Cornelius Borck (University of Lübeck) Nicole C. Nelson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Fiona Kenney (McGill, Architecture) Cynthia Lazzaroni (McGill, Anthropology)
McGill University, Department of Social Studies of Medicine
8:30-9:15 Coffee, get together
9:15-9:30 Welcome
9:30-10:00 George Weisz (McGill University)
How it Started. About the History of SSoM
10:00-11:00 Cornelius Borck (University of Lübeck, Germany): Social Studies or Philosophy and Language of Medicine? Reflections Twenty Years On
Don Bates’s vision for the Department combined the history of medicine with sociology and anthropology. The CRC program provided an opportunity, at the turn of the millennium—in the wake of the “Science Wars” and coinciding with the shift toward evidence-based medicine—to add philosophy and language of medicine. What role can health humanities play in light biomedicine’s impact on life and living?
Cornelius Borck is a historian of science and a philosopher of medicine. Before joining the University of Lübeck in 2007 as director of the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, led a research group at the Bauhaus University Weimar, and held the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy and Language of Medicine at McGill University.
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-12:30 Nicole C. Nelson (University of Wisconsin, Madison): Calling from Inside the House. On Being Embedded in Medicine
My postdoc at SSOM was my first experience being the embedded ethnographer in a biomedical science project, in a unit that is itself embedded in the Faculty of Medicine. In this talk, I will reflect on the delights and challenges of working from an embedded position.
Nicole Nelson is an Associate Professor in the Medical History and Bioethics department at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She is the author of the book Model Behavior, published by the University of Chicago Press, and a former Editor in Chief of the journal Social Studies of Science
12:30-14:00 Lunch Break
14:00-15:00 Fiona Kenney (McGill University): Where Care Takes Place. Architecture and the Social Studies of Medicine
Reflecting on my time as a PhD student with SSoM, this talk considers how the Department's interdisciplinary community broadens the questions and evidence of architectural history. Throughout my research on late-twentieth century hospices and long-term care, I consider architecture and care as mutually constitutive: care work helped to produce architecture, while architecture actively participated in producing new forms of care practice.
Fiona L. Kenney is a PhD candidate at the McGill University School of Architecture interested in the intersections between architecture, care, and ethics. She holds a Master of Design Studies from the Harvard GSD and is currently the Margaret Angus Research Fellow at the Canadian Museum of Health Care.
15:00-16:00 Cynthia Lazzaroni (McGill University): Questions We Inherit. Thinking about Alzheimer’s and Forgetting in Social Studies of Medicine
Marking SSoM’s sixtieth anniversary, this presentation brings Margaret Lock’s legacy and my training in the department into conversation with ongoing fieldwork on familial early-onset Alzheimer’s in Antioquia, Colombia. One family’s experience offers an occasion to reflect on how I have learned to think about forgetting and what fieldwork asks me to reconsider when neurodegeneration alone cannot account for the histories a life carries.
Cynthia Lazzaroni is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Social Studies of Medicine at McGill, a research assistant at the Douglas, and a visiting researcher in neuroscience at Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia. She studies how families navigate genetic early-onset Alzheimer’s and forgetting, exploring memory as biomedical object, fate, and political demand amid historical violence and collective reckoning.
16:00-17:00 Reception
