal which precludes an analysis of the university’s liberal humanistic emergence with racial capitalism and anti-communism in the mid-twentieth century (Mitchell & Boggs, 2018). Second, relatedly, how we have yet to find out what the university is for and that its integral practices of research might take place not through its official channels but within its margins (Erevelles, 2021) or ‘undercommons’ (Moten & Harney, 2013). Then, Rákóczi will speculate as to what can be achieved if CUS turns towards both health-related research and extends its reach towards a non-U.S.-centric global-local perspective.

Harriet Cooper will then consider interactional and communicative labour in the contemporary university, situating this within the current landscape of accelerating marketisation in UK HE. How do the polarising effects of ‘the market’ have consequences for our interactions within and across HE spaces in the medical humanities community? How are the burdens of self-curatorial labour unevenly distributed? Who is interpellated by email-work as care work (and who is not)? How are we differentially entangled with and reliant upon ‘the market’ in ways that render ‘the critical’ risky, impossible, or imperative? What are the consequences, as a medical humanities scholar, of moving (daily or hourly) between spaces where ‘the critical’ is lauded, and those where it is invisible, undiscussed? And what do these labour relations do to ‘the critical’ itself?

Labouring in the medical humanities
Stan Papoulias and Felicity Callard
Labour relations affect epistemic cultures, and vice versa. While there has been growing interest in how the working conditions of researchers affect the production of disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, there is much still to understand regarding the ways in which policy initiatives and research funders have institutionalised particular forms of labour relations in institutions creating medical humanities research and practice. Our presentation builds on our joint efforts to bring the fields of survivor/service user research in mental health and critical university studies more closely together; here we think explicitly about our approach might be used to think through ‘critical medical humanities’ as an interdisciplinary domain. We are particularly interested in understanding how the creation/emergence and consolidation of particular kinds of actor in research ecologies bears on what kinds of knowledge are created, as well as on how working practices across these broader ecologies are affected by the emergence of particular actors/roles. The talk will use key examples (including: (i) the category of the ‘Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) professional’, and (ii) the ‘survivor researcher’ – both of whom are envisaged as bringing ‘lived experience’ in closer proximity to the protocols of ‘conventional research’) to articulate its claims. We see our talk as offering a space in which conference delegates are able to contribute to the urgent project of thinking through labour relations in relation to medical humanities, and therefore request that our formal talk is shorter than an ordinary spot so as to allow for more time for contributions from others.

The Future(s) of Medical Humanities is a special series produced and hosted by Ends of Knowledge collaborators Mona Baie, Swati Joshi, and Annabelle Olsson.

What does the future of the medical humanities look like to YOU? And what are the obstacles you encounter in shaping that future? In a report commissioned by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, Sarah McLusky (2022) states that one of the main challenges medical humanities researchers are facing is ''to feel isolated lacking like-minded peers''. With this mini-series we want to open a networking and discussion space for anyone working or interested in the medical and health humanities, but particularly so PhD students and early career researchers from across the globe. We hope to lay grounds for a fruitful conversation about the present state of our field, and our hopes and visions for its (multiple) future(s). We encourage people from non-anglophone countries, and countries where medical humanities as an (institutionalised) field is barely existent or just emerging, to participate and express ideas and concerns.

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Identifying Barriers

Chaired by Mona Baie, Swati Joshi, and Annabelle Olsson.

The second session of Future(s) of the Medical Humanities series centres on barriers to medical humanities research in both national and transnational contexts. These barriers appear in various forms: lack of organised networks, barriers of language and time zones, financial crunch, and much more. Moreover, a lot of non-Anglophone scholarship remains untranslated, making it difficult for non-native speakers to gain access to and/or interpret it. Our session aims to provide a platform where Anglophone and non-Anglophone researchers of medical and health humanities can brainstorm issues of global collective collaboration and perhaps discover similar struggles.

Group discussions might revolve around questions such as:

•         What are the barriers (institutional, financial, political, ideological…) to medical and health humanities research as perceived in different contexts, different institutions, and different countries? How can we research, communicate, and address such barriers?

Suggested reading:

McLusky, S. (2022). Overcoming barriers to progress in medical humanities research. Report commissioned by the IMH at Durham University, UK.

Event image credit: Photo by Krzysztof Hepner on Unsplash.

The Future(s) of Medical Humanities is a three-part series produced and hosted by Ends of Knowledge collaborators Mona Baie, Swati Joshi.

What does the future of the medical humanities look like to YOU? And what are the obstacles you encounter in shaping that future? In a report commissioned by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, Sarah McLusky (2022) states that one of the main challenges medical humanities researchers are facing is ''to feel isolated lacking like-minded peers''. With this mini-series we want to open a networking and discussion space for anyone working or interested in the medical and health humanities, but particularly so PhD students and early career researchers from across the globe. We hope to lay grounds for a fruitful conversation about the present state of our field, and our hopes and visions for its (multiple) future(s). We encourage people from non-anglophone countries, and countries where medical humanities as an (institutionalised) field is barely existent or just emerging, to participate and express ideas and concerns.

