Biomedicine on Display

Thing afficionados still have a week left to consider an abstract for the conference ‘Things in culture, culture in things’, to be held at the University of Tartu, Estonia, 20-22 October, 2011 — three days about things in culture, cultures in things “and lest we forget, all that stuff in between”.

The call for papers claims that ”since the groundbreaking publication of Arjun Appudurai, ed. The Social Life of Things (1986) to the launch of the Journal of Material Culture a decade later, “the material world in its cross-cultural, multi-temporal and interdisciplinary study could never quite be the same again”: objects, artefacts and matter, “even sometimes the immaterial”, have been theorised and contextualised in lots of case studies. And in contrast to the usual jargon of ’thing agency’, this call for papers takes a more sober position — things are “endowed with agency”, which is an entirely different ‘thing’:

A well known adage in this field of enquiry is that things make people as much people make things. The relationships we develop and share with a tangible arena of artworks, buildings, infra-structures, monuments, relics and everyday objects varies from the remote to the intimate, from the fleeting to the durable, from immediate to mediated, from the passive to the passionate, from the philosophised to the commonsensical. Within the practices of creative processes and their use or non-use of the physical world, things gain meaning and status. They become endowed with agency, symbolism and power. Our journeys through the world of things generate a multitude of emotions: pleasure, attachment, belonging, angst, envy, exclusion, loathing and fear. They also feed into the propagation of on-going myths, narratives and discourses which oscillate between the robust and the ever shifting.

And here are the organisers suggestions for topics, i.e. everything about things is apparently of potential interest:

(i) Dynamics – Changing of meaning, practices, functions and modality in time and space
- displaying / collecting (museums, galleries and institutions);
- archaeological practice / how objects are made meaningful through their use;
- naming and renaming; assembling and dismantling;
- modality, mediation, remediation; (sources of) knowledge of things;
- innovation and technologies;
- biographies of things / life stories;
- recycling, reuse, waste, entropy, heritage.

(ii) Identity – Ways we relate to and use things
- identification / objectification;
- memory (memorials);
- cultural autocommunication;
- symbolic usage of things – heritage, monuments, rituals;
- consumption, consumerism / commodification;
- naming, narrating and silencing (or censoring) things;
- embodiment and things.

(iii) Methodologies – How we study things
- objects and subjects of research;
- material aspects of research / materiality of research;
- disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies;
- historiographical approaches;
- what things are – genres and types of things in different disciplines;
- historical epistemologies.

350 words abstract should be sent in by next Wednesday (1 June) to Monika Tasa, cect@ut.ee. More info here.

A lot of scientific and non-scientific discoveries are known to have been done by chance or even accident. We all know the story of how Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin when one of his staph bacteria cultures got infected by a fungus. Another example that might not be as well-known is sildenafil, also known as Viagra. Originally developed to treat high blood pressure and angina (chest pains), this drug was quickly discovered to have other more “exciting” uses. Teflon, microwave ovens and LSD are other examples of common-day (well, for some anyway) appliances that were discovered by accident.

Science by chance happens all the time. Researchers looking for answers to one question find themselves answering another. Last week, I went to a seminar entitled “The role of actin cytoskeleton in glucose metabolism and the accumulation of fat” by Professor Peter Gunning from the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is the head of the Oncology Research Unit at the School of Medical Sciences and an expert on the protein tropomyosin (list of publications). Alongside the proteins actin and myosin, these are responsible for the contractile activity of muscle cells. But they also have functions in virtually all other cells in regulating cell structure, motility, division, adhesion and even signaling.

In searching for proteins that could be targeted in cancer treatment, they happened to discover that when mice were genetically engineered to overexpress a specific protein they had visibly increased fat mass in certain areas of the body. Similarly, when the same gene was knocked out (eliminated), the same areas of fat were smaller. Interestingly, and also rather counter-intuitively, the same overexpressing mice showed an increased glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity – parameters that are usually impaired in association with type 2 diabetes. Thus while the mice had more fat and therefore supposed to be more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, these mice showed quite the opposite. So, while looking for cancer target genes, they accidentally came across some very interesting findings that might prove important in a completely different area of research!

I wonder how often such discoveries are made – and do researchers always take the time to share findings that aren’t necessary relevant to their own work? I certainly hope so!

