MedHum Open Forum: Embodiment and Critical Medical Humanities

EMBODIMENT AND CRITICAL MEDICAL HUMANITIES

Conversations with Angela Woods, Erin Manning, Monica Greco, Ana Gómez-Carrillo, and Siri Hustvedt

Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, Cornelius Borck (eds.)

Medical Humanities – Open Forum 1

Medical Humanities – Open Forum

Edited by Vincent Barras, Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio, Martina King, Susanne Michl

Volume 1

Embodiment and Critical Medical Humanities

Multiple Practices and Shifting Concepts

Conversations with Angela Woods, Erin Manning, Monica Greco, Ana Gómez-Carrillo, and Siri Hustvedt

Edited by Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües,and Cornelius Borck Schwabe Verlag

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© 2024 by the authors;editorial matters and compilation © 2024 SophieWitt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, Cornelius Borck, published by Schwabe Verlag Basel, Schwabe Verlagsgruppe AG, Basel, Schweiz

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Introduction: Embodiment &Critical Medical Humanities

Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck

Medical or health humanities is an umbrella term for avibrant international and interdisciplinary field of studies. It entangles various perspectives and practices from the humanities and the social scienceswith medicineand healthcare. Its starting point was the insight that illness and health, as both human experiences and socio-political concerns, transgress the narrow limits of their biomedical operationalization. Literary studies, philosophy, ethics, anthropology, history of medicine, social and cultural history, and the arts among other fields all address the experience of illness and health, the diversityofbodily and mentalconditions, the variety of medical and psychiatric practices, the needs and shortcomings of patient care, educational questions and possibilities, and the politics of normalizationand inclusion.

Within this broad understanding of the medical humanities, its aim and meaning differ widely depending on its concreteinstitutional context.InGermany where the idea for this project and the publication of this book originated medical humanities is often the label applied to training programs within medical faculties. In 2016, the journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt (German Medical Journal)reportedthat medical humanities have amuch richer tradition in Switzerland and other countries compared to Germany where just asingle endowed chair existed.1 New centers emerged and things have changed since then,2 but compared to other countries, theconcept of medical humanities in Germany perhaps still tends to be conceived more narrowly in its educative focus of enabling medical students “to look beyond the horizon of science-based medicine” in order to “ preserve sensitivity to human need and the help that is required.” In

1 Cf. “Wahlfach Medical Humanities verbindet Medizin, Kultur und Gesellschaft,” Deutsches Ärzteblatt,https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/71980/Wahlfach-Medical-Human ities-verbindet-Medizin-Kultur-und-Gesellschaft, Dec 13, 2016.

2 Susanne Michl (2020), “Wissen in Bewegung. Medical Humanities – Potenziale und Fallstricke eines umbrella term,” in: Nach Feierabend. Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 15:pp. 189–205. Cf. for an overview of Medical Humanities in Switzerland Marc Keller, “Medizinische Geisteswissenschaften, Sciences humaines en médecine, Scienze umane mediche:Medical Humanities in Switzerland,” The Polyphony. Conversations across the medical humanities, https://thepolyphony.org/2023/10/17/medhums-in-switzerland/, 17 October 2023.

8 Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser,Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck

this vision,the humanities come into play because “good films and literature […]build abridge to the interior of the human being.”3

Conceived in this way, themedical humanities are relegated to merely providing aservice, and this has epistemological consequences. Oneofthese is the resulting epistemic statusofhumanistic knowledge, which is subordinated to biomedicine’sobjectifying gaze;another is the repetition and continuation of the dichotomybetween subjective experience and objective biomedical knowledge.4 Last but not least, this dichotomyinappropriately narrowsthe multidimensional perspectivethat is necessary if bodies are to be acknowledgedintheir myriad biological, social, and cultural conditions.

