The next Research Cafe will be held on 23rd February in MB1007 (Main Building) from 1.00pm to 2.00pm.

If you would like to attend, please register with Markos Klonizakis mklonizakis@lincoln.ac.uk.

Research Café’s aim to help support staff and students involved in health and social care research.  They provide an informal networking opportunity to discuss ongoing research and methods.  Students/staff have an opportunity to present their current research and provide discussion and advice on research methods.

Coffee/Tea will be provided

The second Community & Health Research Café was held on 19th January in Bridge House, at which Coral Sirdifield presented her PhD research study “Offender Health, What role for the Probation Service”.   

Coral Sirdifield who presented her work at the Research Cafe

Corals presentation can be found here:  Research Cafe Presentation

Fiona Togher, Research Assistant in the School of Health & Social Care attended the Cafe and commented:   “Similarly to the first Café the session provided an excellent opportunity for the audience to learn about a research topic that may be new to them and to secure an increased understanding of aspects of research methodology.

Coral firstly talked about why she had chosen her specific area of study and the research questions that had been generated before moving on to focusing on the methods that had been selected and how the data had been collected.

The audience were not shy in asking questions and offering comments and suggestions which added to the positive atmosphere of the session. As a Master of Clinical Research student myself, I found the presentation fascinating and it certainly provided me with some useful tips for when I come to conduct my own thesis!

Overall the café was really enjoyable and I’m looking forward to the next one already…”

If you would like to attend the next research café, the purpose of which is to provide an opportunity for discussion about research in an informal relaxed friendly environment, please email Markos Klonizakis, mklonizakis@lincoln.ac.uk.   The next Research Café will be held on Wednesday 23rd February in the Main Building, MB1007.

This presentation looked at heart transplantation as an exemplary process that potentially disturbs all aspects of modernist bioethics as well as raising concerns about prostheses and human hybridity in general (Shildrick, 2010). .

The paper offered an insight into the way human heart recipients in a North American context are likely to experience psychic disruption to their sense of self as a result of their bodily transformation. Drawing on a mixed method approach of interview and visual methods (video), recipients were able to talk about their feelings about receiving a donor”s heart as well as offer more phenomenological understandings through their body language and affect. The empirical aspects offered often indicated that the emotional descriptions of their identity did not correspond with their body language and emotionality surrounding their heart transplants, which points to the existing bioethical implications of heart transplantation, in this instance, and perhaps other organ transplantation more generally. Margrit Shildrick (2010) argues that the implications have profound ethical implications on 2 levels. From a conventional perspective, results show a clear need to revamp clinic practice to enable recipients to give more open accounts of their actual bodily experiences following transplantation, and indeed to question the limits of what is seen as unproblematically therapeutic. On this level, it seems that the pressure to conform to the ‘grateful for life’ discourse, whilst grappling with, amongst other things, guilt that somebody died, which enabled them to live, obligations that come with receiving a ‘gift,’ the encouragement by clinicians to write letters of gratitude to donor’s families alongside visceral changes in their embodied self were more than the authorized narrative. The authorized  narrative situates the body as a Cartesian machine that is being restored to an originary self. However, the research confirmed that recipients are highly invested in speculating on the identity of donors precisely because they feel that some donor characteristics will carry over, and that almost 80% display distress, either in relation to the donor, to their own identities, or both (Shildrick, 2010). The authorised narrative insists that the replacement of a ‘failed’ organ restores the originary self, but the problem is that the post–transplant body is not only prostheticised, but becomes irreducibly hybrid for life: the originary self is irrecoverable (Shildrick, 2010). Throughout the seminar, Susan Stryker’s famous quotation in relation to transgender surgery kept springing to mind:

“As we rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are something more […] than the creatures our makers intended us to be. Though medical techniques for sex reassignment are capable of crafting bodies that satisfy the visual and morphological criteria that generate naturalness as their effect […] Transsexual embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster, places its subject in an unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to a Nature in which it must necessarily exist” (Stryker, 2006: 248).

On the second level, Shildrick (2010) asks could a better understanding of what it means to incorporate an organic prosthesis mobilise a different approach to a range of biomedical interventions? This would require a move away from a number of ethical paradigms that insist on the Cartesian mind/body split and rethinking Utilitarianism. Both prostheses and transplants show us a destabilisation of the socio-political, legal and ethical categorisation of bodies according to normative epistemologies that create markers such as gender, sex and race (Shildrick, 2010). As the body makes novel connections and participates in assemblages of the organic and inorganic, it demands a reimagination of the ideologies of human identity, and a reconfiguration of bioethics (Shildrick, 2010).

References:

Shildrick, M. (2010). Hybrid bodies and prostheses: the bioethics of identity. Paper presented at the Intersectionality: Theory and Practice for Quality Improvement in Healthcare, School of Health and Social Care Seminar Series 2010-11, University of Lincoln.

Stryker, S. (2006). My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. In S. Stryker & S. Whittle (Eds.), The Transgender Studies Reader (pp. 244-256). New York: Routledge.

 Professor Janneke Vans Mens-Verhulst from the University of Utrecht kicked-off the 2010-11 seminar series on Wednesday 20th October. Her seminar entitled: “Improving Health and Social Care with an Intersectional Approach to Diversity” introduced the concept of ‘intersectionality’ as representative of the complex, varied, and variable effects which proceed when multiple axes of differentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically and geographically specific contexts. The concept emphasizes that what we call ‘identities’ – black, gay, mother, Muslim and so on – are not objects but social processes constituted in and through power relations. The concept also emphasizes that different dimensions of social life cannot be separated out into discrete and pure strands.

Multiplicity, representing consciousness as a “site of multiple voicings” does not necessarily originate with the subject but through discourses that are intersubjectively and structurally produced. According to Van Mens-Verhulst these multiplicities are part of everybodies existence. Therefore, in order to be more patient centered and improve quality in health and social care environments we must take heed to the ‘multiplicity’ and ‘hybridity’ of patients social positions as well as to their similarities. Thus, multiple axes need to be observed on order to instruct quality improvement projects within our respective healthcare systems. Lincoln-presentation -handout Prof Van Mens Verhulst

If you want to learn more about Intersectionality Theory and feminist ethics in health and social care join us at the next seminar where Professor Magrit Shildrick from Queen’s University Belfast and author of “Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics” (1997), “Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self” (2002) and “Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality” (2009) will speak about heart transplants in her talk entitled: “Hybrid bodies and prostheses: the bioethics of identity.”