"Translated Identities", 8 March 2012
A joint IASH/Scottish PEN Colloquium

Lecture by Professor Priscilla Wald (English, Duke University): "The Outbreak Narrative: Disease Emergence and the Obscured Geography of Poverty": 23 February 2012 (joint event with ESRC Genomics Forum)

Symposium: "Mental Health and the Disciplines: Contributions to mental health practice from Biology, Geography, Sociology, Architecture, Theology and Philosophy": 17 February 2012

Animals: three seminars on Tuesdays at 4 pm: 14 and 28 February and 13 March, 2012

Symposium: "The Acknowledgement of the Aesthetic": 20 June 2011

Workshop: Epistemic Practices: Knowing through Testimony: 22 March 2011

Seminar: "Theorizing Creativity - Embodiment, enaction and its (a-)logical signature": 8 June 2010

Workshop Series: Spring Semester 2010

Workshop Series: Autumn Semester 2009: "Thinking Animals"

Symposium "Reading the Photographic Image": 19 March 2009

MENTAL HEALTH AND THE DISCIPLINES:
Contributions to mental health practice from Biology, Geography, Sociology, Architecture, Religious Studies, and Philosophy

Friday 17 February 2012
IASH, Hope Park Square

This one-day symposium offers an interdisciplinary and methodological exploration of how elements in the sciences and humanities may be transferred beneficially into perspectives and methods of working used in talking therapies, to generate new insight and inform mental health practice.

The beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a growing demand for mental health services, which in turn requires an expansion in mental health disciplines and enhancement of their capacity to meet the challenging and changing personal and social problems to which they are called to attend. Mental health is not an isolated phenomenon, but is the result of interactions occurring at many levels of organisation, from molecules and cell neurobiology, intrapersonal psychic organisation, human relations with intimate others, social structures and institutions, the natural and man-made environments that we are a part of, and our capacity to find or generate meaning in the inner and outer world. Knowledge and approaches from specialisms at each of these levels are therefore relevant to the effort to improve knowledge-based mental health practice and practitioners’ ability to attend to mental health issues and needs.

There is currently significant interest in medical humanities and the intersection between theology, spirituality and mental health (e.g. the ongoing project ‘Theology and Therapy’ at the University of Edinburgh; the ‘Project for Spirituality, Theology and Health’ at Durham University; a recent conference at Trinity College, Oxford, on ‘Physicians of the Soul: Between Psychotherapy and Spirituality’). The premise of this IASH symposium is that exchange with other disciplines may offer mental health professionals additional vigour and inspiration to respond in a more diverse and comprehensive manner to the complex needs and expectations set before them. The programme builds around the assumption that humanities, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences may all contribute to mental health care provision by offering practitioners specific ‘instruments’ (concepts, methods, explanations) not previously considered within their field of practice. In this process the informing disciplines may in turn expand their own areas of applicability and relevance. Our speakers bring a unique contribution to these recent areas of academic interest, not only in their endorsement of a particular openness in engaging humanities with mental health and exploring new elements in theology and philosophy that can have therapeutic relevance, but also by promoting a variety of sciences that may inform mental health practice, including geography, biology, sociology and architecture. The methodology of interdisciplinary research presented in this symposium is designed to retain the autonomy of original disciplines, while promoting cross-enrichment.

Mental health professionals, scholars and students in any field are invited to participate in this event.

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACTS:

Professor Catharine Ward Thompson (OPENspace, University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Jenny Roe (School of Built Environment, Heriot Watt University): Open Space and Mental Health
There is a growing body of empirical evidence to demonstrate the contribution that open space and natural environments can make to mental health and relief from stress. This relationship has been recognized in different ways, in different cultures, throughout history but is now receiving greater attention in the context of concerns over unhealthy lifestyles and serious health inequalities in the 21st century. Epidemiological studies have shown a relationship between green space near home and patterns of health and mortality, particularly for poorer segments of the population in the U.K. (Mitchell and Popham, 2007). As the developed world faces increasing problems of mental illness (e.g. Bird, 2007), particularly in young people (Collishaw et al., 2004), there is a particular interest in how such green space environments might relieve depression or stress and support mental wellbeing (Hartig, 2007; 2008). This paper will outline the pathways by which green or natural open space is believed to support mental health drawing on evidence from several recent research studies carried out within OPENspace at ECA/UoE and Heriot-Watt University. Catharine Ward Thompson will present findings from a 4-year 'GreenHealth' study for the Scottish Government, which has found a relationship between levels of nearby green space for residents of deprived city areas in Scotland and stress. Jenny Roe will present work on the restorative health benefits of different natural and built settings, flagging some of the benefits in young people and ethnic minority groups.

