“This isn’t therapy, what we’ve done. We’ve erased things.” — Heidi Bergman, Homecoming (TV version). Roanne Kantor and Anna Mukamal // This fall I had the pleasure of teaching a course on intersections between disability and technology. In putting together the syllabus, I quickly noticed that one of the most potent sites for…
Author: roannekantor
Synapsis in Paris: “A Hundred Times More Dangerous than Terrorism”
Rising eco-conciousness in India and some thoughts on comparison Roanne Kantor // In what follows, I want to first extend the few scattered thoughts I presented at the CHCI conference in Paris about the shift in eco-conscious rhetoric that I observed in various sites in North India when I returned there for the first time…
The Classic, or Institutionalization part II
Roanne Kantor // What happens when different kinds of institutions meet? When I asked that question this winter, the answer focused on the unevenness between various types of things that get theorized very abstractly as “institutions.” Can there be any use in exploring “institutionalization” and “de-institutionalization” in both medical and educational contexts? Within this larger…
Institutionalization
Roanne Kantor // Earlier this month, I handed in the grades for my course on narratives of disability from around the world. At the same time I was teaching a graduate class about the interdisciplinary endeavor and its dependence on metaphor. The way that the same words have slippery and differing meanings depending on disciplinary…
“Very Dramatic”: Healing, Teaching, and the Placebo Effect
Roanne Kantor // Once again, I am in the midst of teaching a medical humanities course to a group primarily composed of pre-med students. Even though it’s quite distant from my original training, I’ve taught this course more than any other since leaving graduate school. Whenever I work with this population, I think of my…
Translating Medicine: Interview with Harris Solomon, author of Metabolic Living
Roanne Kantor // Q: What does medicine mean to you? How does it relate to your projects (past or current), and the academic position you hold? A: For me, medicine is most meaningful on a several fronts right now, in light of my current ethnographic research in and around casualty (emergency) and trauma wards at…
Translating Medicine Part III: Interview with Colin Halverson
Roanne Kantor // What does translation mean to you? Can you talk about the way that it shapes your academic project? The process of ‘translation’ figures centrally in my dissertation, “Individualized: An Ethnography of Translation in Genomic Medicine.” This title plays on the metaphorical extension of ‘translation’ in medical jargon, referring to the application of…
Translating Medicine Part II: Sabrina Datoo
Roanne Kantor // RK: To start, what does “medicine” mean, in the context of your work? Can you say a bit about your scholarly project? SD: The words used for medicine in my sources are the Arabic words tibb, and hikmat. The second of these has a broader range of meaning, including ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’….
Translating Medicine Part I: Introduction
Roanne Kantor // We’re rounding out the first year at Synapsis. It makes me want to come full circle, to re-approach the very first questions I asked in this venue: about the nature of interdisciplinary research on health and medicine, and the shared language we develop to make that research possible. The thing about this “department…
Fellow Feeling: Empathy, Interdisciplinarity, and the Use of Medical Humanities
Roanne Kantor // I was recently giving a talk at my alma mater—a weird experience in and of itself. At the end, a senior colleague asked a rather dumbfounding question: “What do we even want from the literary? I’m so fed up with it, but I can’t seem to quit.” I ask you, dear reader,…