School of Social and Political Science

Description

Take a university undergraduate majoring in mathematics, a budding architect and a first year medical student. What must all these novices develop for their future work? A spatial imagination. In mathematics it may be a question of inhabiting geometric space (Barany and MacKenzie 2014), for the architect, the built environment (Pallasmaa 2011), and for the doctor in training, an intimate relationship with the visceral, corporeal spaces of bodies (Prentice 2013). Spatial imagination is an important element of learning in these fields, and many more beyond, yet how it is cultivated in higher education settings is rarely discussed, including in STS scholarship. The perceived “demise” of imagination in education has increasingly become a matter of concern for some, especially in the context of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. In this talk I will take the audience into a particular learning setting where spatial imagination is practiced in everyday lessons (Macknight 2016): medical school. It will draw on research conducted on the precipice of the pandemic-led explosion in digital learning in schools and universities as part of the 6-year long ERC-funded team project called Making Clinical Sense. In this seminar I will focus on the materiality of learning, dissecting some of the practices, places and objects that teachers use when they go about crafting spatial imaginations, delving into what these materials do and what kinds of bodies are rendered in such encounters. I will suggest that the physical, material, sensory learning that our research team encountered in medical schools in Ghana, Hungary and the Netherlands opens up a different kind of knowledge from that happening in virtual and online educational environments. Using the anatomical and literary metaphor of the labyrinth to shape the talk, I will share ethnographic vignettes from my own fieldwork, discuss the broader context of the ethnographic-historic project and our collaborative publications, and, if time, the methodological and writing experiments we have developed and are still exploring.

Anna Harris is an Associate Professor of the Social Studies of Medicine at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She works at the intersections of STS and anthropology, and her research largely concerns the material, sensory and bodily nature of medical practices. She is currently finishing an ERC project called Making Clinical Sense on learning in medicine, and is a co-PI on several projects on sensory learning in primary schools and higher education. Her recent books include Making Sense of Medicine (with John Nott), Stethoscope (with Tom Rice) and A Sensory Education.