Biomedicine in museums

Even if both Adam (here) and I (here) have been critical of all these ‘turns’ that appear over and over again — and more or less mindlessly — in the humanities, I for one am nevertheless inclined to accept some ‘turns’ more than others. I’m particularly intrigued by the notion of a sensory turn (see also here).

The senses and sensory experience have recently been embraced also by historians. For example, the conference ‘The Five Senses in the Enlightenment’ at the University of Birmingham, 17-18 May 2008, will discuss multi-sensory (smell, taste, vision, hearing, touch) historical phenomena — not, unexpectedly, with a focus on how the senses have been mobilised in the history of medicine. As the organisers write:

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(In two earlier posts I discussed science communication as a field of governance (here) and the multitude of technoscience (here). Here’s the third post — about the blogging phenomenon and science communication)

Blog-savvy readers of this post hardly need to be reminded about the fact that the blog medium has grown explosively over the last ten years and is now rapidly transforming the global media ecology; in early February 2008, Technorati reported they were tracking 113 million blogs and that the number of daily posts was around 1,6 million.

The majority of these millions of blogs are pretty inactive and the majority of these in turn deal with everything but technoscience. Yet, in absolute numbers, blogs dealing with science, technology and medicine have an impressive presence on the internet.

The number of blogs dealing with science is probably somewhere between the ~28,000 blogs tagged ‘science’ on Technorati and the 1,000 or so ‘serious’ blogs that are written by, as Bora Zivkovic puts it “graduate students, postdocs and young faculty, a few by undergraduates and tenured faculty, several by science teachers, and just a few by professional journalists that deal with pressing issues or aim to engage other scientists in discussions about science practice, scientific publications or science policy”.

The number of blogs tagged ‘medicine’ is almost 6.700 (around 700 of these are ‘serious’) and the number of ‘technology’ blogs (mostly about computers and IT) is over 65,000 (all figures from 9 February 2008).

Number exercises aside, the rapid rise of blogging in these fields is important for understanding science communication today. “Because of their freewheeling nature, these blogs take scientific communication to a different level”, Laura Bonetta (‘Scientists enter the blogosphere’, Cell, 129: 443-45, 2007) points out. In my opinion, this “different level” has to do with the fact that blogging is currently more about communicatio than lectio (cf. my earlier post).

Not only is the blog medium easy to use, it also invites people to get their own voice in the global network; furthermore the functionalities of hyperlinking and comments emphasise the social nature of knowledge production and opinion making:

To define blogs as mere “personal diaries on the web” would certainly be miserly … This phenomenon should not be understood as yet another manifestation of an individualism nurtured by society in decay, but is on the contrary the result of a new technological articulation, made transparent by syndication, and taking place in between “intimateness” and “ex-timacy” – to borrow a concept of Laurence Allard. The ”blogosphere” represents not simply the juxtaposition of intimate diaries, but is a true media space which enables subjectivities to exist on a territory of their own, while at the same time “weaving threads” among each other, and which makes it possible for them to assemble around a political and aesthetic subjectivity that is at once their own and shared. It is never “me” who decides whether someone is going to “syndicate” with me. It is always for the other party to decide, and vice-versa (Olivier Blondeau, ‘Hacktivism Street protests, politics, and mobility: A study of activist uses of syndication’; originally published in Multitudes 21 (2005); read it here)

In my ‘multitudinarian’ interpretation, blogs can be seen as ‘singularities’ in the sense of Hardt and Negri: there are few group blogs, and even fewer corporate, organisational or national blogs. The large majority of blogs don’t represent any movements, parties, institutions or organisations; instead they function, in a Deleuzian sense, as “an escape from the dominant codes and majoritarian categories—including those of ‘identity politics’—that otherwise trap the singular in passive or static relations” (Simon Tormey, ‘‘Not in my Name’: Deleuze, Zapatismo and the Critique of Representation’, Parliamentary Affairs 59: 138–154, 206).

Yet blogs are not individualistic in a traditional way: many bloggers identify themselves by pseudonyms. Nor are they solipsistic: there is a high degree of cross-linking between blogs. The net of hyperlinks to other singularities stands for the network of all singularities.

The current dominant mode of thinking among bloggers is one of criticism and resistance. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Technoscience is not homogenous; in fact, the notion of an alleged ‘(techno)scientific community’ conceals the distribution of power and authority within technoscience. Younger scientists complain about their situation as a transnational ‘scientific proletariat’ who live on temporary soft money and have to move around world to get jobs. Even tenured faculty and other people with secure positions are judged largely by the amount of grant money they bring in and how many graduate students they can support. Competition for grants and publications is fierce, and the tactics used to secure them can be ugly, especially in high-profile sciences.

At the moment, as an open network of singularities, the blogosphere has a bias towards the ‘multitude’. But the blogosphere is a contested arena. More and more institutional (both national and transnational) blogs are entering the arena. There are also blogs that are run by organisations which are themselves divided between ‘Empire’ and ‘multitude’ (to continue to use Hardt and Negri’s sometimes contested binary categories; for a foucauldian critique, see here), for example, Nature.com blogs. It is an open question how biopower and biopolitical production will be distributed within the science communicating blogosphere.