Score one for the usefulness of facebook in science. In January and February, a group of scientists, led by Dr. Brian Sidlauskas, assistant professor of fisheries at Oregon State University (OSU), had been conducting the first ichthyological survey on Guyana’s Cuyuni River. The purpose of the study was to find out which species of fish live in the Cuyuni and get a good estimate of their abundance. After two weeks of fishing, the team had more than 5.000 specimens in their nets. But then trouble came:

“In order to get the fish out of the country,” says Bloom, “we needed an accurate count of each species.” The team’s research permit required them to report this information to the Guyanese government. “We couldn’t leave the country until we turned over our data to the authorities.” Time was of the essence, as Sidlauskas, Bloom and OSU graduate student Whit Bronaugh had to return to North America as soon as possible. But how could a handful of people possibly identify 5,000 fish in just a few days?

The answer became facebook. A Ph.D –student suggested uploading the fish to facebook, and within 24 hours the 5.000 fish had been identified with the help of a network of ichthyologically-minded friends.

This story made me think of the points that Andy Clark makes in his book Supersizing the Mind – Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension about the functioning of what he calls the extended mind. Facebook and other social web media has the same potentials as other tools in our cognitive environment -  like pens, smartphones, computers, fingers or calculators – to become part of our extended mind. And a powerful one at that, given the distributed power of a network of that size.  This raises serious questions about how social web media will influence the way our extended minds work. How will it impact scientific production and what new forms of life will it produce? Crowd sourcing certainly opens for scientific experimentation in new and interesting ways – www.fold.it is one of my favourite examples.

Two weeks ago, friends and colleagues alerted me to Horace Freeland Judson’s recent death. I was amazed to hear he had already reached the age of 80. But then again, 20 years have gone since we first met in 1991-92.

Horace had received a major grant from the Mellon Foundation to write a history of immunology, and advertised for postdocs to do the basic research. I had finished my PhD a few years earlier and had just begun the preliminary archival work and interviews for my biography of Niels K. Jerne. What an opportunity to spend a year at Stanford doing research for my next book! I applied for the job and went to Baltimore in July 1991 for an interview at Horace’s homeplace.

I was duly impressed, both of the fact he had won a MacArthur Fellowship a few years earlier and of the magnificent palais he and Penny had bought on University Drive. I also thought quite highly of his magnum opus on the history of early molecular biology, The Eighth Day of Creation (1979), because it was so extremely well written and because he had made extensive interviews with most of the major players. His cosy relationship with Francis Crick loomed large in the book.

I immediately accepted Horace’s offer to spend a postdoc year at Stanford and so did Nic Rasmussen (now at University of New South Wales) and Craig Stillwell (now at Southern Oregon University). But with some trepidation. Most young and ambitious historians of science at the time were put-off by the fact that Horace wasn’t a professional historian of science (he never earned a Phd), but a ‘simple’ journalist with a bachelor’s degree. His had no interest in historical theory and method, he didn’t like philosophy of science and despised all kinds of science studies. We considered him a skilled but atavistic amateur.

When we arrived, we were told that the reason the project was placed at Stanford was that historians of science and medicine at Johns Hopkins hadn’t wished to host Horace, and that Stanford had welcomed him only because of the substantial overhead. I don’t know if this was true, but the Stanford Program in History Science faculty indeed kept him at arm’s length. Partly this was a matter of academic snobbery from the side of Peter Galison and Tim Lenoir and their students, but Horace’s vanity, mannerisms, and habit of addressing people in a magisterial, and sometimes even condescending, voice most probably added to the mutual dislike.

Yet Horace was a MacArthur ‘genius award’ recipient who had rubbed shoulders with almost everyone of importance in early molecular biology. And he wrote damn readable texts, much better than most historians of science could ever dream of. Horace was a very intelligent man, who thought highly of science and quickly absorbed the essentials of molecular biology. He had been a fellow bachelor student with Matthew Meselsohn (of Meselsohn and Stahl experiment fame) in Chicago and had met Max Perutz in England when working for Time Magazine in the late 1960s. Through Perutz he got acquainted with Francis Crick, and that’s how The Eighth Day of Creation started — indeed literally started: the opening lines about how he’s walking down the street with Crick is one of the most famous show-off anecdotes in the history of science.

