Biomedicine on Display

Like biography, autobiography has always been an important genre for science communication — like Francis Crick’s autobiography What Mad Pursuit (1988).

A couple of decades ago, only a tiny scientific elite had, in practice, access to present themselves autobiographically in the form of book-length memoirs and interviews in newspaper and magazines.

Science communication through self-presentation was thus largely restricted to famous life scientists, medical doctors and their famous patients.

Now, thanks to the web, and especially social web technologies, public self-presentation has become an opportunity for the global biotechnoscientific multitude.

Medical and nursing students, life science PhD students, and all kinds of ordinary patients are blogging, facebooking and twittering accounts of themselves in dialy work in labs and clinics or their experiences of being medicalised.

No doubt, these new practices of communication and self-presentation are contribution to changing public understandings of biomedical culture and its place in culture at large.

This conference promises to inspire to more thinking along these lines.

Patrick Crowley, Kerstin Fest, Rachel MagShamhráin and Laura Rascaroli at the University College Cork are inviting papers about new media, film and “new theoretical approaches to autobiography post-Lejeune“, as they put it, for a conference titled ‘Technologies of the Self: New Departures in Self-Inscription’, which they are organising 2-3 September in Cork, Ireland.

In an era in which self-expression has undergone an exponential growth fuelled by technological innovation, most importantly, perhaps, the creation of an internet that hosts an ever-increasing number of blogs, tweets, personal webpages and other forms of audiovisual self-expression such as YouTube, it seems timely to think again about the phenomenon of writing, filming, recording and, indeed, publishing or publicizing the self: what innovations in self inscription have recent decades witnessed, what continuities and discontinuities can be traced, what changes in attitudes to the self and to self-revelation or exposure have been witnessed, how have developments in the channels of broadcasting altered how, what and why we engage in various, if always elusive acts of self-expression, are there now new practitioners of self-inscription because of these changes, and, finally, with so many outlets and such a market for narratives of self, how is such material consumed?

The organisers particularly welcome 250-300 words abtracts on the following themes:

- new theories of autobiography: thinking beyond Lejeune
- technologies and self-inscription: the Internet and new media innovations
- the avant-garde: experimentation and the changing boundaries of the self
- on-line writing and freedom of expression: the blogosphere as political third space
- auto-ethnographies: new ways of recording the self in its sociocultural context
- issues of veridicality
- consuming selves: the appetite for self expression
etc

Send abstract proposals to self.inscription@gmail.com, before 4 April. And please consult the conference website, http://www.ucc.ie/en/german/events/selfinscription.

I think first-person accounts — that is, acccounts about oneself and one’s relation to the world told in ‘I’-form, as opposed to accounts of ‘you’, ’he/she’ or ‘they’ — are fascinating. Such accounts tell something about the people who produce them and they also reveal much about their authors’ relations to others and the culture and environment they live in. In fact, one of my basic historiographical convictions is that even the concepts, theories and objects of science, technology and medicine are, at least to some extent, first-person accounts (‘science as autobiography‘).

First-person accounts appear in many forms, which you could call ‘genres’ (or ‘sub-genres’), like ‘autobiography’, ‘self-portrait’, ‘memoir’, etc. Turns out that the genre specialists Jean-Louis Jeannelle (known for his studies of the (anti)memoirs of André Malraux) and Philippe Lejeune (renown specialist in the study of autobiography) are currently interested in how we define, and in which terms we describe, different kinds of such first-person accounts, especially non-fictional accounts (i.e., excluding novels, short stories etc. in ‘I’-form).

Jeanelle and Lejeune are particularly interested in the linguistic distinctions we make between the different genres in which personal experience can be narrated, and they want us to reflect about the terms we use and to make us question our assumptions about them. They use the term ‘non-fictional first-person accounts’ as though it were a neutral description, but this isn’t true, of course — as they rightly point out in an email message to colleagues, this label “needs to be examined as much as any other label”.

And here are their seven questions they want us to think about:

1. What are the customary generic classifications used in your language to designate the different kinds of personal narratives, such as autobiography, journal, testimony? Can you provide a comprehensive list of these terms, and cite, in each case, a work that could serve as model for that category?

