*Shifting Temporalities in Biomedicine*
Call for
Proposals
International
Summer School, 5-10 October 2013 in Roscoff (France)
*Shifting
Temporalities in Biomedicine*
The meaning
of medicine has been transformed over the course of the 20th century: it has
be¬come biomedicine on a molecular basis. Based on novel and partly disruptive
technologies, bio¬medicine has ventured into new spheres of interpretation not
just within the (life) sciences but also in the wider socio-cultural realm.
Promising to solve some of society’s fundamental and vital problems,
biomedicine has become the new vanguard science. After detaching biological
proc¬esses from their natural space and time, matters of life and its
temporalities seem to have become malleable entities.
Against
this background, a selection of shifting temporalities in biomedicine deserve
critical evaluation:
•
Suspending biological time in experimental systems;
•
Overriding time in biological cycles, for example in technologically assisted
reproduction;
•
Shifting latencies, such as in epidemics/chronic diseases or ecologically
triggered biohazards;
•
Processes of chronification in somatic and psychiatric diseases;
•
Evolving concepts of life time and life span.
Without a
doubt, »Time matters«, as the sociologist Andrew Abbott put it. Time is a
physical en¬tity, but its structural organisation and our sense of time is a
socio-cultural construction that is influenced by culture and individual
perception (Norbert Elias, Helga Nowotny). This raises questions about the
simultaneity and interrelationship between ›natural‹, organic, and life time on
the one hand, and a mechanistic, synchronised and chronological organisation of
time (Bergson) on the other. How do different time regimes coexist
contemporaneously? In what ways have bio¬technologies changed our understanding
of time and temporality? If we assume that biotechnolo¬gies have changed the
understanding of time and temporality and if we assume that biomedicine has an
important impact on culture, it follows that we need to ask how shifting
temporalities in biomedicine have modulated our understanding of time and temporality
in general. Ernst Bloch has coined the phrase »simultaneity of the
non-simultaneous« (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen) to explain how
different historical processes overlap and unfold at the same time. And
finally, in what sense is our entanglement with simultaneities and
contingencies creating a broad concept of the present (Gumbrecht) and force us
to rethink the chronicity of our own lives?
The Summer
School is designed for graduate students and post-docs working on topics in the
history and philosophy of the life sciences. We welcome interdisciplinary
proposals from diverse national contexts. The Summer School provides
participants with a unique opportunity to pres¬ent their works in a stimulating
and inspiring atmosphere at the marine biology and oceano¬graphy research
station in Roscoff (France, Brittany) and to engage with German, French and
US-American experts working on aspects of temporality. The keynote lecture will
be given by Anne Fagot (Paris) and additional speakers will include among
others Norbert Paul (Mainz), Mita Banerjee (Mainz), Alain Leplege (Paris),
Claude Debru (Paris), and Maël Lemoine (Paris).
Participants’
accommodations at the Station of Marine Biology and their travel expenses will
be covered. Presentations are welcome in German, English, or French, but our
discussion will rely on pre-circulated papers that need to be in English.
Please send your proposals (300-600 words) to Axel C. Hüntelmann (huentelm@uni-mainz.de) and Alain
Leplege (alain.leplege@univ-paris-diderot.fr)
by: 17 June 2013.
The Summer
School is a joint initiative of the Institute of the History, Philosophy and
Ethics of Medicine in Mainz (Germany) and the Laboratoire SPHERE of the
University Paris Diderot, the École Normale Superieur. It is funded by the
German-French University (DFA-UFA).