During our initial discussions, Nic, Craig and I rapidly realised that Horace had received the Mellon grant to follow up on his DNA-story masterpiece with a sequel on the history of contemporary immunology. We knew this was an impossible project. Postwar immunology doesn’t have the same simple storyline as molecular biology. There is no overarching discovery story (like the double helix), no main central actors (like Watson and Crick). Postwar immunology is a historiographical mess, which is complicated even more by the intricate relations between basic immunology and clinical science.

As a consequence, Horace’s magnificent idea ended with a torso. Nic, Craig and I published quite a few papers — but there never came a book from Horace’s hands. His next grand scheme, the Center for History of Recent Science at the George Washington University, received an initial grant for five years but then collapsed because of lack of funding. And his planned book on the Baltimore affair was scooped by Dan Kevles (The Baltimore case, 1998), forcing him to produce a much less spectacular book (The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science, 2004) than originally conceived.

It’s easy to pass over Horace Judson as a vain, pompous, gossipy, self-absorbed person who happened to write one single successful book, followed by decades of barrenness. But those of us who came close to him saw another side. Whereas too many academics are selfish, aspergeric and nasty behind their smiling and convivial personas, Horace was the other way around. Despite his superficial vices, he could be a very generous person: he would spend hours and days reading and commenting on people’s writings and several of my colleagues testified to how much they’ve learned from his writing skills.

Horace was a deeply troubled man, whose bitterness increased after Penny’s much too early sudden death in pneumonia in the mid-1990s, but he could also be quite endearing and empathetic. I’ll never forget how, when my then wife arrived in the winter of 1992, she was neglected by everyone except Horace, who sent over a huge basket with fruit, cakes and a bottle of champagne on the night of her arrival (“she needs it after a 16 hour long transatlantic flight”, he said). He could have added that life needs to be lived with style.

All this is anecdotal history now. The bottom line is that Horace Freeland Judson wrote one of the most readable and insightful books so far published about the history of mid-20th century science. For this he will long be remembered.

(Read also Nathaniel Comfort’s eulogy on Horace Judson here; we discovered by chance yesterday that we were writing in parallell and decided to post simultaneously today).

Let me take this opportunity to present another new member of staff — assistant professor Adam Bencard:

I started as assistent professor in science communication here at Medical Museion in November 2010. I have two major tasks: I’m doing research in experimental science communication and I make exhibitions. I’m particularly interested in material objects and the philosophical aspects of materiality and the meaning of artefacts in a science communicatioin context. I have a background in history and philosopy (MA, Roskilde University, 2001) and finished my PhD here at Medical Museion in 2008.

After defending his PhD-thesis ‘History in the Flesh’ in February 2008, Adam worked as a research assistant together with me and Camilla Mordhorst on the concept of ‘presence’ (resulting in, among other things, this article on biomedicine as a challenge to museums). Now he is moving deeper into the philosophical dimensions of material museum objects — those who read this blog may have noticed that Adam is the author of quite a few posts on subjects like ‘object oriented ontology’, ‘the material turn’, ‘existential materialism’, ‘the digital delusion’, etc.

Adam has been main curator of the exhibition The Chemistry of Life: Four Chapters in the History of Metabolic Research that opened in our satellite exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciecnes, and he is now working on yet another exhibition about the humoral vs. chemical body that is planned to open in mid-October.

Adam’s position is financed by a grant through the NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research.

I am currently researching a piece on rollators. Based on artistic research investigating the aesthetics and materiality of these essential but perhaps under appreciated objects I am struggling with finding some further information.

It is generally accepted that the first rollator appeared in the 1970s and was designed by Bernt Leander from Sweden. There is no record of a ‘first’ rollator and no history of the initial designs. Unable to find a person responsible for design and manufacture of rollators  I emailed the general Swedish inquiry contact at Invacare, the overall worldwide distributor but I have had no reply. I know that Dolomite was taken over by Invacare and their factory is in Anderstorp. A specific question I asked is regarding the range of colours available, particularly in 1997 in the Dolomite Futura range.

Thomas has kindly emailed his science/tech colleagues in Sweden but I wondered if anyone else might also have information. Academic texts are few and are mainly concerned with the effects on the joints of rollator users and effects on patients with other health issues and in assisting rehabilitation. There is very little about the actual object and its history.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for further information? Any help would be greatly appreciated

On Friday 13^th May, Adrian Bertoli, Morten Hillgaard Bülow and I attended the University of Copenhagen Center for Healthy Aging (CEHA) retreat day at the DGI Congress Center here in Copenhagen and we have decided to bring our experiences of the day together in one blog post.

