Category: Conference Reports

“The Future of the History of the Human Sciences” – hosted jointly by History of the Human Sciences and Dr Chris Renwick – saw established scholars and early-career researchers gather in York for a two-day meeting in April 2016. The aim was to consider changes wrought in the broad interdisciplinary field of the history of the human sciences by new developments in the medical humanities, biological sciences, and literary/cultural theory. In so doing, these scholars not only marked the beginning of a new era for History of Human Sciences with a new editorial team, led by Felicity Callard, but also give thanks to the outgoing editor, James Good.

You can find out more about the conference on its website and in the reports on this blog from those who attended. Thanks to the kind permission of many of those who took part, we can now also make available recordings of a number of the talks. Abstracts for each talk can be found here.

• Roger Smith, “Resisting Neurosciences and Sustaining History”

• Steve Fuller, “Kuhn’s Curse and the Crisis of the Human”

• Des Fitzgerald, “The commotion of the social”

• Maurizio Meloni, “The Social as the Non-Biological: Genealogy and Perspectives”

• Jessica Hendy, “Molecular Archives of Human History: Moving Beyond Text-Based Sources”

• Michael A. Finn, “Possibilities and Problems with the Growing Archive”

• Peter Mandler, “The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life: What it Does, How it Circulates, How to Track it”

• Amanda Rees “Biocultural Evolution Then and Now: The Brain in Environmental Context OR Counterfactualising the History of Biology and Sociology”

 

 

 

 

The biennial Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) conference took place at the University of Kent, 7-10 July 2016. The conference was opened by the chairman of the society Carsten Timmermann, and Julie Anderson, who organised the event with half a dozen of other postgraduate students in Kent’s history department. They made it clear that as a biennial meeting of members of the field from all over the world, the programme was kept flexible, to enable historians of medicine of diverse approaches and methodologies to present their work, even beyond social history itself. Nonetheless, the conference was officially titled Medicine in its place: situating medicine in historical contexts. The notion of place was open to different interpretations: physical and geographical places, ‘places’ of knowledge production, and the idea of a ‘social space’ as originally conceived by Henri Lefebvre. However, historians were perhaps in agreement that medicine must be understood, as stated in the title, within the social and cultural contexts in which they were practiced at the time. ‘Medicine’, often misinterpreted as a branch of western science within the popular imagination, has always been contingently constructed within its own time and space.

The clearest reflection of the theme of medicine in its place was how many of the papers discussed medicine as practiced within a specific geographical or physical space. Fabrice Cahen explored the geographically located pathology of congenital hip dislocation in provincial France, while at the transnational level Bill Leeming compared the process of institutional diffusion of prenatal diagnosis between Canada and Mexico. Kate Grauvogel’s fascinating paper discussed the renovation of an infamous mental hospital in suburban Stockholm to a modern residential area, articulating how the stigma associated with mental health was ‘contagious’ to the land even after the function of the space changed.

As an appropriate commentary on the role of ‘place’ in the construction of medical knowledge, Steve Sturdy delivered the first plenary of the event on the commercialisation of genetic testing in the second half of the twentieth century. Sturdy argued that the topic was a good case study to understand the process of the ‘medical-industrial complex’ in both Britain and the United States through the increasing penetration of private enterprise in the realm of health care. He employed the notion of ‘place’ in the often-cited shift in medical knowledge production in the late twentieth century, from one based on clinical genetics and molecular biology to that of the population-based epidemiological approach. Understandings of genetic diseases and predispositions came to be constructed primarily through the exploration of disease associations through graphs and spreadsheets, transcending the confinement of the laboratory and the hospital.

The application of the notion of ‘social space’ has been a recent development within the discipline of history. This methodology was in fact the central focus of the second plenary delivered by Graham Mooney on the relationship of ‘medical spaces’ and mobility across history. The paper explored multiple cases in which these two themes intersected, one familiar case being his exploration of the history of the hospital waiting room in twentieth century Britain. Mooney explained how the waiting area, as a sedentary space, itself potentiated the exercise of power through the ‘imposition’ of health education leaflets. Chris Millard’s paper on shifting clinical thought-styles on emotional health and child abuse in postwar Britain went beyond merely taking the hospital space for granted, exploring the debates over the impact of the spatial environment on the psychological development of newborns.