Indeed, this book takes its starting point from its authors’ and editors’ discomforts with these narrowing effects. It sees itself as part of an enterprise in cultural studies and artistic research that aims to strengthen and expand the medical humanities in research and teaching, both within medical facultiesand beyond.5 Hence we conceive of medical humanities as atruly interdisciplinary field in which the traditional oppositions of object and subject of biomedicine’ s explainable physical body and the humanities’ hermeneutic dimensions might be critically challenged, and even perhaps overcome: How can we consider “the body” and “bodies” in all their individuality and plurality?How can the valueof individualexperiences, of affects and sensual structures, of embodiment in medical contextsbetaken into account?How can the hidden strategies of normalization be addressedand rewritten with the aim of achieving amorejust perspective?Theseare someofthe central questions and concerns that led us to undertakethis book project. Contrary to what the title “Embodiment &Critical Medical Humanities” might suggest, there is no single term or homogeneous conceptual framework to guide us. Therefore this book necessarily explores “Multiple Practices and Shifting Concepts.”

To speak of critical medical humanities is first of all to refer to discourses in the English-speaking world, as the well-known Edinburgh Companion demon-

3 “Wahlfach Medical Humanities verbindet Medizin, Kultur und Gesellschaft,” Deutsches Ärzteblatt,https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/71980/Wahlfach-Medical-Humanities-verbin det-Medizin-Kultur-und-Gesellschaft, Dec 13, 2016.

4 Cf. Kristeva Julia, Moro Marie Rose, Ødemark John and Engebretsen Eivind (2018), “Cultural crossings of care:Anappeal to the medical humanities,” Medical Humanities 44:pp. 55–58.

5 See, for example, two newer German institutions:IMHAR Institute for Medical &Health Humanities and Artistic Research at HKS Ottersberg:https://www.imhar.net/; and the new specialization on interdisciplinary health studies as part of the BA studies program in Liberal Arts &Sciences at the University of Hamburg:https://www.philosophie.uni-hamburg.de/liberalarts/ studium.html.

strates.6 In the UK, the medical humanities are traditionally located in humanities or social sciences faculties and thus address awide fieldofdiverse knowledge and distinct actors, often in “critical” distance to strictly biomedical agendas. If we understand the experience of the body or of illness not as irreducibly subjective, but as embodied in aculturally, historically, and socially situated reality,7 then this opens up arange of polyphonic critical perspectives. William Viney, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods had issues such as these in mind when they sought to sharpen theprofile of the medical humanities about ten years ago, and thus to readjust therelationshipbetween the medical humanities and biomedicine. In their manifesto for acritical turn and interdisciplinary entanglement in the medical humanities, they pleaded for “greater attention not simply to the context and experience of health and illness, but to their constitution at multiple levels,” as well as for a “closer engagementwith critical theory, queer and disability studies, activist politics and other allied fields.”8 Not least, their call fell on the fertile ground of the so-called “cultural turn” in thehumanities, and could also build on earlier work in medical anthropology, Science and Technology, gender studies, among others, on the lived body.9

In this book, our focus on embodiment on therich, diverse territory of discursive bodily practices takes up this critical impetus and touches on ontological, epistemological, and institutional aspects. Precisely because biomedicine focuses so much on the body, our contributions also start here, rather than concentrating on an alleged other.They focus on embodiment and the bodily conditions of experience and offer adescriptive, diverse, rich arena of discursivebodily practices. (Critical)medical humanities can thus be traced as an enterprise that reaps the benefits of the disciplinary rigor applied in the humanities and the social sciencesconcerning ontological, epistemological, and institutional issues; and also as an effort to bringhidden practices to the fore, to articulate silent speech, and to explore the blind spots that screen certain habits.

In this sense, the medical humanities interconnect with other humanistic fields that attempt to traverse the spheres of nature and culture and these constitute the implicit or explicit theoretical backgroundfor this book. These topics obviously resonate with gender and disabilitystudies, but also for example with phenomenological perspectives, which point to the ontologically irreducible

6 See Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods (eds.) (2016), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities,Edinburgh UP.

