CHHS and ‘Sense and Sensations’ cluster Research Seminar: Professor Hannah Thompson

Professor Hannah Thompson joined the CHHS on 02/11/2022 to discuss ‘”Blindness Gain” and the Danger of Accessible Art’.

This talk used examples from 3 Parisian art galleries to argue for a new approach to the display and interpretation of art. Most large museums and galleries work hard to make a few pieces of art accessible to blind and partially blind beholders. My research shows that this kind of access can do more harm than good. Here, I will use my theory of “blindness gain” to suggest that more inclusive approaches, informed by the practice of ‘creative audio description’ are the best way to create properly inclusive gallery experiences for everyone.

 

CHHS Research Seminar: Dr Luis De Miranda

On Wednesday 5 October, CHHS welcomed our first speaker of the year, Dr Luis de Miranda. The seminar was chaired by Professor Ulrika Maude, the director of the CHHS.
Dr Luis de Miranda is a researcher at the Center for Medical Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden, the initiator of the Philosophical Health International network (https://philosophical.health) and the author of a dozen books translated into various languages, including Being and Neonness (MIT Press). His talk was entitled ‘Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health: Introducing the New SMILE_PH Method through the Case of Spinal Cord Injury’.
He told us about his new semi-structured interviewing method SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. As well as explaining the theoretical underpinnings of his method (including work by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenological thinkers), he described some interesting case studies based on a pilot study he conducted with people living with spinal cord injury (SCI). The SMILE_PH method progressively gathers phenomenological information about 1 – our bodily sense; 2 – our sense of self, 3 – our sense of belonging; 4 – our sense of the possible; 5 – our sense of purpose and 6 – our philosophical sense. Dr de Miranda explained that his main motivation is pragmatic: he wants to provide the recent philosophical health movement with a testable method and show that philosophically-oriented interviews are possible in a manner that can be reproduced, compared and used systematically with a population that has received no training in philosophy. It was fascinating to hear about the ways in which philosophy can enrich medicine, and vice versa.

CHHS and Philosophy Department Research Seminar: Dr Jamila Rodrigues

Dr Jamila Rodrigues joined the CHHS on June 14th to present a talk entitled ‘Finding IKIGAI during times of crisis’.

 

Abstract

Our ways of overcoming times of crisis critically depend on cultural ideas of living well since cultures conceptualise/experience well-being differently. This topic has raised interest in the social sciences, especially since the COVID-19 Pandemic. Rodrigues’ appeal is to understand how different people express well-being in the life settings in which they live. This talk focused on Japan, and the concept of ikigai (生き甲斐), translated as “a purpose in life” to address the question: how do Japanese people seem to balance well-being, life meaning, and joy in life during pandemic crisis? 

Firstly, Rodrigues drew from the Japanese participant’s narratives from a large-scale project, Experiences of Social Distancing during the COVID-19 Pandemic. She used Ikigai-9, a psychometric tool developed by Japanese scholars (Imai, Osada &Nishimura 2012), tested by scholars in the UK (Fido & Kotera 2019) to measure one’s reason for being through dimensions of emotions towards one’s life, one’s future, and the acknowledgment of one’s existence. Rodrigues proposed that ikigai is one way of looking at well-being from a cultural basis that helps people to make sense of their “being in the world” during times of crisis (i.e., COVID-19 Pandemic).

Secondly, Rodrigues presented the topic of her JSPS fellowship, which stems from the COVID-19 Pandemic Survey’s initial findings. The aim is to develop a framework that she calls “embodied ikigai,” based on cultural phenomenology (Csordas 1993), phenomenology of illness (Carel 2017), psychology (Kamiya 1966), and anthropology (Mathew 1996) studies on ikigai and Japan and cultural identity (Tanaka 2019). Rodrigues wishes to explore the idea that the gendered body can be understood as the subject of experience and that our bodies are the existential ground of self and culture. Focusing on ikigai as a bodily felt experience, Rodrigues wishes to clarify how Japanese women perceive ikigai as a cultural idea or motive in their lived experience through crisis.