Social historians of medicine have been especially adamant that medicine should be framed, as the title of the conference suggests, in its place. Medical knowledges could well be understood in a similar or an identical manner across geographical boundaries, but ultimately they have been influenced by the social and cultural contexts within which they were practiced. On the peculiar case of the consumption of Jamaican ginger (a ‘cure-all’ patent medicine of high alcohol content) in the American South, Stephen Mawdsley framed its popularity under the prevailing culture of self-medication in the Southern and Western United States during prohibition. Jane Seymour’s paper sought to reinterpret the history of public health in interwar Britain by placing it within the political context of the interwar period itself. Seymour critiqued the traditional historiography of the period as being largely influenced by the hindsight of postwar achievements in the establishment of the NHS, arguing that public health measures during the interwar period, within their particular context, had a strong progressive initiative behind them.

Without these engaging and stimulating papers delivered by speakers on their latest research, an academic conference would be empty and meaningless. However, the SSHM conference at Kent was unusual in going beyond the traditional academic conference by having a variety of unique sessions and opportunities outside of the hundreds of research papers that were being delivered by the participants in their respective panels. There were three roundtable panel discussions by some of the leading practitioners of the field exploring the most recent developments in the profession. One of the panels, which included Lauren Kassell, Elizabeth Toon, Helen Valier, Heather Perry, and Carsten Timmermann, talked about the place of the medical historian in the university curriculum and the challenges that come from teaching the history of medicine to undergraduate students who major in STEM subjects. There were also two workshops delivered by Thomas Bray from the Wellcome Trust on grants and funding, and Emma Brennan and Tom Dark from Manchester University Press advising on how to publish a paper or a book within the current academic climate. As a postgraduate historian and an early-career researcher, I found both sessions to be highly informative and helpful. Perhaps the most unique aspect of the event is that we had an official poet and an artist representing the conference, who hosted sessions that happened parallel with the panel presentations. Dorothy Lehane ran a writing session on medicine and poetry, while Frances Stanfield explored the theme of the representations of the body by encouraging her participants to instinctively draw one another without looking directly at the paper. These sessions and workshops provided a crucial space for visitors to escape the brain fatigue that often results from a hectic schedule of academic events, allowing historians to explore health, illness, and the body beyond the confines of research papers that come one after another in most conferences.

This was the first major conference that I have attended on the history of medicine. As first conferences go, where I barely knew anyone, the organisers from the Department of History at Kent did an excellent job at creating a friendly environment. The fact that it had a large number of established scholars did not create a hierarchical atmosphere, quite unlike a lot of other important international conferences where it can be quite intimidating for an early-career researcher to feel included. Perhaps as a reflection of the relatively relaxed academic culture of the field of history of medicine, there were a plenty of informal occasions to socialise over food and drink. Large academic conferences such as these have an important function in providing a scholar with the space to interact with likeminded people, to escape from the isolation that one might feel from specialising in the history of medicine. The event was satisfying both as an arena for the exchange of knowledge and for the dozens of wonderful people that I was able to get in contact with. I am very much looking forward to the next SSHM conference.

Ryosuke Yokoe is a PhD student at the Department of History, University of Sheffield and officially affiliated with Medical Humanities Sheffield (MHS). His research concerns the twentieth century history of popular and scientific understandings of alcohol and liver disease. Follow him on twitter! @RyoYokoe1.

Thanks to Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi for the photo.

 

This is part three in a four-part report from the workshop, ‘The Future of the History of the Human Sciences,’ which was held at the University of York, 7-8 April 2016 (see a storify from the workshop here). The workshop was jointly hosted by HHS and Chris Renwick (History, York), and was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the University of York. Here, Maria Damjanovicova (European Institute of Oncology, University of Milan) reports on the third of the workshop’s core problematics: The Problem of The Archive.

What has been the impact of biological data and digital media on the archive and on notions of human nature? In the first talk of this session, ‘Possibilities and Problems with the Growing Archive’, Michael Finn (Museum of the History of Science, Technology, & Medicine, University of Leeds) discussed the changes in how archives are used in research, and the relevance of archival material with the emergence of the digital. He focused on three sets of challenges: in questions of storage for example, digitisation introduces software and copyright issues, as well as a risk of information-loss when physical objects are digitised. In curation-related challenges, the role of the expert on historical subjects and historical expertise in archives is lost – together with a sense of what gets excluded from what is archived and unfiltered in search results. And in interpretation-related challenges, digitisation changes the way we view our archives, as it affects the relationship between what we want to study and what is accessible.