Lucy says:
Everyone involved in each of CEHA’s five programmes was required to participate and it was definitely a day of two halves. CEHA Managing Director Lene Juel Rasmussen introduced the proceedings and her talk was followed by short overviews given by each of the programme leaders. The morning was dominated by traditional PowerPoint based presentations used to display schematics, charts, diagrams and arrows that sometimes became overcomplicated and confusing. Then PhDs and postdoctoral researchers presented research highlights from each programme. One very interesting presentation was by PhD student Aske Juul Lassen on Programme 5 who described his field studies and collaboration with No Age innovative solutions for elderly people in his research into technologies and communities for the active elderly

After lunch we were split into groups and invited to join in ‘The Hunt for the Elixir of Life’ – a cross-disciplinary dialogue. This was organized by the young researchers and involved the groups going into a series of rooms where different scenarios were enacted. In the ‘TV/Fitness’ room an elderly man watching TV phoned his busy daughter while she was working out at the gym. In the ‘Nursing Home’ room an elderly diabetic resident was shown being left to eat her lunch alone. In ‘General Practice’ room the scenario played was of a stressed, pregnant woman and a clock watching GP. In the ‘Chess Club’ room an elderly man playing chess with his regular partner became frustrated about starting to lose games and in the ‘Work Place’ room cigarette-smoking workmen with backaches had a health assessment.

Each different scenario played out gave rise to discussion on different aspects of ageing research. The overall question was how we might go about asking questions or researching topics raised in the scenarios from across all our disciplines. This part of the day was a great success and in my opinion the ‘Chess Club’ room worked best. Here, not only was a scenario enacted but we were asked to engage in an activity. We were given five cards with pictures on. We had to choose the top two cards we felt represented things to help with the problem shown in the performance and explain our reasons for choosing them. This participatory activity led to good discussion and the chance for all to voice opinions not just a few who had previously dominated conversations.

At times the differences between wet and dry sciences were seen as a hindrance and there were still signs of hierarchy between disciplines. Though it is hard to tell whether the aim of interdisciplinarity across the programmes will be achieved, it was valuable to bring all members of CEHA together in one space.

Adrian says:
A day of two halves is a very apt summary of the Center for Healthy Aging’s retreat. I can appreciate the need to have an overview of the five programmes, and the importance of allowing young researchers to present research highlights. It was nice to hear what goes on within the Center, I personally knew little about the other programmes, but the presentation format means that for the most part the researchers remained faceless names on the screen. The afternoon was a great success, the creativity and ‘unorthodox’ method of engaging researchers has set the bar high for future CEHA events.

What was missing for me was a chance to do more informal networking and socializing, especially among PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers. It is one thing to know the general research interests of the programmes, but another to know more about the people behind these. If we are to bridge the differences between the wet and dry sciences and create a common language, perhaps more informal channels would be effective. It might be a cultural difference in choice of words, but when I picture a retreat, I think of various social activities and games, chances to see the lighter side of your colleagues. This happened to some extent in the afternoon sessions, but was still somewhat plagued by power dynamics between senior and junior staff. There was a social hour afterwards; perhaps people were a bit tired after a full day of activities as not many stuck around. Even fewer of us made it out afterwards where we went out for dinner and drinks.

On the whole the day was interesting and entertaining, the venue was nice and we were well catered to in terms of food and drink. I just came away at the end of the day not knowing much more about the people who are on paper my colleagues at the Center for Healthy Aging. We are physically isolated among various campuses, the challenge becomes how to make the most of the unfortunately too seldom times we are all gathered together.

Morten says:
As one of the organizers of the last part of the CEHA Retreat, I was very curious about how it would turn out. From the start when we were asked to organize the afternoon, our small group of PhDs and postdocs all agreed that we wanted to do something different than another line of talks or poster-sessions. I think it was Bjarke Oxlund who first came up with (and was given responsibility for) the idea of a ‘treasure-hunt’  – which was not actually a hunt for the elixir of life, but rather a hunt for interdisciplinarity, which we had been told was to be the theme of the day.