7 See, for example, Rob Boddice and Mark Smith (2020), Emotion, Sense, Experience,Cambridge UP.

8 William Viney, Felicity Callard and Angela Woods (2015), “Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks,” Medical Humanities 41(1): pp. 2–7.

9 See, for example, Annemarie Mol (2003), The Body Multiple:Ontology in Medical Practice,Duke UP;Havi Carel (2016), Phenomenology of Illness,Oxford UP.

“ambiguity of the body” based on thefact that the body, the soul, and theworld are in areciprocal, interactive relationship; thus the body can be understood as the “medium” through which one accesses the world.10 This also resonates with claims fromthe field of new materialism, which situates material bodies in their cultural and societalenvironments.AsKaren Barad states, the body is something more than an inert, passive object on which ideology inscribes meaning;itisan agential reality with its own causal role in making meaning.11 Bodily realities inhere experiences that are founded on the ambiguity of the body’sentanglement between the embodied self and its particular worldly situation. The body itself is situated in-between the subjective and the objective, the self and the world;it is a “hinge” between different methodological and thematic approaches. The theoretical foundation of this book also includes body history (Körpergeschichte), afield in German-speakingcountries which explores changing conceptualizations of the nature of the body.12 This history is located between thefields of discourse history, history of knowledge, and media theory, and it explicitly aims to acknowledge the fact that (medical)bodies remain deeply connected to materialism and to the sciences.13 It asks how we can remain sensitive to different cultures of knowledge; to the constraints of our always-partial perspectives, to borrow aterm from Donna Haraway;14 and to the politicaland ethical implications that arise from these.

From this perspective different questions and new interdisciplinary opportunities in the field of teaching arise, both within and beyond medical faculties: Which of the understandings that biomedicine takes for granted should be scrutinized because they unleash unexpected consequences and often manifest in unjustified strategies of normalization?Inwhat areas does medicine exert power beyond its expertise, and to which socio-political effects?What role can artistic forms and practices play in research and teaching?Critical medical humanities constitute an efforttoquestion medicineonanequal footing, not by ignoring its enormouspotential,but by acknowledgingmedicine’smultiple efficaciesand coming to terms with them in beneficial ways, on the individual as well as the collective level.

10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012), Phenomenology of Perception,transl. by Donald Landes, Routledge.

11 See Karen Barad (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway:Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning,Duke UP.

12 Cf. Philipp Sarasin (1999), “Mapping the Body:Körpergeschichte zwischen Konstruktivismus, Politik und ‘Erfahrung’ , ” Historische Anthropologie 3: pp. 437–451;cf. Barbara Duden (1990), Body History – Körpergeschichte. Arepertory – ein Repertorium,Tandem.

13 Cf. Albrecht Koschorke (1999), Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts,Fink.

14 See Donna Haraway (1988), “Situated Knowledges:The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14(3): pp. 575–599.

10 Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser,Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck

Along with these critical and interdisciplinary impulses, medical humanities aim at deconstructing and leaving behinda bifurcated ontology namely, the assumption that nature consists of two separate realities:the objective reality of bodies as determined by the biomedical sciences and thesubjective reality of lived experience, thinking and feeling.Our book tries to take this challenge very seriously and aims to include both material reality of bodily experiences and scientific knowledge. While the medical humanities commonly acknowledge language, culture, and the experiential world as part of the clinical encounter, we also turn the question backaround:How can we bring the physical and material world into the humanities in ameaningful way?The ways in which we perceive ourselves and others as healthy or ill, and how we classify, evaluate, and act upon these concepts, is adeeply embodied practice. This “ we ” is interwoven in many ways with our environment and the ways in which it is possible for us to act in relation to it in short, we are embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended (commonly referred to as “4E”).15 How can our senses of hearing, speaking, or touching be traced senses that may be hidden, yet are so vividly experienced somehow?More generally, what are the bodily conditions that allow us to speak of a(homogeneous) “ we ”?Certainly thediscussions on neurotypicality and neurodiversity which have intensifiedsince the 2010s, and which play adecisive role throughout this book make clear that the idea of auniversal human perception or cognition must be critically re-evaluated.

