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.