In this hunt we wanted to avoid thinking in research programmes and instead think of themes or situations that could be viewed from different disciplinary perspectives. And we wanted to facilitate discussions that would illuminate differences and similarities between disciplines – and preferably, in the process, show the value of each research perspective and how they might fertilise each other.

I don’t know if we succeeded, but the process of coming up with these themes and situations in itself was a challenge and a learning experience. Setting it up to involve participants demanded serious considerations – our main worry was that nobody would want to discuss these issues or that they would think the whole set up too light hearted and oppose it. After all, we wanted this event to bring participants ‘outside’ the boundaries of the traditional disciplines; outside their scientific comfort zone, so to speak. For some participants this did indeed seem to imply that what we did was also un-scientific (in the broad sense of the word). It was sometimes difficult to keep the discussions going or to go up against a certain understanding of what can or what cannot count as relevant (research) questions.

But there were also mostly great discussions and interesting topics coming up so that the allotted 20 minutes per group often felt too short a time. People were just warming up to the subject of the workshop when you had to rush them out the door to receive the next group. The groups were very different – group dynamics were central to how the discussions went, and actually seemed much more important than what disciplines were represented.

This for me stressed the importance of having an open attitude towards other people and disciplines and of having enough time to develop this openness in a suitable context. For interdisciplinary discussions to work, this seemed an important take-home message.

I’m proud to present our new staff member, Daniel Noesgaard, who will work with biomedical science communication on the web, especially through social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc., and maybe especially the many forthcoming cetera).

Daniel’s position is financed by the science communication grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation through the new NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research (which I will tell more about on this blog later).

Daniel’s first task (besides attending the Museums and the Web 2011 conference in Philadelphia last month) is to work out a new web platform for Medical Museion that will have all the usual functionalities, but which will hopefully also integrate our blogs and our presence on social media into the site. When the platform is ready some time later this spring or early summer, he will begin to fill it with exciting content — and specially incite the rest of us and other users to make the site flourish.

Daniel has a Master’s degree in molecular biomedicine. For his Masters thesis he did laboratory work with lysine deacetylase inhibitors (see publication here) and their use for the treatment of type 1 diabetes. He has also worked in the internet business, where he worked with all possible kinds of things, from domain registration to network design, and has also done quite a lot of a voluntary work in a student association, including communication through social media.

Perhaps the recent surge towards objects and materiality is connected to a deep restructuring of our collective unconsciousness tied to a sense of ‘waking up inside an object’, as philosopher and blogger Timothy Morton writes about here?

Humans no longer live in a “world” or in an “environment,” and certainly not in “nature.” Global warming spells the end of the world, not in an apocalypse but in an abject living-on in the absence of a meaningful lifeworld bounded by a distant horizon. We have realized that the “world” is actually a gigantic object in which we exist like Russian dolls inside a larger Russian doll.

Anyone interested in Morton’s thought on ecophilosophy can read more in the essay Here Comes Everything – The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology. I was struck by the similarity to a quote by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht from an essay entitled Shall We Continue to Write Histories of Literature?, which strikes a similar chord in diagnosing our times:

It is as if, all of a sudden, we found ourselves in the middle of time and in the middle of objects, with a desire to become part of this material world (and perhaps even of its temporality) which experience, for a sheer lack of familiarity, is confusing for us. In other words, we have to learn what it is to be an observer who stands, with his body, in the middle of a material world to be observed.

The ‘we’ in the quote is literary theoreticians and philosophers, but there seems to me to be a deeper resonance at work, evoking something like an early 21st century zeitgeist or some such nebulous notion.

Those interested in the ecological ramifications of new materialisms should attend the Eco-tone workshop in june. Beautiful event poster too:

Our own Lucy Lyons and Anette Stenslund are organising a two-day workshop titled ‘The Sensuous Object’ here at Medical Museion, September 29-30.

‘The Sensuous Object’ is an interdisciplinary, participatory workshop concerned with ways we actually engage with objects and aimed at researchers in all disciplines interested in the materiality of actual artefacts and ways of understanding objects through the senses.

