Medical practice treats the body as an active field. Growth, pathology, healing, immune response, digestion, atrophy, arousal, pain, panic – none of these organic processes is stable, fixed, or indeed ‘a thing’; yet, they are all objects of interest for medicine. Medical intervention, whether it takes the form of an antibiotic or an acupuncture treatment, interrupts a flow of causes …
Tag Archives: Interdisciplinarity
Authors and Impresarios: How to Move Across Disciplines
A conversation with Mario Biagioli.
Mario Biagioli is a Distinguished Professor of Law and Science and Technology Studies, as well as Director of the Center for Science and Innovation Studies at the University of California, Davis. Prior to his time at Davis, he was a Professor of History of Science at Harvard University, specialising in intellectual property in science. His …
Entangled in the collaborative turn: observations from the field
If there really has been a ‘collaborative turn’ between the social and biological sciences, then the stakes of that turn are still very much to be negotiated. ‘Collaboration,’ of course, is not a practice or a structure simply to be aimed for: like all ethical and methodological commitments, collaboration is made in the turning – and thus the actual forms …
On Relevance (The Very Idea)
As someone who thinks and works on the edges of the social sciences I am always curious about—and fascinated by—the ways in which ideas, feelings, propositions, demands, and attachments of various kinds have dynamically contributed and continue to contribute to articulating both the knowledge-practices of social scientific disciplines and the habits or ethical sensibilities that inform those forms of inquiry …
An Emerging Infectious Disease Perspective, Inter Alia
As the saying goes, ‘there are no good models, only useful ones’. Tell a disease modeler that, and they might shake their head, interrupting to correct you – “only elegant ones”. And Hufnagel et al’s (2004) influential disease simulation, now ten years old, is quite elegant indeed. Published following the emergence and spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in
The collaborative turn: interdisciplinarity across the human sciences
Questions of health, medicine and science have long animated sub-disciplinary attentions in the social sciences and humanities. Recently, however, research around these topics has taken a marked collaborative turn. If topics in the medical and health sciences were once straightforward objects of study for anthropological, sociological or philosophical analysis, increasingly, to work ‘on’ such topics often means also to work …