Jonathan Delafield-Butt: Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, Satisfaction, and Mental Health The panpsychism of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy offers a refreshing view from which to consider the mind and our human experience of mental processes. Whitehead broke rank with British analytic philosophy to pursue a course of reasoning that led to a new processual metaphysic, coined the 'Philosophy of Organism'. This view saw perception, feeling, and intention as the primary mental components of any existence and that deliver one along one's 'life' toward satisfaction and completion. It is only at the end, or 'death', of the process that the thing 'objectifies' and becomes available to others, to be appropriated by them as sense datum. This philosophical position sheds light on a number of human psychophysical processes, from sensorimotor control of intentional action to shared narrative projects in social engagement. This paper will examine Whitehead's mind-matter unit to shed light on the multitude of 'life processes' occurring within and between persons, and will suggest ways in which these may be disrupted in mental illness.

Dr Alexandra Pârvan (Fellow, IASH): The Philosophical Concept of Evil and Its Practical Uses for Mental Health Practitioners
The paper investigates ways in which the philosophical theories on evil of Plato, Plotinus and Augustine can be made useful in the psychotherapeutic work, and integrated into practitioners' methods of working with clients experiencing abuse, trauma, depression, anxiety, loss, etc. I examine certain aspects of these theories, such as evil seen as an addition or a lack, evil as an image, or unmixable with the soul, evil as a relation or self-referential, and indicate how they can be given practical uses in a therapeutic context, and how they can prove relevant for therapists addressing clients' harmful experiences. I also identify similarities and connections between some of these philosophical theses and therapeutic Gestalt principles. I argue that a philosophical understanding of evil can have clinical significance and can be usefully worked with in a non-philosophical manner, and in a non-philosophical context, while the philosophical content transferred into therapists' practice is still preserved.

Dr. Steven Sutcliffe (Religious Studies, School of Divinity): Spirituality as a Cultural Resource for Counselling and Psychotherapy
This paper begins by briefly reviewing the scope and some early findings of a two-year interdisciplinary research project called 'Theology and Therapy' based in the School of Divinity and the School of Health in Social Science at the University of Edinburgh. Drawing on perspectives from history of psychotherapy, philosophical theology, human geography and religious studies, and based on documentary research and oral history methodologies, the project has been investigating various ways in which psychotherapy, Christianity and a new language of 'spirituality' intertwined in and beyond Scotland c. 1945-2000. The paper then proceeds to discuss one aspect of the project: the emerging discourse on 'spirituality', which I identify in the first instance as a product of cultural change in the 1960s. I examine several instances of this language of spirituality in the Scottish context, before suggesting some reasons for its appeal under conditions of secularization and religious pluralization. In particular I suggest it may be serving as a cultural resource for reconstructing meanings and values within the fields of counselling and psychotherapy.

Professor John MacInnes (School of Social and Political Science): Sociology and Psychotherapy
At first sight, sociology offers psychotherapy too much. The sociological maxim of our times is ‘the personal is political’, with sociology revealing the social and historical roots of ‘identity’.  My own view is that this approach is misconceived, and one that few practitioners of psychotherapy make use of: individual neurosis or suffering is about more than the social or historical context of someone’s life. What might be a more modest but useful role for sociology then? I can think of at least two, and I’m sure there are more. The first is to offer a guide to the convoluted language of identity and its roots in contemporary social change. Identity is a weasel word. Just when you think you’ve clearly pinned down the meaning you want to give it, it wriggles off in another direction. I think the solution to this puzzle is to give up on defining identity, and instead think of the kinds of social context within which identity comes to seem so important. The second is to offer psychotherapy an account of its own emergence, and by doing this, help therapists reflect on what it is they do, the limits of what it is possible to do, and a clearer sense of the costs and benefits of a sceptical attitude towards psychotherapy. This involves some hard reflection about therapy, trust and faith.

REGISTRATION
As space is limited, booking is essential. Please email iash@ed.ac.uk to book a place

Joint event - ESRC Genomics Forum/Medical Humanities Research Network, IASH:

Thursday, 23 February 2012 at 3.30 pm, Room S37, Psychology, 7 George Square

Lecture by Professor Priscilla Wald (Professor of English and Women's Studies, Duke University): "The Outbreak Narrative: Disease Emergence and the Obscured Geography of Poverty"

Abstract:

Accounts of newly surfacing diseases appeared in scientific publications and the mainstream media in the West with increasing frequency following the introduction of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the mid-1980s.  They put the vocabulary of disease outbreaks into circulation, and they introduced the concept of "emerging infections."  While these accounts were neither monolithic, nor static, their repetition of particular phrases, images and story lines produced a formula that was amplified by the extended treatment of these themes in the popular novels and films that proliferated in the mid-1990s. Collectively, they drew out what was implicit in all of the accounts: a fascination not just with the novelty and danger of the microbes, but also with the changing social and spatial formations of a shrinking world.