Bringing these different approaches to the table, however, goes againstpremature hopes for the holistic integration of different perspectives in interdisciplinary research settings. Contrary to this expectation, critical medical humanities require us, in Angela Woods’ words: “not to seek resolutionorconsensus, not to pretend that the power hierarchies [ ]don’texist, but to try to find ways of working around them.”16 Following from this insight, artistic practice and research play acentral role in our conceptualization of this book. Sensory experiences go beyond the body as an abstractor “authentic” entity. Combining critical and artistic methods in this way leads to new research avenues, especially opportunities to develop inclusive forms of research in which diversity is addressedin ways that seek to avoid the traditional hierarchy of language over body.

These different perspectives cametogether in the institutional cooperation that marked the beginning of this book project:cooperation between the University of Zurich, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Ottersberg, and the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies (IMGWF) at theUniversity of Lubeck. As agroup, the four initiators of the project Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Cornelius Borck, and Christina Schües initially invited colleagues and

15 Joerg Fingerhut, Rebekka Hufendiek and Markus Wild (eds.) (2013), Philosophie der Verkörperung. Grundlagentexte zu einer aktuellen Debatte,Suhrkamp.

16 See Woods’ contribution to this book, p. 108.

12 Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser,Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck

experts working on these issuestoa workshop at the IMGWF in Lubeck. What was originally planned as an international conference at which participants would be present in person had to be redesigned due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that nobodycould travel. Form and content are often closely related, and that is also the case with this book. Narrativity and questions of writing and poetry are important topics throughout its pages, but the book itself also has a story that must be told if the reader is to understand its form and content.

When an in-person conference was still not possible even more than afull year after the onset of COVID, most of us were tremendouslytired of the online meeting formats we had been confined to in 2021. We had to recognize that we could not simply move three days of lectures and Q&A online. Instead, we designed an online format in which we asked our experts to guide us through their work in an informalmanner and to share their reflections in an intimate online setting, “in conversation with” the other participants. We cametogether with five eminent guests:Angela Woods from Durham’sInstitute for Medical Humanities, Erin Manning fromConcordia University in Montreal, Monica Greco from Goldsmiths at the University of London, Ana Gómez-Carrillo from McGill University in Montreal, and Siri Hustvedt from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. We invited them to engage in aseries of conversations about their completed, ongoing, and future interdisciplinary projects;about their still-unwritten booksto-come;about non-academic research designsand experimental research spaces;and about their embodied thinking and teaching practices.

We had the great pleasure of startingour conversations with Angela Woods, Professor of Medical Humanities in the Department of English Studies and then Deputy Director of the Durham Institute of Medical Humanities.Asmentioned above, she and her colleagues, William Viney and Felicity Callard, and later Anne Whitehead, established theterm critical medical humanities.17 On the same day we met with Erin Manning, who was in the middle both mentally and physically of her current project in Canada, and thus gained avery vivid impression of the workings of the SenseLab she founded, as well as her follow-up project, the 3EcologiesInstitute. Erin holds the University Research Chair in Relational Arts and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, and she convinced us of the importance of various kinds of practices and of acknowledging neurodiversity. We started our second day with Monica Greco, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University in London, talking about Monica’ s particular areaofinterest:the implicationsofconcepts in psychosomatic medicine for questions of ethicsand politics, subjectivities, social ontology, embodi-

17 William Viney, Felicity Callard and Angela Woods (2015), “Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks,” Medical Humanities 41(1): pp. 2–7; Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods (eds.) (2016), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities,Edinburgh UP.

ment, and agency. We continued our conversation with Ana Gómez-Carrillo, postdoctoral fellow in the DivisionofSocial and TransculturalPsychiatry at McGill University. We talked with Ana about the role and importance of an ecosocial perspective in psychiatry, and how this model is influenced by concepts from 4E cognition that is, cognition as enacted, embodied, embedded, and extended. Last but not least, we had an inspiring conversation with Siri Hustvedt, the eminent and well-known author of numerous works of fiction and essays, and alecturer in psychiatryatWeill Cornell Medical College in New York. Siri shared her fascinating long-term project on the placenta, which considers the placenta’splace literally between two people or bodies, and metaphorically between nature and culture. We talked about the scientific, political, and ethical importance of such in-between states, which open up awhole universe of critique.

