Research
My research is curiousity-driven and my approach to the philosophical tradition is pragmatic. I draw mainly on 20th-century scholars from historical epistemology, phenomenology, psychoanalytical theory, analytical philosophy of science and epistemology, science and technology studies, and philosophy of science in practice.
My research follows different threads, but converges on exploring messy moments of enquiry and ways that we engage with the world to learn more about it.
Below you find descriptions of three broader strands in my research.
'Ah’, sighs the traditional subject, ‘if only I could extract myself from this narrow-minded body and roam through the cosmos, unfettered by any instrument, I would see the world as it is, without words, without models, without controversies, silent and contemplative’; ‘Really?’ replies the articulated body with some benign surprise, ‘why do you wish to be dead? For myself, I want to be alive and thus I want more words, more controversies, more artificial settings, more instruments, so as to become sensitive to even more differences. My kingdom for a more embodied body!’. (B. Latour, How we talk about the body, 2004)
Ethnographic Philosophy
My philosophical work focuses on making sense of the world around us in all its messy glory, as experienced and lived by medical practitioners, scientists, patients, and people in general. To speak meaningfully of this world – even in abstraction – requires empirical engagement with it. To get this, I take inspiration from Bruno Latour for a 'more embodied philosophy', and draw on anthropological methods such as ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews in my research practice.
While recent years have seen a rise in 'naturalised' and interdisciplinary philosophy – with much work coming out at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and health sciences – the use of ethnography in philosophy is still quite untheorised; many philosophers draw on conversations and observations from their respective 'sites' of research, or they import knowledge of these sites from anthropology, but very few reflect methodologically on the quality and role of this material in philosophical enquiry. One of my research interests is thus to develop and articulate a more robust and reflective methodology for ethnographic philosophy, that is, the use of ethnographic methods for philosophical enquiry.
For a brief remark on my motivations for engaging in ethnography, you may find the video conversation with Adham El-Shazly in this link enlightening. For some thoughts on the methodology, see this talk on 'Ethnographic philosophy – articulating embodied ideas' from the International postdoc forum for philosophy of science.
Encounters with the Unruly
Medical practice is fraught with unruly moments – fear, disgust, pain, and bodily fluids are part of the package. Professional uncertainty or error can mean life or death for the patient, miscommunications can have similarly dire consequences, and different frameworks of reference, whether of profession, culture, or age, between doctor and patient rapidly turn into obstacles that hinder the alleviation of suffering which both parties desire.
Understandably, this has lead doctors, engineers, psychologists, educators, philosophers, and others to explore ways of overcoming the unruly elements in medicine: how to control the fluids, ameliorate the fears, numb the pain, talk plainly, yet compassionately about death, and so on. However, finding ways of overcoming the unruly risks becoming a strategy of escape or repression that does not allow proper understanding of the unruly moments that will inevitably occur. In this aspect of my work, I stick with the unpleasant moments – with the abject, the aversive, the disgusting, or the haunting experiences from medical practice, and I explore how these forms of encounter affect clinical enquiry and clinical practice more broadly.
Diagnosing Messy Bodies
My newest research interest explores the role of diagnostic categories, classification, and taxonomy in clinical enquiry.
In my early fieldwork, it appeared that patient bodies do not always fit neatly into categories – but more importantly, it appeared that the clinicians I was following did not worry too much about this. 'It is just a box that we made up, and then a lot of things fit into it', a surgeon told me one day. As someone embedded in the extensive philosophical discussions about the adequacy and accuracy of different ways of carving up disease categories, this comment baffled me. I had been under the impression that diagnostic categories were meant to capture the world; the nonchalant smile on the surgeon's face implied otherwise. The category under discussion seemed to have done the job even as he was fully aware of its constructive and imperfect nature.
My current work in this area focuses on orthopaedic surgery and in particular on shoulder surgery. To understand how medical classification works, I explore various questions related to the classification practices in this branch of medicine. Among those are questions about the Neer Classification system: What is the classificatory diagram meant to represent? What role does it play in clinical enquiry and medical reasoning? And what does this tell us about our conception of injury and disease? For this project I collaborate with the renowned Danish surgeon, Stig Brorson.
See a recording of some of the ideas in the project here: Representing Broken Bones (Sowerby Philosophy and Medicine Lecture Series, King's College London).