UNREST screening 14 June 2019 and Medical Humanities Reading Group 4 July 2019

Contested Conditions Screening: Unrest (Jennifer Brea, 2017)

Friday 14th June, 18:00-21:00, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square

Suddenly afflicted with a debilitating illness, director Jennifer Brea is eventually diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Frustrated by doctors’ insistence that her condition is psychosomatic, Brea makes contact from her bed with an activist community engaged in lobbying for further research into the disease. Spanning the categories of documentary, personal testimony and activist intervention, Unrest offers insight into a little-understood chronic illness, and explores what role the movie camera might play in giving image and voice to people living with the condition.

The film will be followed by a panel discussion with Louise Kenward, Raju Rage and Daniella Valz Gen. Book your place here.

This event, part of the Contested Conditions screening series, is funded by an ISSF grant from Birkbeck and the Wellcome Trust, and organised in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image.

Medical Humanities Reading Group: Exploring deaf ways of seeing through film-making techniques and visual media technologies

Thursday 4th July 2019, 14:30-16:00, Room 106, 43 Gordon Square

Are there deaf ways of seeing? And if so, what might this mean for filmmaking by and for the deaf? In this session led by Dr Rebekah Cupitt, we will explore these questions through the following readings:

  • Anu Sharma and Hannah Glick, “Cross-Modal Re-Organization in Clinical Populations with Hearing Loss”, Brain Sciences, 2016, 6, 4.
  • Patricia Durr, “Deconstructing the Forced Assimilation of Deaf People Via De’VIA Resistance and Affirmation Art”, Visual Anthropology Review, 15.2 (Fall/Winter 1999-2000)

The readings for each session are held in a shared Dropbox folder. If you need access, email sophie.jones@bbk.ac.uk (include your Dropbox-linked email address, if you have one).

Everyone is welcome at the reading group. There is no need to book.

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group aims to create a space in which academics, clinicians and students can come together to explore key readings, ideas and materials in the field of medical humanities. Our endeavour is to find ways of talking across the different disciplines of the humanities and medicine, and we welcome participation from colleagues and students interested and engaged in these areas. For details of previous sessions, please click here.

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Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group – Thursday 21 March

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group will meet on Thursday 21st March 2019, 14:00-15:30, in Room 101, 30 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5DT. **Please note the change from our usual location** 

 

This session will focus on phenomenological approaches to the medical humanities, and it will be led by Dr Peter Fifield (English and Humanities, Birkbeck) and Dr Mohammed Rashed (Philosophy, Birkbeck). The readings are:

  • Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford UP, 2003), pp. 109-125.
  • Havi Carel, Phenomenology of Illness (Oxford UP, 2016), Chapter 1 – “Why Use Phenomenology to Study Illness?”

The readings for each session are held in a shared Dropbox folder. If you need access, email sophie.jones@bbk.ac.uk (include your Dropbox-linked email address, if you have one).

 

Everyone is welcome at the reading group. There is no need to book.

 

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group aims to create a space in which academics, clinicians and students can come together to explore key readings, ideas and materials in the field of medical humanities. Our endeavour is to find ways of talking across the different disciplines of the humanities and medicine, and we welcome participation from colleagues and students interested and engaged in these areas. For details of previous sessions, please click here.

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Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group – 29th November 2018 3pm: Schizophrenia

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group will meet on 29th November 2018, 15:00-16:30, in the Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD to consider work on the topic of schizophrenia. This session will be led by Dr Mohammed Rashed, ISSF Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow in Birkbeck’s Department of Philosophy, and the readings are as follows:

  • Colin King (2006) They diagnosed me a schizophrenic when I was just a Gemini. In ‘The other side of madness’. Reconceiving Schizophrenia. Edited by Man Cheung Chung, Bill Fulford, and George Graham (Oxford UP)
  • Angela Woods (2011) Schizophrenia, modernity, postmodernity. In Woods, The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory (Oxford UP)

The readings for each session are held in a shared Dropbox folder. If you need access, email sophie.jones@bbk.ac.uk (include your Dropbox-linked email address, if you have one).

