Research Projects
Designing Public Installations
Making Technical and Moral Codes of Medical Care and Technologies Public Through Modelling In and With Public
In the fall of 2021, we mounted a public installation -- Moral Horizons of Pain at Canmore artsPlace. Audience members traveled through several participatory spaces where they interacted with our team (as performer-facilitators) to consider two views of medical care. The first view was technical, in which peoples’ bodies and experiences of pain are measured and categorized. The second view was moral and embodied, in which peoples’ stories, emotions and expressions of pain are centered. This interactive participatory theatrical installation immerses the audience in the dramatically different nature of both perspectives.
In November 2022, we gave an invited talk describing the the "Moral Horizons of Pain" event, for the University of Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture & Society. The complete talk can be viewed here:
Perspectives, Politics and Representations of Moral Horizons
Doctoral Candidate (Learning Sciences) Santanu Dutta is interested in the intersection of moral and political dimensions of computational and cinematic representations and their implications and use in public education. His key contribution to this project includes developing cinematic animations of moral horizons. As he puts it, "animation equips us technically to the free temporal and spatial movement. It is of course a temporal succession of images, but within the images, embedded are different configurations of objects and bodies at different instances of time.” Santanu served as director and animator of a short film for the International Merleau-Ponty Circle video series celebrating the 75th anniversary of Phenomenology of Perception. Permanently available on vimeo. Drawing on our interviews for the Moral Horizons project, the film uses animations to explore discipline, pain, trauma, and touch in the clinic.
Critical Review: Knowledge, Technology, Bodies, and Power in the Clinical Encounter
Project team members are examining whether and how the impact of technologies the bodies of clinicians and patients and the clinical encounter are considered in the clinical literature on pain. We hypothesize that sensing bodies -- both patients' and clinicians' bodies -- are rarely considered in relation to care or treatment as an interactive, shared experience. As project team lead Martina Kelly has shown in previous work, bodies of doctors are typically absent in medical education and research.
Interviews
We are carrying out in-depth interviews with clinicians in several specialties about their experience with how technology affects when and how they use their bodies and senses in interaction with patients.
Technologies of Knowing Pain
In her master's thesis research, Erin Knox will examine how the measurement of pain acts to reconfigure the knowledge and sensation of pain in the clinical encounter.
Critical Ethnography of Modelling Pain
In her doctoral research in the Learning Sciences, Megha Sanyal is interested in orienting technological literacies toward Southern and decolonial imaginaries. She is interested in studying the nature of collaborative research experiences of our team using critical ethnographic approaches, as well as how we can center pedagogies of pain in technoscience education.