After two days of individual conversations, on the third day we held an “Opening Up” panel as an invitation to reflect together on the broader questions that had emerged from our conversations. As we edited the transcribed version of this group panel, we identified in addition to the overarching question of the role critical medical humanities could or should play four significant strands which structure the discussion and consequentially the last chapter of this book: questions of 1) writing &narrativity, 2) embodiment &space, 3) art-based research &artistic practice, and 4) propositions, failures &openings.Thanks to the intellectual generosity of our conversation partners, this was an extremely inspiring and illuminating event, and it was immediately clear to us that we wanted to share these recorded conversations in atextualformat.

Exploring thecultural side of medicine and health opens up stimulating new fields of research beyond the institutional distribution of labor and disciplinary specializations. Such an approach shapes research as collaboration, as polyphony, as aminorgesture, to take up Erin Manning’sformulation. Our shared aim was and still is to leave the comfortzones of the establishedorders of knowledge according to which our universities are designed, with their faculties of science on the one hand, and their faculties of the arts and humanities on the other. Both the series of recorded conversations and this book itself are explicitly intended to operate far fromclassic academic formats. In what follows, we take the plunge and allow for wild, outrageous modesofthinking and practice.

What started as akind of pandemic-induced experiment ended up being the best format we could have found.Wehad no choice but to experiment but then, this is exactly what we think critical medical humanities needs:spaces of shared experimentation and exploration.Wehad amazing, lucid, thought-provoking, tremendously open, touching, and funny conversations, for which we are all extremely grateful.

In Conversation with Angela Woods

Sophie Witt: It is an honor and apleasure for me to open our first conversation. Iwill begin by introducingAngela Woods. From the beginning, it was clear that we very much wantedAngela to participate in this workshop. In fact, of all the guests and organizers, she is the only person whose professorship is explicitly identified as “medical humanities.” She teaches in the EnglishDepartment at Durham University and is now Director of Durham’sInstitute for Medical Humanities and co-director of the Hearing the Voice project. Her position in an English department is exciting for those of us in theGerman-speakingcontext, because normally in German-speaking countries aprofessor of medical humanities would be part of the department for medicine. Later, we will have the opportunity to look at these local entanglements and different local contexts, as well as the academic traditions in which the medical humanities come up, and also to raise questions about the separationofthe sciences and the humanities, both in our universities and in our history of thought. Since Angela Woods along with her colleagues William Viney, Felicity Callard, and later Anne Whitehead turned the medical humanities into critical medical humanities why don’twe start our conversation with this notion of the “critical”?Angela, maybe you could tell us something about the startingpoint, or primacy,that convincedyou and your colleagues it was necessary to think of the medical humanities differently namely critically.

Angela Woods: Ithink that is an important question to keep asking. As the 2015 article perhaps intimated, there are so many different iterations of what one can mean by “critical,” and sometimes different versions of those will come into focus at different times. For me, there was areally galvanizing momentwhen Icame from Australia that’swhere Idid my doctoral work on schizophreniaand representations of schizophrenia, completely independently of any interaction with clinical thinking, with people with lived experience, with practicing psychiatrists; it was purely akind of literary–cultural studies endeavor. At the end of that project, Istartedtorealize that there was this field of medical humanities, and for that reason to cut avery long story short Irelocated to theUKin2009, and I managed to do so with some very uncanny timing:atthe momentwhen the King’sCentre for the Humanities and Health at King’sCollege London was launched, and at the same time as Durham University was advertising this posi-

tion in philosophy and medical humanities. This field seemed to speak to adesire Ihad in my worktomove beyond strictly textual framesofreferenceand to start engaging experience, essentially. At the King’sCentre launch event, Howard Brody, who was then the doyen of the field, gave atalk outlining theroles he saw for the humanities in relationshiptomedicine.1 The third plank of his argument centered on the role of the supportive friend, and it was avision of the humanities as very much servile is too harsh, as there was very much apositive intent in the idea of supportive, but it was very clearly hierarchical, clearly areinforcing endeavor that would restore to medicine its lost humanity, the sense of alack in empathic practice or akind of corrective to strictly biomedical concerns. Listening to this talk thenight before Iwent to Durham for the job interview just made me really, really cross and really frustrated to think that all the traditions of scholarship Ihad grown up in and all the critical potential Icould see didn’t really seem to have an articulated place within this field, which Ihad literally moved across the world to join. Iwas always personally critical of what we have gone on to describe as thefirst wave of medical humanities, which is deeply embedded in medical education and located, as you have said, in medical schools, which sees itself in that provisionofsomething, either restorative or corrective. These frustrations Ihad were picked up on, amplified and further complicated by the connections and ongoing networks that emerged through what was then the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham and particularly through coming to know Felicity Callard and her work, and working with WillViney and his work. For example, one of the first workshops Iattended at Durham was arevelation to me:that fat studies existed as afield, in terms of this configuration of fundamentally challengingfat as apathology or fat as aproblem, and very much bringing activism into the heart of scholarship and scholarly aims and endeavors. Ithink there was avery strong sense of the critical as opening out certainly critical theory, but also acriticality that emergesfrom activism, that is actually instrumentally calculated, that is seeking change and is seeking to have, for want of aless egregiousterm, areal-world impact. Again,there is critical in the sense of an intensifiedform of reflexivity, holding acritical suspense or tension around one ’ s own assumptions. Critical in that iteration suggestsanongoing dynamism, potentially, or an ongoing sense of energy or movement, or that the stakes are not defined and necessarily figured in acontinuous way in relation to each other but are shifting and need to be thefocus of attention and reflection. Not to take one ’ s eye off the ball, in that sense. But critical also in terms of wantingsome of that antagonism, wanting some of that sense of the greattraditions in awhole lot of cognate areas such as disability studies most obviously, queer theory, and feminism really strong currents that have profoundly shaped thinking, particularly

1 Howard Brody (2011), “Defining the Medical Humanities:Three Conceptions and Three Narratives” [Book Review], Journal of Medical Humanities 32(1): pp. 1–7.

over the last century, and also activism over thelast century, that again are seeking to shift or reorient or problematize the knowledges that are seen as sacrosanct in certain biomedical contexts. My sense of the “critical” in critical medical humanities is that it’sanimperfect term precisely in its multiple meanings to multiple audiences and on multiple occasions, but Ithink when we were talking about it and designing the 2013 workshop that then led to the special issue which the article you mentioned seeks to introduce,italso felt like the best version of what we could come up with, without it being aparticularly original thing to say.

Cornelius Borck: Iwould like to focus alittle more closely on the notion of critique. Iexplicitlyengaged with critique when Ijoined the Critical Neuroscience Group, which also contributed to the same special issue. There is also apersonal backgroundtothis:when Ifinished my training in medicine and philosophy, I had the opportunity to do aPhD in neurophysiology, in London. So Idid “ proper neuroscience,” so to speak, and with that backgrounditwas an obvious decision to continue working on neuroscience when switching back to the history and philosophy of science. When Ipublished the book on the cultural history of electroencephalography, it coincidedwith themassivepublicinterest around neuroimaging, so Iwas immediately confronted with invitations to comment on questions like, “What’sgoing on with functional imaging?” and “Can you believe what’sgoing on there?” So there was afelt sense of urgency to evaluatewhat was going on and also to respond to the public need to debate the overblown, alleged “triumphs” of these scientific breakthroughs. As someone who had just studied the history of neuroscience, Iwas well aware that this kind of triumphalism runs through society with every new technological visualization tool;I could easily align recent glamorouspublications with similar news magazine articles from the 1930s or 1950s, or whenever just name your “revolution.” This critique wasn ’t so much spawnedinrelation or close connection to political movements, but it corresponded with my own historical epistemological work, questioning the epistemological foundations of this line of research:What conditions are necessary to make these research results possible? How many circumstances have to be geared into precisely these laboratory conditionstoget to these results?I was blending Kantian epistemological critique with Foucauldian socio-political grounding.With this backgroundI came to the Critical NeuroscienceGroup and met Martin Hartmann and Jan Slaby,2 for example, who were very much rooted in the Frankfurt School notion of critique. Ijust wanted to invite you,with this very long introduction of my own intellectual trajectory, to reflect alittle further on how you would relate this more overtly politicalagenda of critique to another

2 See Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby (eds.) (2012), Critical Neuroscience:A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience,Blackwell.

agenda, which Ithink is also valid in critical medical humanities:questioning the soundness, the reliability, of medical scientific knowledge itself.

Angela Woods: One of the things that springs to mind is perhaps directly in response to your discussion of the neurosciences. Ithink it’sfrom 2010, the work of Felicity Callard and Constantina Papoulias; the article is called “Biology’ s Gift.”3 Iremember that, for me, was areal turning point in picking up on the whole flood of interest from the humanities, in particular the work of Antonio Damasio and this idea that there was somehow going to be, if not arapprochement between the humanities and the neurosciences, then akindofdaring reimagination of what humanities scholarship could do with neuroscientific knowledge, with these understandings of the brain, and with someofthe kinds of beliefs and convictions in the literature being borne out of neuroscientific evidence. One of the things Iremember vividly from that article was the attention they paid to drawing out the additional commitments in taking some of these ideas around mirror neurons and empathy, for example, and runningwith them as it were in ahumanities context; the idea that the widercommitments of aneuroscientific project were being downplayed, or the dependency on certain evolutionarytheories that might not sit with people’sprogressive politics was being downplayed. Before the term “critical medical humanities” existed, Ithink, Felicity definesher workinvarious different ways rightly so, in various different contexts and I’mnot sure if she would fit this paper to that agenda. But it seems to me that in that move, in being able to attend to the wider context intellectual,material, and cultural in which ideas are crossing disciplinary boundaries,particularly en masse when these things become popular or become movements,thatthere is acritical perspective, in that sense of very focused attentiveness that is deeply historical, that is also deeply literate in terms of being able (asyou did in your work, Cornelius)tolook beyond the popularization of medical or scientific concepts into theunderpinning research there.

Christina Schües: Iwould like to twist this question about the critical in yet another turn, from the perspective of aparticular philosophical horizon. Idid my dissertation on classical Husserlianphenomenology on the theme of changes of perception, and since then Ihave tried to link phenomenology with politicaland feminist theory. So some of my publications are dedicated to epistemic injustice, notions of vulnerability, and the phenomenon of negative social philosophy. I was wondering about the different dimensions of yourterm “critique.” It seems to me that with aMarxian-Adorno approach,when you critique, you remain immanent to the system;one cannot really leave the system. In that case, Iwould

3 C. Papoulias and F. Callard (2010), “Biology’sGift:Interrogating the Turn to Affect,” Body &Society 16(1): pp. 29–56.

ask:Isitpossible for you to find astandpointexternal to the epistemic system that we might be in and might almost be imprisoned by?Ifwethen turn to Judith Butler, it seems we can see Butler in two senses. One is more FoucauldianButler, where she asks about the limits of our mode of conditions, because we look at the world around the unspeakable what has been excluded and how can we include the unspeakable?Does theunspeakable have aparticular space?I would think this is arather epistemological question. The other Butler is more closely linked with Levinas, so this is about the dimension of social ontology. There we ask about vulnerabilityand howdifferently vulnerability can be broken down. Who is actually vulnerable?Wecan describe how some lives are more vulnerable than other lives, and it seems to me this is avery different type of ontologicalcritique. Then Icome to thefinal dimension, which seems to me rather asocial-institutionalone, where we can place knowledge in the particular institution, in particular social spaces. Hence one would wonder whether anew sense of critique might also be institutional critique, and whether this notion of revolution you came up with in the already mentioned editorial of the “Critical medical humanities:embracing entanglement, taking risks” is then actually an institutional one or what sort of revolution is it?Because arevolution is actually aresistancetothe state, and the state doesn’twant this to occur. In this sense, I would like to ask you:Inwhich dimension do you situate your critique?Epistemic, social, ontological, or institutional?Where do you see yourself in your approach, and in what sense are we actually really talking about arevolution?

Angela Woods: That is an excellent and very complex question. Ithink one of the challengesinanswering that question is around the diversity of the field and the commitment to not wantingtobeprescriptive and Irealize that is frustrating and somewhat evasive, not to nail one ’scolors to the mast and to shy away from programmatic statements about what good scholarship in this field might look like, or what an agenda or arobustepistemic standpoint should be. I’malso mindful of the fact that the medical humanities or critical medical humanities is not the only set of voices in the room thinking about health and illness from the perspectives of the humanities and the social sciences. Thereare deep conversations happening in medical sociology and in sociologies of the body, and more broadly in medical anthropology, so it’ sa question of what mightgive critical medical humanities adistinctiveness within that space. In terms of thinking about to take it very narrowly why Iwould describeour project on hearing voices4 as acritical medical humanities project, for example, Ithink it’sbeen a struggle, but with respecttothe sense of finding an epistemic standpointthat is not necessarily, or doesn’tunderstand itself in terms of being entirely dictated by psychiatryorclinical practice, the project has moved in two directions. One is

4 For further information on the Hearing the Voice project, see:https://hearingthevoice.org.

very much going back to people’sexperience, to lived experience, and Ithink that connects themedical humanities to loads of research happening in different places that is participatory, that is trying to wrestle with and work around precisely these institutional barriers concerning who gets to produce knowledge and where knowledge has come from. So for us and for the project, the imperative to constantlygoand talk to people about their experiences, to listen to experience in ways that try to attend to some of what phenomenologists call bracketing the endless suspensionofone’ sown assumptions, to the extent that is possible trying to find and make space for standpoints that aren ’tnecessarily primarilytheorized, or intellectual, or coming from the institution, that has been one way we have been able to generate more intellectualknowledge about this set of experiences. This also connects with the sense of the very complex pragmatic, ethical, and effective degrees to which these conversations becomepossible, or listening becomes possible, with people in very vulnerablesituations, who have been users of mental health services for years, and other voice-hearers we have worked with who are members of the spiritualist church, who have very different relationships to their experience and who are perhaps vulnerable in slightly different ways. In addition, attentiveness to experience leads into multiple forms of collaboration that are endlessly pushing back and testingusinterms of the disciplines and the disciplinary institutionally-embedded knowledge we are bringing to the table this sense that within our project, it’sthe people working in very different historical periods and with very different thought worlds who have also provided a grounding and avantage point from which to try to imagine otherwise. One of the project publications that has just come out is an edited collection called Voices and Visions, 5 which is about voice-hearing (although it is very difficult to separate out something like hearing voices in the medieval and early modern period, because it’ssooften amultisensory experience,orit’sfused with visions). But one of the fantastic things about that volume is the exploration of experience through these different textual means by which the past can be accessed, which are taking place particularly in early medieval hagiographic accounts datingback to the 12th century;thought worlds where entirely different, different sensory experienceswere possible, and entirely different views of the boundaries of mind and body and the presence of the supernatural were possible. To think with and alongsidethese kinds of differences is again away of engendering akind of critical space that is part of how, in the context of our project, people have been kept on their toes, as it were, and able to do things that would not be critical anotcritical way of working. For us in this project, the answer to that question would have been to take at face value either the assumptions about hearing voices as

5 H. Powell and C. Saunders (eds.) (2021), Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.