In ‘Molecular Archives of Human History: Moving Beyond Text-Based Sources,’ Jessica Hendy (Department of Archaeology, University of York) drew together a range of material and historical practices showing how, for example, cultural practice towards animals can be gauged through parchment analysis, how the molecular biography of a people (who did not have a chance to write their own history) can be learned from the remains of St. Helena slaves, and how the effects of nineteenth century urbanisation on disease, life, and diet, can be assessed from microbes contained in dental calculus. Hendy argued that the tools we use constrain and shape our research question, and that it is of vital importance to integrate biomolecular data with existing data sets to provide a holistic understanding of the past.

Elizabeth Toon’s (Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester) ‘Matching the tools to the job, and not the other way round: Digital humanities and the history of the human sciences discussed the question of what digital humanities methods can do for historians of the human sciences. Toon discussed several projects that demonstrated digital humanities approaches to texts and data, and particularly offered insights from her experience of working on one such project – text mining ‘big data’ in the biological and biomedical sciences with the goal of creating a semantic search engine, which allows queries where categories are open. This process highlighted both the promises and perils of such approaches, including questions around revisiting methodologies, collaboration on big projects, and questions of transparency.

Questions raised in the discussion drew out the commonalities among these papers: how are we to move away from the social/biological dyad, and the categories set in the eighteenth century? How, if at all, do we differentiate between the data and the source, in the distinction between what is digitized and not analysed, versus what is simply not digitized? The question of the future of the history of the human sciences, which reverberated across all conference sessions, was posed as: is there another future for disciplinary collaboration beyond providing context? Is there such a thing as a “we” in shaping the future? Who is a part of that ‘we” and who is supporting it’?

Maria Damjanovicova is a PhD candidate in Foundations and Ethics of the Life Sciences (European Institute of Oncology, University of Milan) and she has a background in molecular biology and physiology (Faculty of Biology, University of Belgrade). Her PhD project is focused on epigenetics and policy and it is an outgrowth of the Italian Epigenetics Consortium (EPIGEN) project on Public Engagement and Policy Work on Epigenetics.

(Image Credit: ‘Papyrus text: fragment of Hippocratic oath.’ Wellcome Library, London. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, No derivatives licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.)

 

This is part two in a four-part report from the workshop, ‘The Future of the History of the Human Sciences,’ which was held at the University of York, 7-8 April 2016 (see a storify from the workshop here). The workshop was jointly hosted by HHS and Chris Renwick (History, York), and was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the University of York. Here, Maria Damjanovicova (European Institute of Oncology, University of Milan) reports on another of the workshop’s core problematics: The Problem of The Social.

How do models of ‘the social’ in the life sciences challenge those in the social sciences and humanities? The first talk of this session was Des Fitzgerald’s ‘The Commotion of the Social’. Fitzgerald (School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University) engaged with a crisis of sociology considered to have been brought about by the challenge that technology poses to sociological research, and confronted the idea of duality in mainstream sociology – that sociology must be dead or alive, digital or analogue, etc. Using urban life, a case with long established interest for both biology and sociology, Fitzgerald introduced the idea of a ‘limit sociology’ – a concept inspired by Stefan Helmreich’s notion of a ‘limit biology’ – as a form of practice, in a time of ecological crisis, and an edge case for connecting sociology and biology in an interesting way. Describing his current project, which embraces a ‘limit sociology approach,’ and looks at stress and the topologies of stress in Shanghai, Fitzgerald proposed an alternative future for the sciences of the social to go on living into the twenty-first century.

In ’The Social as the Non-Biological: Genealogy and Perspectives’, Maurizio Meloni (Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield) examined how we came to think, ‘it is social vs. biological’ via the notion of inheritance and its division into biological heredity and social heritage. Locating the split into soft/hard heredity and genetics/epigenetics in the period after Erasmus Darwin, Meloni identified the postulation of Weismann’s barrier as the moment in which the sphere that we call ‘the social’ became entirely possible as something transcending the biological or the organic. He focused then on epigenetics – as opposed to simple/hard heredity – as an instantiation of the contemporary challenge posed to the biology/society debate, suggesting that heredity, heritage, and inheritance may be increasingly merging today, much like in Erasmus Darwin’s time.

