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)