Everyone is welcome at the reading group. There is no need to book.

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group aims to create a space in which academics, clinicians and students can come together to explore key readings, ideas and materials in the field of medical humanities. Our endeavour is to find ways of talking across the different disciplines of the humanities and medicine, and we welcome participation from colleagues and students interested and engaged in these areas. For details of previous sessions, please click here.

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Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group – Contested Conditions: 25 October 2018, 3.00-4.30 pm

Thursday 25th October 2018, 3.00-4.30 pm

Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group – Contested Conditions

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group will meet on 25th October 2018, 3.00-4.30 pm, in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD, to consider contested, chronic, and invisible health conditions.

Prior reading

Anna Mollow, ‘No Safe Place’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 1/2, SAFE (Spring/Summer 2011), pp.188-199

Johanna Hedva, ‘Sick Woman Theory’, Mask Magazine (January 2016). Available at: http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory

Email sophie.jones@bbk.ac.uk for a copy of the Mollow article (include your Dropbox-linked email address if you have one).

Everyone is welcome at the reading group. There is no need to book.

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group aims to create a space in which academics, clinicians and students can come together to explore key readings, ideas and materials in the field of medical humanities. Our endeavour is to find ways of talking across the different disciplines of the humanities and medicine, and we welcome participation from colleagues and students interested and engaged in these areas.

For details of previous sessions, please click here.

Please get in touch with Sophie Jones (sophie.jones@bbk.ac.uk) if you have any queries.

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From Field to Page: Core Skills in the Medical Humanities 5 July and 8 November 2018

From Field to Page: Core Skills in the Medical Humanities 

CHASE Cohort Training Days

July 5th & November 8th 2018

Keynes Library

School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London

43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

Medical humanities continues to emerge as a live and transforming field of enquiry.  The core work of this field seeks to explore and critique biomedical science and its histories through the various critical frameworks of the humanities disciplines.  Medical humanities research presents scholars with the particular challenges of transdisciplinary research undertaken across the radically different domains of medicine and the humanities’ academic disciplines.  Across the CHASE institutions there is a diverse cohort of medical humanities doctoral researchers that incorporates students from both clinical and non-clinical, humanities backgrounds. As such the cohort represents a broad range of skills-sets, work, academic and training experiences, and previous exposure to the critical methods central to the humanities disciplines. Clinicians come into the field of research with substantial situated knowledge of the real-life settings and practices of medicine and surgery but often with the need to acquire, through training the requisite skills of critical thinking and writing.  Conversely, non-clinicians and humanities’ scholars are much better versed in critical practice and inquiry, but lack the grounded, lived experience of clinical practice. The range of research projects undertaken in the field is markedly diverse, ranging from practice-led (examining the nature of clinical practice), to practice-based (using clinical practice as research), to purely analytic (discursive analysis) modes of inquiry but all undertake to situate medicine, disease, patient experience, clinical practice and medical education within socio-cultural and/or historical contexts in such a way that critical analysis and discursive understandings may be produced. The aims of medical humanities theses may, or may not, have the avowed intention of contributing to the practical fields of clinical practice, delivery of healthcare or medical education. All medical humanities theses must adhere to the core methodologies and practices of the humanities disciplines and this means that critical thinking and writing skills are key requirements of the medical humanities doctorate.

The CHASE Consortium will deliver two training days, which map the core skills required of medical humanities doctoral research and support doctoral researchers as they undertake their projects.

Registration for both days is free and open to all PhD students at CHASE institutions.

There are 10 travel bursaries available for students without CHASE funding, these will be awarded on a first come, first served basis.

