The Lab and the Clinic between STS and Medical Humanities

Surely one of the greatest joys of research is having the opportunity to collaborate with friends. Over the past year, I have been lucky enough to get to work with the lovely Hannah Star Rogers to think about the space of the laboratory - and in particular how STS and the medical humanities approach this (and other spaces of knowledge) as subjects of study. This question is one which feels particularly pressing in a moment where more and more humanities scholars are organising themselves into ‘labs’ and ‘platforms’ - strategically deploying the language of science in a fraught funding landscape.

The result of Hannah and I’s thinking has now been published in the medical humanities blog the Polyphony, which you can read here: Between the Lab and the Clinic: Perspectives from Medical Humanities and Science and Technology Studies (STS) – the polyphony

And something which was really important to us was making sure that our conversation was one that also was reflected in STS scholarly circles. So with that in mind, we were so thrilled that Backchannels (the blog of 4S) allowed us to share the polyphony piece with a new introduction from an STS perspective. You can find the Backchannels version of the blog here: Between the Lab and the Clinic: Perspectives from Medical Humanities and Science and Technology Studies (STS)

And of course with thanks to the amazing artist Kirsten Stolle for allowing us to use her work to illustrate the pieces!