In the final talk, ’Synthesis at What Price?’ Marianne Sommer (Department of Cultural and Science Studies, University of Lucerne) discussed attempts towards a knowledge synthesis by three influential figures, each of whom claimed epistemological superiority for the objects they used in pursuing their political goals. Henry Osborn, for example, argued for epistemic superiority of fossils vis-à-vis other historical approaches, endorsed synthesis of organic and inorganic through integrated anthropology, and advocated progress through notions of racial purity. Julian Huxley, on the other hand, claimed that organisms have epistemic superiority vis-à-vis other historical sources and molecular biology, arguing for the synthesis of research on all the levels on which living phenomena manifest themselves. Huxley advocated evolutionary humanism, social equality, democracy, and peace, while being strongly against racial anthropology and classical eugenics. And Luca Cavalli-Sforza, today, argues for an epistemological pre-eminence of genes vis-à-vis historical sources in linguistics, archaeology (paleo), anthropology, ecological, climatic and human history, and endorses mathematical models of cultural evolution.

What these different approaches to the problem of the social – division in knowledge production; attempts of knowledge synthesis; and crisis of sociology – highlighted, is that the future of the history of the human sciences itself entails the prospect of both a ‘new merger’ of and ‘new boundary work’ between and within the social and the biological sciences.

Maria Damjanovicova is a PhD candidate in Foundations and Ethics of the Life Sciences (European Institute of Oncology, University of Milan) and she has a background in molecular biology and physiology (Faculty of Biology, University of Belgrade). Her PhD project is focused on epigenetics and policy and it is an outgrowth of the Italian Epigenetics Consortium (EPIGEN) project on Public Engagement and Policy Work on Epigenetics.

This is the first in a four-part report from the workshop, ‘The Future of the History of the Human Sciences,’ which was held at the University of York, 7-8 April 2016 (see a storify form the workshop here). The workshop was jointly hosted by HHS and Chris Renwick (History, York), and was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the University of York. Here, David Saunders (postgraduate student at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Manchester) reports on one of the workshop’s core problematics: The Problem of The Human.

“We very much hope that this is an event where we can all be provocative and disagree with each other,” notes Felicity Callard (editor-in-chief of History of the Human Sciences) in her opening address to the attendees of the ‘Future of the History of the Human Sciences’ conference. The event’s first session, ‘The Problem of the Human’, sought to address the human sciences’ most central, and yet most frustratingly illusive, subject of inquiry – the human itself. The death of the human as a philosophical and scientific category has been endlessly prophesised and postponed over the years, from Michel Foucault’s oft-repeated prediction of man ‘erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault, 1966) to more recent concerns regarding the supposed overthrow of ‘selfhood’ by ‘brainhood’ facilitated by the emergent neurosciences (Vidal, 2009). Discussions among historians and human scientists about the uncertain ontological status of the human clearly continue to foster the kind of passionate and provocative disagreement that the event’s organisers had hoped for.

In the first paper, ‘Resisting Neurosciences and Sustaining History’, Roger Smith (Emiritus Reader in the History of Science, Lancaster) expresses his scepticism regarding the supposed novelty and radical impact of the neurosciences on conventional ideas of the human. Rather, Smith argues, materialist explanations for sentience have been present since the nineteenth-century and have had a very limited impact on the daily lives of ordinary people. Instead of neuroscientific colonisation, Smith sees the persistence of non-neuro understandings of the human, drawn from diverse sources such as folk knowledge, religious belief, and the social sciences. For Smith, any claim that these bodies of knowledge will all become subservient to the neurosciences is extremely questionable. Thus, rather than the replacement of one body of knowledge by another, Smith wishes to focus on the relationships between ways of knowing and being.