These stories have consequences.  As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes.  They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, spaces and locales (regional and global), behaviors and lifestyles, and they change economies. They also influence how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how we imagine the threat and why we react so fearfully to some disease outbreaks and not others at least as dangerous and pressing, as well as which problems merit our attention and resources.

Attendance is free but please reserve a place online at http://waldlecture.eventbrite.co.uk/

Thursday, 8 March 2012
IASH, Hope Park Square

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Scottish PEN

Translated Identities

An event to mark International Women's Day, bringing together creative writers, scholars and critics. Open to all.

PROGRAMME:

The event is free, including lunch and refreshments. Booking is essential as space is limited. Please email iash@ed.ac.uk to book a place.

6 p.m. Moray House, Paterson's Land, Holyrood Road
Pippa Gregory gives the University of Edinburgh's International Women's Day lecture

Animals

IASH, Tuesdays at 4 pm

14 February: Dr Alastair A. MacDonald
"The mystery of the pig with horns - an exotic illustrated history"



28 February: Prof Colwyn Trevarthen
"Tasting Shapes In Light, and Feeling Time In Sound: How Moving Animals Sense Their World, and Give Its Forms and Values Social Meaning"

Abstract: I will summarize a philosophy or ‘natural science’ of animal vitality -- in the flesh, in action, and in awareness. I want to question how ‘sensory-motor intelligence’ is adapted to discover tasty benefits and avoid tough risks in the world, and how the intelligence of an individual animal becomes ‘co-adapted’ to generate social meaning. I question the assumption that ‘cognition’ is the cause of understanding -- either of ‘reality’, or of meaning in communication. I will refer to evidence that pre- or proto-cognitive (anoetic) awareness has evolved and develops from emotional evaluations of inquisitive motives of integrated animal selves, and from their sharing in ‘immediate sympathy’ -- for impulses of interest and for states of ‘affective appraisal’. I hope to bring light to confusions concerning how intentions are ‘mirrored’ between animal brains, how actions are ‘imitated’, how states of mind and consciousness are transmitted as ‘information’, and how knowledge is ‘taught’. My research on the innate foundations of infant companionship, maternal attachment and communication before language depends upon this natural science of the motives and sensuality of animals, and upon the identification of co-adaptations between embodied conscious agents for mutual regulation of well-being in vital states, and for social collaboration in projects.

13 March:  Dr Andrew Gardiner
‘The Dangerous Women of Animal Welfare: how British veterinary medicine went to the dogs’

Abstract: I'm looking at the gendered nature of animal welfare activitism between the wars, linking this to Victorian animal protection and late 20th century animal rights, and showing how a hands-on practical ethic of animal care transformed British small animal practice. This happened initially outwith the veterinary profession, in charity clinics run by the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor, and caused problems for the profession as it struggled to come to terms with the affective nature of dog medicine (which would completely dominate post 1980 clinical practice).

One-Day Symposium on "The Acknowledgment of the Aesthetic"

Monday, 20 June 2011
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square

The symposium will explore the aesthetic as a source of intimate knowledge. According to the American philosopher, Stanley Cavell, our relationship to the external world is not one of knowing nor one of certainty. Rather, it is an ungrounded and uncontrollable association, still claiming our courageous acceptance and embrace. This mode of "acknowledgment", this respective attentiveness to the other, is offered by Cavell not as an alternative to but as an interpretation of knowing. Promising such an interpretation, moreover, is the realm of the aesthetic. For Cavell, works of art hold peculiar possibilities of notice and expression; they afford an "intimacy" with existence.

Offering Cavell's central ideas of acknowledgment and intimacy as starting points, this one-day symposium opens to central questions of knowledge and the artworld.

• Is there a form of knowledge that only artworks can provide?
• Might artworks address the epistemological in a unique way?
• How, if at all, might "knowing-through-art" speak to the traditional problems of other-mind and other-world scepticism?