To register, please contact Jo Winning, j.winning@bbk.ac.uk by 25th June 2018

Programme

Day 1, July 5tth 2018

10.15-10.30am:  Coffee and Registration

10.30-11.15am:  Keynote Lecture 1: Mapping the field (Jo Winning, Birkbeck)

11.15am-12.30pm:  The challenges of transdisciplinarity and the problems of language (Birkbeck/Wellcome ISSF Medical Humanities Fellows)

12.30-1.30pm:  Lunch

13.30-2.30pm:  Open Space to discuss the morning sessions

2.30-3.45pm:  Working with stakeholders: public engagement and impact (Ross Macfarlane, Wellcome; Deborah Padfield, St George’s Medical School; Wendy Earle, Birkbeck Impact Officer)

3.45pm-4pm:  Coffee

4-5.15pm:  Breakout group sessions to discuss intersections of the sessions with individual research projects

5.30pm:  Happy 70th Birthday NHS, Drinks Reception, followed by evening tour of the Wellcome Collection

 

Day 2, November 8th 2018

10.15-10.30am:  Coffee and Registration

10.30-11.15am:  Keynote Lecture 2: From academy to clinic, and back again (tbc)

11.15am-12.30pm:  Medical Humanities and Ethics (tbc)

12.30-1.30pm:  Lunch

13.30-2.30pm:  Open Space to discuss the morning sessions

2.30-3.45pm:  Putting theory into practice: medical humanities as practice-based research (tbc)

3.45pm-4pm:  Coffee

4-5.15pm:  Breakout group sessions to discuss intersections of the sessions with individual research projects

5.30pm:  Panel discussion and Drinks Reception, hosted by Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities

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Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities Reading Group – Summer Term 2018

Please find below details of upcoming events linked to the Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities.

Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group – Summer Term 2018

Tuesday 29th May, 2-3.30 pm, Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Extracts from Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke UP, 2017. We will read the Preface, Introduction, and (optionally) Chapter 2: Crip Nationalism: From Narrative Prosthesis to Disaster Capitalism

Tuesday 26th June, 4-5.30 pm, Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Extracts from Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure. Duke UP, 2017. We will read Chapter 1: Ideology of Cure, Chapter 2: Violence of Cure, and (optionally) Chapter 3: In Tandem With Cure.

Email Sophie Jones (sophie.jones@bbk.ac.uk) for access to the reading (include your Dropbox-linked email address if you have one).

 

 

Please note that the Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities website is currently under maintenance and will be updated with details of the above events as soon as possible.

Please visit the site for more information about our activities, and do forward this on to any interested parties.

 

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Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group Spring Term 2018

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group will meet twice in the Spring Term to consider Attention and its Medicalization. The sessions will speak to each other but it’s fine to attend just one.  Everyone is welcome! There is no need to book.

1 March 2018, 2-3.30pm, Malet Street Building, London, WC1E 7HX – Room 420: Reading Attention

22 March 2018, 2-3.30pm, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD – Room 114 (Keynes Library): Medicalizing Attention

  • Matthew Smith, “The First Hyperactive Children”, Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD. Reaktion, 2012, pp. 46-74.
  • Ilina Singh, “A disorder of anger and aggression: Children’s perspectives on attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder in the UK”, Social Science and Medicine 73 (2011): 889-896.

Further reading: Simon Bailey, “ADHD Mythology”, in Rethinking Disability Theory and Practice: Challenging Essentialism, ed. Karin Lesnik Oberstein. Palgrave, 2015, pp. 98-117.

Led by Sophie A. Jones and Bozhena Zoritch.

Email Sophie (sophie.jones@bbk.ac.uk) for a copy of the reading (include your Dropbox-linked email address if you have one). For directions to our Bloomsbury campus please see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps

Visit the Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities website for more information about our activities, and please do forward this on to any interested parties.

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Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group – 7 December 2017

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group meets on 7th December to consider the topic of non-conception. The meeting is preceded by a guided tour of the Conceiving Histories exhibition for those that can make it. Full details of the prior reading are below.

On Non-Conception

The Reading Group will meet on 7th December 3-4.30, Room 321, 43 Gordon Square, London. WC1H 0PD.

