A series of online seminar discussions about the uses and meanings of evidence in contemporary health contexts and beyond. Each session focusses on a particular type of interaction with evidence, and the kinds of things we do with it: narrating it, waiting for it, and perhaps increasingly, doubting it. Please join us by follow the registration links below.
Please note: listings are UK time (BST)
2nd July - 2-3.30 pm: Indexing Evidence
How do indexes work? In one sense they serve to orient us in the world of printed fact and evidence, but they can have a host of other more subversive and unexpected uses, too. Dr Dennis Duncan and artist Alejandro Cesarco explore the histories and creative uses of the index as a form. What stories can they tell? And what happens in instances when they become autonomous entities, pointing to nothing but themselves?
Dennis Duncan is Lecturer at UCL and works on book history, translation, avant-garde literature. His latest book, Index, A History of the is published by Penguin this year. Earlier books include Book Parts (Oxford, 2019) edited with Adam Smyth and The Oulipo and Modern Thought (Oxford, 2019).
Alejandro Cesarco is a Uruguayan-born, New York based artist who has repeatedly put the form of the index to work in creative and intriguing ways. Through text and video, his work explores repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating. His most recent solo exhibitions have been at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (now Kunstinstituut Melly), Rotterdam, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico and Tanya Leighton, Berlin.
9th July - 2-3.30 pm: Narrating Evidence
Can literary and oral narratives work as forms of evidence? What do they tell us that more objective, statistical or quantitative forms of data cannot? Lara Choksey and Kelichi Anucha discuss the interplay between literary narrative and health contexts.
Lara Choksey is postdoctoral fellow in the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter working on a project which brings literary and cultural studies approaches to questions of heredity and environment in the ‘postgenomic’ era. Her monograph, Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds (Bloomsbury), is out in February 2021.
Kelechi Anucha is a PhD candidate working on the relationship between time and care in end of life narratives, as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded research project Waiting Times. Her current project focuses on contemporary end-of-life literature and visual cultures, paying particular attention to representations of impeded, disrupted and alternate temporalities.
12th July - 2-3.30 pm: Doubting the Evidence
What is happening to evidence in a contemporary cultural and political context characterised by distrust and conspiracy theories, by widespread allegations of deception and fakery? Patricia Kingori, Caitjan Gainty and Agnes Arnold-Forster discuss how the concept the fake can trouble ideas of authenticity, and whether skepticism and doubt in health contexts are useful.
Patricia Kingori is associate professor in global health ethics, University of Oxford. She currently leads a Wellcome funded project exploring concerns around Fakes, Fabrications and Falsehoods in Global Health. She is currently working on an initiative called the Museum of Revelatory Fakes with artist AR Hopwood.
Caitjan Gainty is Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at King’s College London. She leads the Healthy Scepticism project which aims to examine and make sense of the doubt, cynicism, suspicion and distrust in and around medical practice from the mid-20th century to the present.
Agnes Arnold-Forster is a writer, researcher, and historian of healthcare, medicine, work, and the emotions, based at McGill University. She is also a co-PI on the Healthy Scepticism project at King’s.
July 16th July - 2-3.30 pm: Waiting for Evidence
How do we understand or attend to evidence that is in the process of revealing itself, and to the uncertainties and confusions of being in the midst of an event? Isabel Davis, Sophie Day and Felicity Callard discuss how the unfolding temporalities of chronic illness or pregnancy can complicate ideas of evidence and how it is documented.
Felicity Callard is Professor of Human Geography at University of Glasgow. As someone who is still recovering, many weeks in, from an infection from the virus, she is currently thinking through patient experiences of Covid-19, and preoccupied by how we might bring together observations and data from patients with those from traditional scientific/clinical observers.
Isabel Davis is a Reader in Medieval Literature and Culture at Birkbeck College. She has published extensively on the histories of gender, sexual ethics and devotional culture in the late Middle Ages. Her recent work has focused on the idea of ‘un-pregnancy’ and she is currently researching a book on the history of trying and struggling to conceive.
Sophie Day is professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College whose current work focuses on contemporary practices of personalisation in elements of health and medicine, digital culture and data science. She has published on waiting and end-of-life care, and established the Patient Experience Research Centre with Professor Helen Ward at Imperial College London, where she continues to work.