Such an approach structures Smith’s current research on the history of kinaesthesia. For Smith, movement provides a privileged entry point into engagements between the neurosciences, literary and cultural studies, and historical research, brought into contact via a shared interest in embodied knowledge and experience (e.g. Berthoz and Petit, 2008). This interest in touch and movement is not a recent development, Smith argues, but instead has formed a central preoccupation for philosophical inquiries since the time of Aristotle. Ultimately, Smith proposes, this recognition of the complex historical ontology underpinning modern concepts of the senses reminds us that all psychological categories of human experience are ‘up for grabs’ in future historical studies.

Steve Fuller’s (Sociology, Warwick University) following paper, ‘Kuhn’s Curse and the Crisis of the Human’, directly critiques Smith’s conceptualisation of the human. Fuller begins his paper with two pervasive influences in the history of the human sciences: Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault. Fuller argues that the one of the key tenets of Kuhn’s approach to history is frequently overlooked: his belief that historical studies can only be conducted on issues that have long since been resolved. Thus, writing histories of the human necessarily requires a Foucauldian perspective in which the human has ‘come and gone’ as a distinct category of being. However, Fuller argues that this perspective has been lost through the work of Ian Hacking, which he proposes has distorted Foucauldian thinking in a way that protects the special ontological status of the human and phenomena such as free will and autonomy (Hacking, 2002). The ensuing philosophical confusion, Fuller contends, has fuelled transhumanist debates.

Transhumanism, Fuller argues, is ‘not ashamed’ to talk about human issues of free will and autonomy, but rather questions whether the biological body, as bequeathed by evolutionary processes, is the only platform from which one can hold such discussions. Instead, Fuller suggests that a greater embrace of technology and cyborg forms of living is required. What emerges from this, he argues, is an ‘anti-Foucauldian’ view of the human in which ‘the human is not dead; it is going to be resurrected’. The role of history in this process, Fuller posits, is to recover alternative and long-forgotten paths in medicine and science that will legitimate and provide past precedents for the technological breakthroughs of future generations. Thus, historians’ attempts to reveal the contingent nature of current scientific orthodoxy, and to look again at paths not taken, has more than academic value; it provides a glimpse of the histories that future generations will use to make sense of their own understandings of human nature.

Jonna Brenninkmeijer’s (Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen) paper, ‘The Case of Neuromarketing’, provides an empirical perspective on these conceptual visions of the human. Utilising observations from fieldwork in a neuromarketing company, Brenninkmeijer outlines how neuro-practitioners in marketing have constructed a vision of the human as overly-complex, self-deceiving, and ultimately unreliable. These practitioners have thus turned to the brain to provide more straightforward, and thus commercially profitable, answers. For Brenninkmeijer, neuromarketing research ‘dehumanises’ consumers, removing the uncertainty and contradiction of human experience in order to gain reliable, quantitative results. Thus, the use of neuroscientific technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides opportunities to map out emotional and subjective responses and standardise and predict consumer reactions.

Ultimately, Brenninkmeijer contends that neuromarketing research fuels a conceptual dichotomy in which humans and brains are equated with deception and truth respectively. This also creates tension between experimenters and participants, with the former frequently frustrated by the difficulty and complexity of managing human subjects in a research environment. Brenninkmeijer concludes that this tension between human and brain cannot be resolved by these neuro-practitioners; even when brains give uniform and commercially useful ‘answers’, the free will, autonomy, and resistance of human subjects will continue to frustrate their agendas.

In many ways, it seems to me that the human that emerges from both Smith and Brenninkmeijer’s papers demonstrates notable similarities. In both accounts, the human is irreducible to a single conceptual category or body of knowledge, retaining its ability to confuse, surprise, and frustrate historian and human scientist alike. However, Fuller departs from this vision of the body, downplaying the current biological form of the human as merely one phase through which humanity will eventually pass. Divisions between these competing visions of the human continued to surface throughout the conference without any clear resolution. Yet to return to Callard’s initial call for disagreement, and indeed the new editors’ introduction for the History of the Human Sciences at this new juncture, these ongoing debates need not be a source of disciplinary anxiety, but might instead provide ground upon which innovative engagements with the problem of the human can grow and flourish in the years to come.

David Saunders is a postgraduate student at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (University of Manchester). His forthcoming doctoral research at the Centre for the History of the Emotions (Queen Mary University of London) focuses on the rise of the neurosciences in British post-war epilepsy research as part of the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Research Project ‘Living with Feeling‘