Led by Dr Isabel Davis

This session of the Reading Group coincides with the  Conceiving Histories Exhibition in the Peltz Gallery, 8th November-13th December. Members attending the group might like to visit the exhibtion before the Reading Group meets. A guided tour will be starting at 2pm on 7th December if you would like to join. Meet in the gallery. No need to book.

Prior reading:
Is available by following the links below. To print it out you need to download the whole file and then select the correct page numbers on your print options.

  • William Harvey, On Conception. This is added on to On Generation. You can read an English translation in The Works of William Harvey, trans. R. Willis (London: Sydenham Society, 1847), pp. 575-86. Link: https://archive.org/details/worksofwilliamha01harv
  • Robert Lyall, The medical evidence relative to the duration of human pregnancy, as given in the Gardner peerage cause, before the Committee for Privileges of the House of lords in 1825-26 (London: Burgess and Hill, 1826), footnote plan for the Experimental Conception Hospital. The whole book is interesting, but the footnote in question is on page xvii. Link: https://archive.org/details/b21473742

Everyone is welcome. There is no need to book.

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group aims to create a space in which academics, clinicians and students can come together to explore key readings, ideas and materials in the field of medical humanities. Our endeavour is to find ways of talking across the different disciplines of the humanities and medicine, and we welcome participation from colleagues and students interested and engaged in these areas.

For details of previous sessions, please click here.

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Medical Humanities Reading Group 23 November 17 and digest of other events

23rd November 3-4.30 in Room B02, 43 Gordon Square, London.
For more information about travelling to Birkbeck School of Arts, click here.

Prior reading for Skin II:

Roger Willoughby, ‘Between the Basic Fault and Second Skin’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 85 (2004): 179-96.

Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between the Self and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Chapter 2.

Reading is available as pdfs, please email  me (Isabel Davis – i.davis@bbk.ac.uk) to request a dropbox link.

Other events at Birkbeck:

The Reading Group will meet for the last session of term on 7th December 3-4.30pm (room 321, 43 Gordon Square). The topic will be non-conception and the reading will be made available shortly.

Before the reading group there will be a free tour of the Conceiving Histories Exhibition (meet on 7th December in the Peltz gallery at 2pm, 43 Gordon Square).

The Conceiving Histories exhibition is free and on at the Peltz Gallery until 13th December.

Conference. 29th-30th November: Putting theory into practice: exploring the role of practice-based medical humanities. This is a free event but you must book a place.

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Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities Reading Group – Autumn Term 2017

The Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities Reading Group will meet three times this term: on 19th October, the 23rd November and 7th December (topic and reading tbc). All meetings will be 3-4.30 in 43 Gordon Square (room to be confirmed).

The first two sessions will treat the topic of Skin.

Prior reading for Skin I (19th October):

Mechthild Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). Introduction.

Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Introduction (available in the dropbox file from tomorrow).

Further reading: Jonathan Lamb, ‘Diagrams of Emotion: Hogarth’s Blush and Maori Tattoos’. Available here.

Prior reading for Skin II (23rd November):

Roger Willoughby, ‘Between the Basic Fault and Second Skin’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 85 (2004): 179-96.

Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between the Self and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Chapter 2.

For more information about travelling to Birkbeck School of Arts, click here.

Prior reading:
This reading is available via the Reading Group’s shared Dropbox folder: for further details of how to access, please contact Isabel Davis.

Everyone is welcome. There is no need to book.

The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group aims to create a space in which academics, clinicians and students can come together to explore key readings, ideas and materials in the field of medical humanities. Our endeavour is to find ways of talking across the different disciplines of the humanities and medicine, and we welcome participation from colleagues and students interested and engaged in these areas.

For details of previous sessions, please click here.

If you would like to be removed from this mailing list just reply and ask. If you think there’s someone else who would be interested in this message do forward it on and suggest that they get in touch with me and ask to be added.

 

All best wishes,

Isabel Davis.

Reader in Medieval Literature and Culture

Department of English and Humanities
Birkbeck College

43 Gordon Square

London WC1H 0PD

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