2. Among these various categories, are there any which you perceive as having fallen out of use or having been discarded because they no longer correspond to the texts that are being produced? Have others become more important over time? In both cases, what explains these changes?

3 Are there one or more categories that seem to you to function as overarching categories, under which other forms of life narrative can be classified?

4. What is your own special field of research? What are the principal generic terms that you use in that research? What synonyms do you use to avoid excessive repetition?

5. What sub-genres of non-fictional first-person accounts seem to you to be the most studied in your country? Which ones seems to attract the least attention or to be unduly neglected?

6. What theoretical works have the greatest influence on you and your colleagues?

7. Do you think that these widely read theoretical works have modified the way in which the different sub-genres of non-fictional first-person accounts are classified?

Jeanelle and Lejeune are interested in all kinds of non-fictional ’first-person accounts’ — not just of scientists and medical doctors, of course, that’s just my own special interest — please send your answers to: jeannelle@fabula.org and philippe.lejeune@autopacte.org

One of the potentially most interesting workshop titles I’ve seen announced so far this year is ’Biodigital lives: making, consuming and archiving the lives of technoscience’.

The meeting — convened by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex) and Adrian Mackenzie (Lancaster) and hosted by the Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), the Centre for Material Digital Culture and the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex on 14 July — will “examine issues and questions about digital and biodigital life, lives and identities framed by biosciences, contemporary media and biopolitical cultures”:

From the lives of scientists to the technologisation of life, ‘Biodigital lives’ will analyse biotechnological and bioinformatic forms and practices of identifying, archiving and storying the living. It will discuss diverse forms of new/digital mediation and informatics as they pertain to the lives of people, plants, animals, microbes, viruses and ecosystems entangled in global media, biopolitical institutions and bioeconomies.

Topics might include:

• How digital/life history and genetic genealogies intersect
• Biomediation and biotechnological media in reading and writing lives
• Biodigital memory, narration and identity (e.g. memory and archive, genetics and life story, digital life practices)
• Genomic databases and biobanks as biographical resources
• Techniques of writing, reading, editing and publishing the lives of species and populations
• Life archives and life histories of humans and non-humans
• Synthetic biology and bioinformatic communities from the perspective of biological literacy, design and participation
• Genomes as digital/media artefacts – new media/biotech convergences and commercial genealogies
• Genetics and genomics as/in life narratives and popular culture
• Aesthetic encounters in biodigital life in sci-art, film, games, software, art etc
• Genealogies and critical potentials of bioart/digital media art intersections

The workshop will be arranged around short presentations and will favour discussion and broad participation. 300 words abstracts + short bios to Kate O’Riordan (k.oriordan@sussex.ac.uk) by 20 April 2009. Final confirmation and draft programme by 11 May.

Although I don’t like Twitter, I must admit that it is an interesting ego-document genre. A written trace of daily life — a publicly available diary, easily written, easily forgotten.

Which made me think about the memoir genre, which is more difficult to write and less easily forgotten. Gore Vidal defined memoir as a story of “how one remembers one’s own life” in contrast to autobiography, which is “history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked” (from his own memoir, Palimpsest, 1995).

Memoirs loomed large in 19th and early 20th century libraries and book stores. Then they almost disappeared. But now, after decades of oblivion, the memoir is an increasingly popular genre again. There are all kinds of memoirs, of course, but this blog has its gaze steadfastly fixated on one and only — the biomedical memoir.

In which formats are biomedical memoirs published today? Not much in book form, I guess. Maybe they come out as chapters (or part of chapters) in Festschrifts (is this peculiar genre still alive?). And what about memoirs on the web? Are there any memoir blogs? And then there are oral memoirs, of course. What about powerpoint memoirs? And interviews for radio and television?

What are these and similar narratives (and narrative fragments) telling us about the experience of doing science today? How are memoirs used by historians of the biomedical sciences? Does the memoir genre have a critical potential? And how does the biomedical memoir differ from biomedical autobiography and other kinds of biomedical ego-documents?