 

Bio

Jamila Rodrigues is a postdoctoral researcher in the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit at OIST, where she contributes as a qualitative researcher to the COVID-19 pandemic experience. Rodrigues is a former dancer with extensive experience working as an anthropologist, doing ethnographic fieldwork in Europe, Africa, South America, and East Asia on embodiment, gender, religious studies, and selfhood expression (Rodrigues 2018). For her Master’s degree in Dance and Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, she received a Leverhulme Travel Abroad scholarship (2010-2012). She received the Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship for her DPhil in Anthropology and Islamic Ritual Studies at Roehampton University, UK (2014-2017). 

In 2020, Rodrigues was awarded a Great Sasakawa short trip scholarship to visit the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies (Kyoto), for which she also conducted preliminary fieldwork on Okinawan shaman’s (yuta) embodied ritual experience. Recently, Rodrigues was awarded a JSPS fellowship for her study on ikigai (生き甲斐), translated as “a purpose in life,” to analyse Japanese women’s narratives related to the role of the bodies in embodying ikigai during times of crisis.

CHHS Research Seminar: Dr Benjamin Smart

On June 1st, Dr Benjamin Smart joined CHHS members to discuss ‘How Covid-19 has brought to light the failure of One-Size-Fits-All approaches to public health’.

Abstract: Since late 2019, every country in the world has been battling the largest pandemic in a century. Covid-19 has infected nearly 500 million people worldwide, and killed 6 million of those (and the real figures for both deaths and infections are no doubt substantially higher). To combat the pandemic, nations put in place a variety of measures to slow the spread of the disease, including, in some cases, measures that all but shut down their economies (both formal and informal). This followed blanket advice from the World Health Organisation (WHO), which recommended strict lockdown policies on a global scale.

In this paper, Smart questioned the WHO recommendations. Evidence Based Public Health Policy guidelines emphasise the importance of cultural context when making policy decisions, and yet these considerations were largely ignored during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Countries were faced with a choice between more or less drastic measures to ‘flatten the curve’, but with a disease that rarely affected the young, one must wonder whether implementing measures that would inevitably lead to malnutrition and starvation for millions of people in Africa, as well as severely disrupting existing healthcare programmes on a continent where only 3% of the population are over 65, could have possibly been justified given the typical disease course of Covid-19 in the young.

Suppose you had a choice between two health policies, A and B. Policy A would result in the death of a lot of elderly people, and Policy B would result in the death of a lot of children, especially infants. Which would you choose?

Bio: Dr Benjamin Smart is an associate professor in philosophy. Prior to joining the University of Johannesburg in 2015 he lectured at The University of Birmingham (in the United Kingdom). He received his PhD from Nottingham University in 2012.

Smart’s research focuses on the metaphysics of laws and causation, and on the philosophy of medicine. He published a monograph entitled ‘Concepts and Causes in the Philosophy of Disease’ in 2016, and has numerous papers in highly ranked international philosophy journals. He has published articles on the metaphysics of least action principles, the problem of induction, the nature of fundamental properties, the philosophy of sport, and on the philosophy of health and disease.

Dr Smart believes that philosophical work in medicine can have a direct impact on society, and so also collaborates with academics in the medical sciences to address what some might call ‘real world problems’ in public health.

CHHS and English Department: Showcasing research at CHHS – a panel of flash papers

Members from the advisory board of the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science joined the English department to showcase their research on the 11th May 2022.

There was a panel of flash papers (followed by Q&A) to learn more about some of the research projects at the intersection of literature and medicine.

  • Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, ‘James Joyce and Non-normative Vision: Re-viewing the Blind Bard’
  • Abby Ashley, ‘Parenting whilst Autistic: Reclaiming ‘Wild’ Identities in (M)otherhood’
  • Maria Vaccarella, ‘Autofiction, Illness Narratives and Life-Writing in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets