This article investigates how the turn to affect within the humanities and social sciences re-imagines the relationship between cultural theory and science. We focus on how the writings of two neuroscientists (Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) and one developmental psychologist (Daniel Stern) are used in order to ground certain claims about affect within cultural theory. We examine the motifs at play in cultural theories of affect, the models of (neuro)biology with which they work, and some fascinating missteps characterizing the taking up of scientific literature. While neuroscience frames the affective as part of a system of regulation that makes both self and social coherence possible, in cultural theory’s narratives, by contrast, affectivity becomes a placeholder for the inherent dynamism and mutability of matter. The article interrogates the consequences of cultural theory’s strange borrowings from neuroscience and developmental psychology in their institution of a model of subjectivity preoccupied with a lived present in excess of the hold of habit and embodied history.
Policy around patient and public involvement (PPI) in the production, design and delivery of health services, and research remains difficult to implement. Consequently, in the UK and elsewhere, recent years have seen a proliferation of toolkits, training, and guidelines for supporting good practice in PPI. However, such instruments rarely engage with the power asymmetries shaping the terrain of collaboration in research and healthcare provision. Toolkits and standards may tell us little about how different actors can be enabled to reflect on and negotiate such asymmetries, nor on how they may effectively challenge what count as legitimate forms of knowledge and expertise. To understand this, we need to turn our attention to the relational dynamic of collaboration itself. In this paper we present the development of the Exchange Network, an experimental learning space deliberately designed to foreground, and work on this relational dynamic in healthcare research and quality improvement. The Network brings together diverse actors (researchers, clinicians, patients, carers, and managers) for structured "events" which are not internal to particular research or improvement projects but subsist at a distance from these. Such events thus temporarily suspend the role allocation, structure, targets, and other pragmatic constraints of such projects. We discuss how Exchange Network participants make use of action learning techniques to reflect critically on such constraints; how they generate a "knowledge space" in which they can rehearse and test a capacity for dialogue: an encounter between potentially conflictual forms of knowledge. We suggest that Exchange Network events, by explicitly attending to the dynamics and tensions of collaboration, may enable participants to collectively challenge organizational norms and expectations and to seed capacities for learning, as well as generate new forms of mutuality and care.
Media, Culture and Communication at Middlesex University. She is currently working on conceptualizations of affect in the humanities and on religious attachments and globalization.
Aims During this presentation we will share learning from a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowship. We will present examples of artsbased public involvement activities, including a sculpture project with young people and a play about dementia. We aim to raise awareness of what public involvement can gain from the arts; stimulate discussion about the pros and cons of different approaches; and discuss how to encourage more creativity within public involvement. Why is it important and to whom? Public involvement has been criticised for a lack of diversity and inclusivity. By diversifying the involvement activities which we offer, we may attract a wider variety of people. Arts based activities also have the potential to facilitate discussion in an accessible, safe and fun way. This session may be of particular interest to people who are planning or facilitating public involvement activities (members of the public and researchers). What difference has, or could, this project make? Throughout the project, both researchers and members of the public have found arts activities stimulating and useful. However people have encountered some practical challenges when running these projects. Specifically, people do not feel they have the necessary skills to plan and facilitate arts activities. I will discuss how we might address that skills gap and invite the audience to suggest what support is needed. What will people take away from session? An understanding of what arts/health collaborations can offer public involvement Access to resources and contacts to support future projects Acknowledgments This work is funded by the Wellcome Trust
RÉGIS DEBRAY'S mediological work has so far failed to stir much Anglo-American enthusiasm. This failure is all the more remarkable given mediology's contiguity to currently flourishing fields of interdisciplinary research, namely the emergent cultural histories of technology, the work on material culture, and the re-orientation of numerous texts in the humanities and social sciences around the function of the new media in the production and circulation of knowledge. While Debray is an extraordinarily prolific writer, only a handful of his monographs have been translated in English to date, while his collaborative work and the journal Les Cahiers de Médiologie, which he has edited since 1996, remain virtually unknown in the United Kingdom. This is regrettable as Debray's work is instructive for current Anglo-American cultural studies insofar as it affirms that we cannot afford to study the history of technology without also studying the history of affect and sociality. At the same time, it demonstrates the difficulty of rendering an analytics of technoculture compatible with an analytics of the social imaginary or, in his words, of crossing the 'story of our tools' with that of 'our hopes and dreams' (p. 47).Transmitting Culture forms part of Debray's mediological project, a project officially launched with Cours de médiologie générale in 1991 but arguably informing Debray's thinking since his 1979 Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (published by New Left Books as Teachers, Writers, Celebrities in 1981). Rather than advancing new work, Transmitting Culture constitutes a further re-statement of principles, this time foregrounding the study of
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