‘Encountering Pain’: Book Review
‘What is this thing called pain?’ Katharine Cheston reviews a new edited volume which sets out to explore this question. Untreatable chronic pain, as Rita Charon tells us, ‘has become the signature disease of
Trusting touch during Covid-19
Performing Medicine’s Bella Eacott examines some of the norms around the use of touch in healthcare settings, and considers how these have been altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Touch is central to healthcare practice:
Debility and Obsolescence: Klara and the Sun’s More-Than-Human Metaphysics
How should scholars of medical humanities and disability studies read Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun (2021)? In this review, sarah madoka currie considers how the novel frames the question of what it
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty – Book Review
What does the figure of the mother evoke in us? How does an engagement with this figure expose the persistence of colonial logics and global inequalities? Yianna Liatsos reviews Mothers by Jacqueline Rose. In
‘Disability and Other Human Questions’: Book Review
Who counts as a human? Emma Salt-Raper reviews Dan Goodley’s new book, Disability and Other Human Questions. In these times of polarised politics, economic instability and the escalating COVID-19 crisis, disability practices and politics
Review of ‘Psychoanalysis for the People: Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis’
Ana Minozzo reviews the first edition of an international online conference that explored socially engaged psychoanalytic practices from across the world. The event was hosted by the Freud Museum in London during the weekend
Reading Banner’s Communicative Biocapitalism in the Time of Covid-19
What happens to the ‘patient’s voice’ when it participates in the creation of biocapital via digital health platforms? What is the significance of Olivia Banner’s concept of ‘communicative biocapitalism’ in the era of the Covid-19
Covid-19 knowledge and the ‘bad expert’
Paige Sweet and Danielle Giffort examine the cultural work involved in the production, circulation and validation of Covid-19 knowledge, via an analysis of the abject figure of the ‘bad expert’. Paige: Danielle and
‘How much philosophical hay can be made with an empirical scythe?’ A review of Ruth Leys’ The Ascent of Affect
How should thinkers across the disciplines conceptualise emotional life? What role do theories and histories of affect play in how we conceptualise cultural analysis, or in how we think about aesthetics? Birgit Breidenbach reviews Ruth
Review of Moments of Rupture: The importance of affect in medical education and surgical training
How can trainee health professionals learn from the ‘messy reality of actual clinical practice’? Wendy Lowe reviews a new book exploring what learning is, or should be, in medical education. Moments of Rupture combines