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Connecting Anglophone and Non-Anglophone Worlds

Chaired by Mona Baie and Swati Joshi.

First session: March 8th, 12pm GMT

What constitutes medical humanities as a field and what factors shape its future can look very different from the perspective of different countries – we, the hosts of the miniseries and originally from India, Germany, and Sweden, are very aware of this. Therefore, we are dedicating the introductory session to international (and multilingual) networking and exchange. We hope to hear from a diverse group of people – both within and outside the UK/US – about their experiences in the current medical and health humanities as well as their visions for the field’s future.

Group discussions might revolve around questions such as:

·      What are the challenges, fears, hopes, visions… of (early career) researchers working in the medical and health humanities, both within and outside the UK/US?

·      What role do national, cultural and linguistic differences play in medical humanities research, teaching, and collaborations? What does translation do to medical humanities concepts and orientations?

·      What does the future of the medical humanities look like to you and in your country?

You can access the event Zoom link in this website’s password-protected Members section which will be regularly emailed out via our mailing list. Alternatively, please email James Rákóczi, Mona Baie, or Swati Joshi at endsofknowledge@gmail.com for the Zoom link and let us know if you have any questions.

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Suggested reading (for all three sessions):

• Macnaughton, J. (2017). The past, present, and future of medical humanities. Postmedieval 8, 234–239. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0050-6

• Shapiro, J. (2012). Whither (Whether) Medical Humanities? The Future of Humanities and Arts in Medical Education. Journal for Learning through the Arts 8(1). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3x2898ww

• Crawford, P., Brown, B., Tischler, V. & Baker, C. (2010). Health humanities: the future of medical humanities? Mental Health Review 15(4). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236851204_Health_humanities_the_future_of_medical_humanities

• McLusky, S. (2022). Overcoming barriers to progress in medical humanities research. Report commissioned by the IMH at Durham University, UK. https://www.durham.ac.uk/media/durham-university/research-/research-institutes/institute-for-medical-humanities/Overcoming-Barriers-to-Progress-in-Medical-Humanities-McLusky-2022.pdf

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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.

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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Image used for event banner Credit: Brocke and Wernicke areas of brain, MRI. Katja Heuer and Roberto Toro. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Will Viney will chair this Ends of Knowledge reading group and research seminar on projects and cases. We will discuss a set of readings in relation to Will Viney’s provocation that “projectifaction” and “case-work” structure the labour conditions produced by and in relation to critical medical humanities. How do these forms of knowledge, for example: the time-limited project as a paradigmatic form of critical medical humanities research in the UK, interact with the precarity of patient communities, research cultures, and associated collaborators?

To prepare, we recommend that you read the following three texts (PDFs of which are available in the website’s members section):

• Forrester, John. ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’. History of the Human Sciences 9, no. 3 (1 August 1996): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/095269519600900301.

• Heney, Veronica, and Branwyn Poleykett. ‘The Impossibility of Engaged Research: Complicity and Accountability between Researchers, “Publics” and Institutions’. Sociology of Health & Illness 44, no. S1 (1 December 2022): 179–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13418.

• Papoulias, Stan (Constantina), and Felicity Callard. ‘Material and Epistemic Precarity: It’s Time to Talk about Labour Exploitation in Mental Health Research’. Social Science & Medicine 306 (1 August 2022): 115102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115102.

You can access the reading materials and event Zoom link in this website’s password-protected Members section which will be regularly emailed out via our mailing list. Alternatively, please email James Rákóczi at endsofknowledge@gmail.com or james.rakoczi@durham.ac.uk for the Zoom link and let us know if you are having difficulty accessing any of the materials.

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). He is co-author of the field-influencing essay “Critical medical humanities: embracing entanglement, taking risks”, Medical Humanities, (2015) http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2015-010692.

Image used for Event banner Credit: Alzheimers disease. Stephen Magrath. CC0 1.0 Universal, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0.

Required reading:

Hassan, Narin, and Jessica Howell. ‘Global Health Humanities in Transition’. Medical Humanities 48, no. 2 (1 June 2022): 133–37. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2022-012448.

Excerpts (tbc) from Kamola, Isaac A. Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary. Duke University Press, 2019.

This week we will be reflecting on Jessica Howell and Narin Hassan’s recent special issue of Medical Humanities BMJ which steps up to the task of reassessing the ‘basic tenets of Global Health Humanities as a developing field’. We aim to set this work into dialogue with a recent body of scholarship which seeks to examine the relationship between universities and the idea of “the global” itself. What subject-formations of academic citizenship are at work in the development of globally-oriented health researchers? What kinds of medical knowledges are occluded and included in the shifting scales of global and local research projects? What does an emphasis on the global in health humanities do to understandings of decolonization, reflexive practices such as critical thinking, and globalization? To prepare, we ask that you read Hassan and Howell’s introduction to their special issue ‘Global Health Humanities in Transition’ (2022) as well as the Introduction and Conclusion to Isaac A. Kamola’s work of critical university studies Making the World Global (2019).