How we experience and understand objects as sensuous objects that have been realized, produced, consumed through and by our senses, and how they impact on us and how we impact on them, are just a few of the expected discussion topics. By inviting participants to choose actual objects and use them as central to their presentations, the aim is to challenge established concepts and reveal new possibilities in our experiencing of and understanding through objects, using sensuous approaches. It will provide opportunity for presenters to test ideas, try out new formats of presentation and discussion, and examine their own research through the sensuous object.

The idea for this workshop began as a way to research objects from Medical Museion’s collections and for the objects themselves to form the basis of further research. Medical Museion is a university museum at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen, with an extensive collection of historical medical objects from the 18th through 20th centuries and with internationally award-winning exhibitions. Its field is the history of health and disease in a cultural perspective, with a focus on the material and iconographic culture of recent biomedicine. Research at Medical Museion is seen as essential to underpinning university teaching strategies for collection and conservation of medical heritage, exhibition making, and other material-based communication practices.

Speakers are invited to present their understanding of an object in terms of their methodological approaches and areas of research. Research areas of confirmed participants include senses of smell and touch, ambience, aesthetic, visual thinking, tacit knowledge, sound, and seduction.

Confirmed speakers:
Laura Gonzalez (Glasgow School of Art)
Ansa Lonstrup (University of Aarhus)
Anette Stenslund (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen)
Jan-Eric Olsén (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen)
Carsten Friberg (Aarhus School of Architecture)

Organisers:
Postdoc Lucy Lyons (lucyly@sund.ku.dk) and PhD student Anette Stenslund (astenslund@sund.ku.dk), Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, 18 Fredericiagade, Copenhagen (www.museion.ku.dk).

More information:
If you are interested in presenting, please email a 200 word abstract by July 15, 2011. If you would like to participate but do not wish to present, please email a paragraph about your area of research by September 5, 2011.

The Sensuous Object workshop is free and Medical Museion will host lunch on both days and dinner on September 29. Participants will need to arrange and pay for their own travel and accommodation.

Further info from Lucy Lyons, lucyly@sund.ku.dk.

For those who are interested in new materialist and object-oriented philosophy, the fledgling journal Speculations is a great source for state of the art experimental writing in the speculative realist vein. The second volume has just been released and can be found here. Here is a snippet from the editors introduction, which gives an idea of the kind of writing facing the brave reader:

What Speculations aims at doing, then, is not to represent the dreadnought of a new theoretical position but to open up a window onto the work of thinkers attempting to push farther the limits of accredited knowledge, to take—with each and every volume—a temporary snapshot of the current state of this journey of thought. As editors, the best we can hope is that, like outdated Polaroids, the value of this effort will only be more and more discernible as time goes by.

Those wanting an introduction to speculative realism and object-oriented ontology can find some texts and audio here and here. The open-access published anthology The Speculative Turn – Continental Materialism and Realism gives some more in-depth examples.

In the introduction New Materialisms – Ontology, Agency, and Politics, another of the recent anthologies on materialism (you can read about some of the other here and here), editors Diana Coole and Samantha Frost discuss the notion of a ‘critical materialism’. Building on social constructionist arguments, they work to integrate the critical approach of post-structuralists analysis of power with a materialists understanding of the irreducibility of the material realm to culture. In their own words:

For critical materialists, society is simultaneously materially real and socially constructed: our material lives are always culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural. As in new materialist ontologies, the challenge here is to give materiality is due while recognizing its plural dimensions and its complex, contingent modes of appearing.

This view, which is echoed in a lot of ANT and post-ANT studies as well as the growing body of work on biopolitics and biopower, is one of the major stakeholders in the new materialist wave (I hesitate to call it a turn, in order to avoid too much academic spin). Materialism thinking, in this perspective, leads to new critical engagements and analysis of the complex functioning of power and structure. A sort of material networkology, so to speak. For the critical materialists, working with a material approach means resharpening the critical tools and applying it to a new topic.

But it seems to me that thinking materially can also lead to a more existential mode of engagement, which works to restructure the role of the researcher in relation to her field of study (somewhat similar to what I wrote about here). This is represented in, amongst others things, the work of Brian Massumi, Jane Bennett (partly), Kathleen Stewart, Graham Harman, Alphonso Lingis and others. Here, thinking materially leads towards, amongst other things, a material embedded and ultimately experiential founded approach to the world.

