experimentality - body

Seminar with Melinda Cooper

Experimentality — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:18:59 +0000

15 April, 2010, Bowland North Seminar Room 23, Lancaster University

Experiments and Accidents

Melinda Cooper

16.00-18.00

All welcome

Workshop 4: Ilana Lowy, ‘‘Designer babies’: embryos and foetuses as experimental objects’

Diana — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:26:29 +0000

Ilana Lowy (Centre de Recherche Medicine, Science Santé et Societé (CERMES), CNRS, Paris) opened her talk stating that the dream of deciding the baby has a long tradition and practical as well as emotional importance. Lowy emphasised that it is a small object by volume but very important politically. She proceeded in explaining the recent development of perfection in medically assisted reproduction as a domesticated technique in France (women try to forget rather extraordinary measures that lead to pregnancy, naturalising stress).

Workshop 3: Brian Balmer and Norma Morris, 'Who is the 'guinea-pig' in human experimentation?'

Diana — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:09:07 +0000

Brian Balmer and Norma Morris (Science and Technology Studies, UCL) discussed their empirical work and its relevance to the theme of Experimental Subjects drawing on a nine-year collaborative research project on how volunteers understand their participation in biomedical research. Their research has involved interviewing women who have volunteered for a test scan using a new medical imaging technology about their experience of being a volunteer. They discussed three ways of understanding the 'experimental subject' that they have encountered in their research. First, they argued that the healthy and patient volunteers themselves are the experimental subjects being experimented on by biophysicists, and then being interviewed by social scientists. Next, they claimed that another type of 'experimental subject' emerges from their relationship with the biophysicists and they discussed the ambiguity around this relationship as either collaborators with the biophysicists or social scientific experimenters on the biophysicists. Thirdly, they reflexively made themselves into 'experimental subjects' and discussed how the biophysicists and volunteers constructed their identity in the course of their interactions.

Workshop 3: Lisa Blackman, ‘Experimenting with Suggestion: Performing ‘social influence’ processes’

Diana — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:32:55 +0000

Lisa Blackman (Dept of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London) began her presentation stating that in it she will outline some work on experimentation and subjectivity that is the subject of her forthcoming book, ‘Im/material Bodies: Affect, Relationality and the Problem of Personality’ (Sage). In the book Blackman takes the problem of ‘social influence’, as it has been stabilized and enacted as a particular kind of object within the psychological sciences, as her topic of problematisation. The genealogical investigation developed throughout the book takes a number of scenes (the laboratory, the séance, the clinical encounter, the therapeutic relationship, live performance and the theatre) as sites for the production of different forms of subjectivity articulated through differing conceptions of suggestion or suggestibility. Lisa Blackman considers all these sites as differing practices of experimentation which stage suggestion as a particular kind of ‘thing’ or entity.

Workshop 3: Linsey McGoey, ‘Experimental dissidence: economies of credibility in drug regulation’

Diana — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:05:11 +0000

Linsey McGoey’s (Science and Technology Studies, Oxford) presentation can be read below in the original version:

Workshop 2: Jussi Parikka, Nature as Experiment: Eco Media as a Probing of Potentialities

Diana — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:40:13 +0000

Jussi Parikka (ArcDigital, Anglia Ruskin University) opened his presentation with a reference to Whitehead, positioning speculative thought as a specific discipline. Parikka then proceeded in presenting two initiatives: Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media ‘‘Cross Talk’’ and Garnet Hertz’s ‘Dead Media lab’. He explained how, the “Cross Talk” project tries to find processes in the natural world (“natural technics”) that could function as carriers of signals or messages. The title of ‘‘Cross Talk’’ corresponds to the prospect of these processes (in the form of materials or forces that were common to the habitats of animals) being accessible to the non-human realms as messages. Jussi Parikka argued that Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media-initiative (2009) aims towards very similar issues at the crossroads of media archaeology and ecology. Parikka positioned his presentation around the intriguing rhetorical question concerning non-human media: “Can ‘natural media’ with its different agencies and sensorium help to rethink human media, revealing opportunities for action or areas of mutual interest?“

Experimenting on ‘The Secret You’

Diana — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:09:06 +0000

On Tuesday 20th October 2009, as a part of their long-standing series ‘Horizon’, BBC2 screened an episode ‘THE SECRET YOU’ where Professor Marcus de Sautoy explored the issues of experimentality in relation to human self-awareness. The Finding Moonshine blog describes the programme in the following way: ‘[t]o find out what progress they are making Marcus becomes a human guinea-pig in a series of mind probing experiments. He begins by asking when our self awareness emerges and witnesses a cunning test that convincingly reveals a child’s sense of self before they are even capable of talking about what they are feeling. The experiment begs a question: are we alone in the world in being aware of ourselves?’ (http://findingmoonshine.blogspot.com/2009/10/secret-you-horizon-bbc2.html)

‘Daredevils’ as experimental figures

Diana — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:42:40 +0000

The recent Channel 4 series ‘Daredevils’ relate closely to the question of human experimentality in the non-academic but popular TV celebrity context. They exemplify an array of social themes and problematic questions about the nature of the experiment, its dissemination and public understanding.

Experimentality - life and magic!

mp — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:25:43 +0000

The Annual Research Programme defines the main topics of debate that unfold in the Lancaster University hub of inter- and post-disciplinary, intra- and inter-institutional encounters, the Institute for Advanced Studies. This year's programme, 2009-2010, is called Experimentality and is billed in this way as "a unique, open-ended conversation about the power of experimentality", beginning with a launch on October 14-15:

"Experimentality is a year-long collaborative exploration of ideas and practices of experimentation in science and technology, the arts, commerce, politics, popular culture, everyday life, and the natural world.

Over the course of the academic year, the programme will run a range of workshops and arts events, culminating in an international conference, The Experimental Society, on 7-9 July 2010."

In this blog I will collect some anecdotes and ideas, stories and viewpoints, perhaps even some analysis and maybe a rant or two, hopefully food for thought, about the kind of experimentality that surrounds the practices of magic healing in the Amazon with the use of what the shamans call teacher or power plants. These are special, sacred plants that facilitate the access to intuitive knowledge about the world, particularly in the context of patients with problems - or for prophylactic purposes or to "simply" develop spiritually. It will mainly focus on the use of ayahuasca, which will be grounded in a politics of social movements and presented from the perspective of autonomous development, as opposed to the predominant Euro-American developmentalism perspective, which is centred upon ideas and politics of private property, industrialisation, teleological investments in high technology, as fixes.

Coming to terms with shamanic experimentality is a deeply political matter. The destruction of the forest in which the healer learns her skills from the wild of the plants threatens the sustainability of the healers' practices: their schools are burning and being demolished.

I will take some material from the Colonos - Amazonia por la Vida blog, which has a diverse collection of "stories (and rants), reflections, photos, analysis and maybe even some good ideas - often relevant for the Amazon or for life in general".

Looking forward to a year of experimentality and hopefully some magic! :)