Ends of Knowledge members (sign up!) can access the reading materials and event Zoom link in this website’s password-protected Members section. Otherwise, please email James Rákóczi or Harriet Cooper at endsofknowledge@gmail.com for the Zoom link and let us know if you are having difficulty accessing any of the materials.

Suggested Further Reading:

Saleh, Sepeedeh, Refiloe Masekela, Eva Heinz, Seye Abimbola, on behalf of the Equitable Authorship Consensus Statement Group, Ben Morton, Andre Vercueil, et al. ‘Equity in Global Health Research: A Proposal to Adopt Author Reflexivity Statements’. PLOS Global Public Health 2, no. 3 (30 March 2022): e0000160. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0000160.

Wong, Sarah H. M., Faye Gishen, and Amali U. Lokugamage. ‘Decolonising the Medical Curriculum: Humanising Medicine through Epistemic Pluralism, Cultural Safety and Critical Consciousness’. London Review of Education, 19 May 2021. https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.19.1.16.

Featured image is Odra Noel’s Map of Health, Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Required reading:

Albert, Mathieu, and Elise Paradis, ‘Social Scientists and Humanists in the Health Research Field: A Clash of Epistemic Habitus’, in Handbook of Science, Technology and Society, ed. by Daniel Lee Kleinman and Kelly Moore (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 369-387.

Chapter 6, “Against Reciprocity: Dynamics of Power in Interdisciplinary Spaces” in Callard, Felicity, and Des Fitzgerald, Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and the Neurosciences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

‘Interdisciplinarity’ is our keyword for this session, which I (Harriet) will chair.

For a long time, I have been intrigued by the work that this word is made to do in the medical humanities and beyond. In my experience, institutional imperatives steer us to describe our work in interdisciplinary ways, but there is a lack of substantive discussion as to what interdisciplinary research looks like in practice. Why has it become such an unquestioned ‘good’, for example? Our discussion will explore how interdisciplinary collaboration is impacted by the material context(s) of contemporary higher education and by institutional structures of power.  

In what ways do hierarchies of discipline bear down upon collaborative work? What are the pleasures, challenges and risks associated with doing interdisciplinary work, and with querying how ‘method has served to guarantee the reproduction of disciplinary logics’ (Wiegman, 2001, p. 517)? I hope that the readings I have chosen will help us to situate and interrogate ‘interdisciplinarity’ in the contemporary medical humanities. 

Ends of Knowledge members (sign up!) can access the reading materials and event Zoom link in this website’s password-protected Members section. Otherwise, please email James Rákóczi or Harriet Cooper at endsofknowledge@gmail.com for the Zoom link and let us know if you are having difficulty accessing any of the materials.

The featured image is a top-down photographs of pipe cleaners moulded into sculptures taken by James Rákóczi after a collaborative conference between Durham and Linköping Universities on critical medical humanities.

Suggested further reading:

Wiegman, Robyn. ‘Statement: Women’s Studies: Interdisciplinary Imperatives, Again’. Feminist Studies 27, no. 2 (2001): 514–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178776.

Event image used is Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Required Reading:

Boggs, Abigail, and Nick Mitchell. ‘Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus’. Feminist Studies 44, no. 2 (2018): 432–63. https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.44.2.0432.

Chen, Mel Y, and Tim K Choy. ‘Corresponding in Time’. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 4 (1 November 2020): 795–808. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa182.

This week we launch the first Ends of Knowledge reading group by orientating conversations around two fundamental questions. What are the medical humanities for? And why are they like the way they are? To get at these questions, we ask that you read two journal articles in preparation, each of which correspond to recent formations of interpretive humanities study of the contemporary university. The first is Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell’s ‘Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus’ which offers a compelling reassessment of research into higher education and its relationship to crisis and repair. This article also acts as a superb overview of the field of Critical University Studies and will be very helpful for our conversations in the future. The second is Mel Y. Chen and Tim K. Choy’s ‘Corresponding in Time’ (2020), a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and a corresponding reflection on the exigencies of research and writing. In this article, the crisis of illness and injustice are both present and endlessly deferred – and questions about the rearrangement of disciplinary knowledge-production is again at its heart. We hope that these two articles will allow us to think together, think through, and think within what it is that happens in health-related research across the university sector.

To attend, please email James Rákóczi or Harriet Cooper at endsofknowledge@gmail.com for the Zoom link. If you have any difficulty accessing any of the materials (we are more than aware how the system currently locks things behind paywalls), then do not hesitate to get in touch.

The featured image is of a Russia-Germany gas pipeline, covered under Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication.

Suggested Further Reading:

Boggs, Abigail, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein. ‘Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation’. Abolition Journal (blog), 28 August 2019. https://abolitionjournal.org/abolitionist-university-studies-an-invitation/.

Chen, Mel Y. ‘Unpacking Intoxication, Racialising Disability’. Medical Humanities 41, no. 1 (1 June 2015): 25. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2014-010648.

Viney, William, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods. ‘Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks’. Medical Humanities 41, no. 1 (1 June 2015): 2–7. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2015-010692.