(The commentator at the workshop ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’ last Friday, Sebastian Linke from the Section of STS at the University of Gothenburg, will has put his remarks to the whole paper (the last three posts) as a comment to this post)

Here’s the resumé of Adam’s PhD-dissertation ‘History in the flesh – investigating the historicized body’. For further info about the public defence on Friday 15 February, se here.

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(Here’s the second fragment of my paper on ‘Science Communication, Blogging, and the Multitude of Technoscience’ for the workshop  ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’ at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm last Friday — for the first fragment, see here).

As science (qua technoscience) is turning into a truly global phenomenon, science communication too is increasingly turning into a practice of national/transnational governance. (The 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference to be held in Malmö this summer – enthusiastically supported by the Swedish science council, Vetenskapsrådet – is a case in point.)

Consequently, science communication is gradually becoming integrated into the sum total of institutions and governance structures that regulate the global economy, politics and culture, i.e., what Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri, among others, call ‘Empire´in their post-marxist class theory of the age of globalization (Empire, 2000; downloadable here).

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In an earlier post I wondered if the editors of the — otherwise interesting and increasingly successful — Advances in History of Psychology blog were really happy with the use of the word ‘advance’ in the blog title (because of the pretty antiquated philosophy of history connotations associated with ‘advance’)

In a recent post, editor Jeremy Burman explains his choice of name for the AHP blog. He is aware, of course, that ‘advance’ is problematic as a historiographical category. But in this case, Jeremy says, it just means that he wants to help further the history of psychology “by bringing together efforts from the various allied disciplines and collecting them into one place, from which further investigations can be launched”.

That’s fine with me. But then Jeremy adds: “More pragmatically, I also wanted an ‘a-name’ so the site would appear at the top of other sites’ blogrolls”.

Read again! I must admit that I’ve never thought about this blogroll position manipulation method before. And I wonder how common it is. I’ve quickly browsed my favourite science/medicine/tech blogs and nowhere have I found a bias towards the first letters in the alphabet.

I guess most blogs stay away from this practice, because it runs against the self-imposed and delicate gift-giving rules of the blogroll listing. But then again, I may be naïve. So I wonder: How common is this? And does it work as intended?

If Jeremy is really serious about this, he should perhaps change the title of the blog to Aadvances in History of Psychology to make sure that he gets ahead of the possibly forthcoming Absolute Psychology 🙂

(Here are the introductory paragraphs to a paper titled ‘Science Communication, Blogging, and the Multitude of Technoscience’ that I presented in Stockholm yesterday at the workshop  ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’, organised by Mark Elam, University of Gothenburg, in co-operation with the Nobel Museum. I’ll be back with more fragments from the paper — dealing with blogging and multitude — next week).

I have always been rather skeptical to the idea of ’science communication’. At first this may sound paradoxical because as an historian of science I am (by default as it were) also a ’science communicator’. Historians of science usually write books that can be read by a larger group of readers rather than just articles in scholarly journals. Some of the bigger names in the field, like historian of science Dan Kevles, former medical historian Roy Porter, and historian of technology David Edgerton (see earlier post here), are read widely beyond the circle of narrow specialists.

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Just want to draw your attention to the conference “Re-Thinking the Role of the Expert” here in Copenhagen 6-7 March — dealing with different aspects of knowledge and science communication (with an emphasis on ‘expertice’).

Personally I am eager to hear what Stephen Turner has to say about the role of bloggers as public intellectuals vs. traditional experts (which is one of my favorite topics right now). But the other papers look very attractive too. Here are the abstracts:

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Since 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) has run a series of seminars at their headquarters in Geneva on global health history, covering topics like child health, epidemic diseases, and primary health care. To mark its 60th anniversary WHO is now organizing (in co-operation with the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL) an intensified series of ten seminars throughout 2008 (read the full programme here).

If I could select one of the events only, I think I would choose Mark Jackson’s talk on Thursday 29 May, titled ‘Marcel Proust and the global history of asthma’. Not only is Proust the most famous asthma patient in cultural history — the title also promises exciting views on particular vs. global, literary vs. historical, and individual vs. social perspectives on the history of late 20th century health issues.

Collections are the body and soul, nay the life blood of museums!

Accordingly, the Medical & Healthcare Subject Specialist Network in UK organizes a two-day conference and training seminar titled ‘The body and soul of medical collections’ to be held at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, 10-11 March. 

The announced aim of the meeting is to inspire museums, libraries and archives to make better use of their medical and healthcare collections. Topics include audience development, collection rationalisation, collections care and access, education resources, engaging public debate, gallery refurbishment and redisplay, and oral history. Keynote speakers are Almut Grüner (Thackray Museum) and Nick Winterbotham (Millennium Point & Thinktank) and the other speakers are Beth Hawkins, Katie Maggs, Francis Neary, Pete Starling, Sarah Jones, Joe Cain, Kate Reeder, Carolyn Ware, Beamish Martin Warren, Pauline Webb, and Sue Weir.

The organisers don’t have a website, but you can probably contact the meeting coordinator, Steph Gillett, for further info at steph.gillett@btinternet.com or call him at +44 01793 845910.

(thanks to Simon Chaplin and MUSHM-LINK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK)

One of the problems of growing older is that all exciting mind-expanding conferences these days seem to be arranged exclusively for phd’s and postdocs! Like this summer school meeting on the history of medical imaging from the Renaissance to present times, organised by the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University 7-11 July 2008:

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