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CeMoRe & Sociology Seminar - Alan Beattie
Date: 4 March 2008 Time: 4.15pm
Alan Beattie, CeMoRe Hon. Visiting Fellow
'To make the frozen circumstances dance?'
choreographic metaphors in medical sociology and mobilities research.
While working in public health in academic and practice contexts, I have in the past few years noticed the increasing prominence of metaphors related to choreography and/or dance; the present paper is an attempt to initiate some debate about this. Four such metaphors are:
- 'inviting dinosaurs to dance' as a metaphor for reconfiguring health services;
- 'intricate ballets of survival' as a metaphor for the patterning of lifechances across populations and lifespans;
- 'ontological choreographies' as a metaphor for the shaping of clients' lifeworlds by clinical practices;
- 'I'm dancing as fast as I can' as a metaphor for individuals' ways of dealing with the contingencies of lifestyles.
Sometimes wordplay of this sort does not go beyond stylistic flourish or window-dressing or rhetorical conceit. But I want to 'follow the metaphors' in the belief that they offer some useful test-cases for mobilities research and theory:
- arguments for 'new metaphors' as a basis for the transformation of medicine
- calls for the application of 'mobile theorizing' to the sociology of medicine
- appeals for new onto-epistemologies of material-&-semiotic entanglements
- the search for a sociology that is itself fluid, mobile, de-territorialized
- attempts to do social research in embodied, performative, carnivalesque ways•links between the 'politics of metaphoricity' and the 'politics of mobility'
Alan Beattie joined the Centre for Mobilities Research as Hon Research Fellow in September 2007. He was a Module Convenor for the MA in Health Research in the Institute for Health Research 1990-2005, ran an MSc in Public Health 1994-2004 at St Martin's College, and is Emeritus Professor of Public Health and Health Education at the University of Cumbria. Born in Carlisle, he spent 6 years at Oxford University studying and researching in biomedical sciences, and the next 6 years pursuing other interests (see below). Making a turn to environmental and social approaches to health, he then worked in public health across the UK and overseas, along with lecturing at London University: at University College (1973-77), Kings College (1977-79), the Institute of Education (1979-89). Some of his published work is much cited: his model of health promotion is widely used in practice and has long been standard textbook content, likewise his model of community development for health, and his model of curriculum planning for training health professionals. He has also worked extensively for the Open University (1977-2006), for example as course team chair for the pioneering undergraduate course 'Health and Wellbeing' (1992).
He has also had a lifelong involvement in dance, in which he trained professionally and has worked as performer, choreographer and teacher. He gets a mention in some scholarly books and papers as a minor contributor to the first wave of experimental postmodern dance in Britain in the late 1960s. His current work at the Centre for Mobilities Research is an attempt to explore the discourses of dance as a possible resource (even perhaps a model) for new projects in the mobilities field.
Contact:
Who can attend: Anyone
Further information
Associated staff: John Urry
Organising departments and research centres: Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe), Division of Health Research, Sociology
Keywords: Dance, Health, Performance, Sociology
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Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YD
United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 1524 510814
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