This faultline – between a critical materialism that has its eyes intently on the material workings of power structures and an existential material that sees materiality as a way to rework the existential back into the investigation of the world – seems to me to be crucial in understanding the new material literature. Which side are you on (and is it a matter of taking sides)?

The deluge of publications on the material turn and the new materialism continues. I wrote about two anthologies last week, and now Oxford University Press have a new anthology out, The Oxford Companion to Material Studies. The introductory chapter can be read here. Interestingly, the editors Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, take a somewhat cautious approach to the idea of a material turn as such. They note the danger that a material turn, if embraced without cautious deliberation and reflexion, “would simply extend, through a rhetorical inversion, the cultural turn of the 1980s.” Thomas and I have argued something similar in an essay entitled “Do Things Talk?” a few years ago (which can be read here). We wrote in that essay that a new materialism would have to work through some fundamental shifts in how the relationship between the subject and the world and between the researcher and the object of study. The editors of the Oxford Companion conclude along similar lines:

The studies collected in this volume lead towards an appreciation not only of the effects of things, but also of things as the effects of material practices (both vernacular and academic). Material culture does not represent a straightforward object of enquiry, simply requiring new vocabularies for interpretation or abstract theorization. Instead, if we take seriously the critique of any a priori distinction between subject and object, then this must also encompass the academic researcher and her object of enquiry.

Ultimately, the editors suggest that it is through a fundamental reworking of the place of the individual in the world that a ‘true’ material turn would come.

When Bruno Latour talks of flat ontologies, these must extend between researcher and object of enquiry, as well as simply between humans and non-humans. Otherwise, we will simply continue to play back and forth across the categories of the cultural and the material: critiquing, collapsing, relating. Imagining that we represent a world, which we can hold at arm’s length, rather than enacting our knowledge of things. It is in this sense—a sense of the radical partiality of our knowledge of the world, which we might celebrate rather than shy away from—that material culture studies will, as Nigel Thrift suggests in his afterword, come of age.

Of course you can, but few history teachers actually take the opportunity. Museum collections remain a remarkably underutilised resource in academic history teaching. And the history of science, technology and medicine is no exception.

Here at Medical Museion we have occasionally brought material objects into our medical history courses and also into the course we’re giving on medical science and technology studies for medical engineering students. We have plans to do much more, especially when it comes to integrating traditional academic and curatorial perspectives on material objects, and we are very eager to learn about other university museums with more teaching experience than we have.

Therefore, the initiative taken by The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies to organise a ‘Using Museum Collections in Teaching History of Science, Technology and Medicine’ workshop on 14 June is much welcomed. The aim is to bring together people teaching history of STM in higher education with staff from major science, technology and medicine museums throughout the UK. The workshop will look at how the study of museum collections can be incorporated into standard taught courses and used for dissertation purposes. Confirmed speakers include Claire Jones (Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick); Jo Booth (National Media Museum); Delphi Tatarus (Thackray Museum); John Beckerson (Manchester Museum of Science and Industry); Tim Procter (National Railway Museum); Alison Watson (Royal Armouries); and Richard Dunn (National Maritime Museum and Subject Centre for PRS)

Attendance is free of charge, but places are limited. Register here, before 1 June.

Sometimes I’m asked what ‘biomedicine’ means. It’s rarely medical people that ask, but people from the humanities often do. I use to answer that ‘biomedicine’ is the emerging amalgamation throughout the 20th century of the life sciences and medical research, but I haven’t had an authoritative history of the term to refer to.

Now there is one, however. In a recent article (“Biomedizin‘ in sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Beiträgen: Eine Begriffskarriere zwischen Analyse und Polemik”) in NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (vol. 18: 497-522), Walter Bruchhausen analyses the trajectory of the term ‘biomedicine’ during the last half century in the social science literature. Not unexpectedly he finds that when the term ‘biomedical’ entered politics and the social sciences, especially medical anthropology, it meant medical research methods derived from biology as opposed to behavioural research or social sciences in general, but also “the complex of Western health care in non-Western countries and the reductionism and alleged Cartesian dualism of its approach – the opposite of traditional, religious, holistic and psychic views and treatment of illness”. The rather late German reception of the term ‘biomedicine’ replaced the older term ‘Schulmedizin’.

It’s behind a paywall, of course (it’s Springer), which reminds me that open access isn’t really an acute issue in highly technical fields, but a major problem for the humanities and social sciences.