These are the central questions we hope to inspire and address. Contributing to the recent renewal of interest in the cognitive value of literature (witness the June 2010 workshop at the University of Liverpool, "Language, Truth and Literature", the October 2010 conference at the University of Nottingham, "Literature, History, Cognition", and the ongoing project [2009-2014] at St. John's College, Oxford, "Literature as an Object of Knowledge"), this one-day symposium opens to the epistemological power of the visual as well as the literary arts. It positions itself at the intersection of aesthetics and epistemology, hoping to attract contributions from across the disciplinary spectrum. Given Cavell's career-long engagement with Film Studies, with painting and photography, as well as with poetry, drama and fiction, we hope that he is an ideal figure to get the conversation moving. Having hosted an acclaimed international conference on Cavell's work in May 2008 (LLC), a one-day workshop, "Aesthetics, Culture and Society" in March 2006 (IASH) and a weekly Epistemology Research Seminar (PPLS), the University of Edinburgh is in a unique position to host this event. The annual British Society of Aesthetics conference is being held at Edinburgh in September 2011; we hope that our smaller symposium will anticipate this conference nicely.

Programme:

Registration:

The event is free but places are limited. Please email Áine Kelly (aine.kelly@ed.ac.uk) to confirm attendance.

The Symposium is supported by The British Society of Aesthetics and The University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH)

"Epistemic Practices: Knowing through Testimony"

Tuesday, 22 March 2011
2.00 - 5.00 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square

Speakers:

Professor Lorraine Code (Philosophy, York University, Canada): "Incredulity: The Politics of Testimony"

Dr. Axel Gelfert (Philosophy, National University of Singapore): "Argumentation, expertise, and the end of inquiry"

Professor Desmond Bell (Film Studies, Queen's University, Belfast): "The Primacy of Practice? Assessing the Cognitive Value and Research Currency of the Moving Image Art Work"

Abstract: I explore the theory-practice nexus as it manifests itself within film and visual studies. Starting from an institutional history of the troubled relation between film theory and the teaching and conduct of imaging practice, I locate this disjuncture in a broader analysis of the social division between intellectual and manual labour within capitalist society. I then examine the emergence of a tradition of practice based arts research within the academy and pose a number of questions about the contending cognitive and expressive demands of making work within an academic context. Can an art work ever become a research outcome? Should it? Drawing upon my own work as a film maker, I seek to elaborate a model which defends the creative autonomy of the art work but identifies the value of reflective and critically informed modes of film and visual arts practice. The relationship between theory and practice, is , I contend , best elaborated as part of the defence of public culture.

"Theorizing Creativity - Embodiment, enaction and its (a-)logical signature"

Tuesday, 8 June 2010
2 - 5 p.m., Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square

This interdisciplinary seminar draws on perspectives from philosophy, psychology and social science to focus on questions concerning the delineation and analysis of creativity, and the environments in which creative practice takes place.

SPEAKERS:

Simone Mahrenholz: Creativity and its relation to logics: Is there a philosophical 'formula'?

Abstract: In the lecture I wish to present the results of a forthcoming book on creativity with the title: Kreativität - Eine philosophische Analyse, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, October 2010. First, I will suggest a philosophical-logical 'formula', describing the formal, structural and symbol-theoretical features of processes that lead to creative outcomes in science, arts and common life. This systematic idea partly uses logical tools for analyzing symbol- and communication-systems developed by Nelson Goodman as well as concepts of, among others, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Theodor W. Adorno. The second section of the talk connects this basic idea with the history of philosophy, demonstrating that eminent descriptions and concepts of human creativity follow the very structural-logical features or predicates the formula suggests (for example Plato's 'Eros', Aristotle's 'phantasia', Leibniz' 'ars inventionis', Kant's 'Einbildungskraft', or Wittgenstein's 'saying/showing' distinction). The third and final section develops the suggested initial idea further. It discusses Gregory Bateson's claim that cultural progress as well as inadvertent mental breakdowns depend on the violation of Russell's type-theoretical logical principles. The conclusion discusses the degree to which these violations are '(a-)logical' and reflects upon the 'model' of creative acting and thinking resulting from this. It thereby suggests a broader concept of what is called 'logics', a concept evolving from the analysis of creative actions.

Biographical Note: Professor Simone Mahrenholz is a philosopher (Habilitation Free University Berlin) and currently teaches media, film and cultural theory at the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule. Her presentation (given in English) draws on her forthcoming monograph, Kreativität - Eine philosophische Analyse. (Creativity: a philosophical analysis). She is also the author of Musik und Erkenntnis. Eine Studie im Ausgang von Nelson Goodmans Symboltheorie (2000).

Sue Hawksley: Work in movement: enactive performance

Abstract: I will discuss aspects of my choreographic praxis, centred around an account of the making and performing of re-membering(s) (2009). This performance work, comprising a series of improvised miniatures in contemporary music and dance, aims (perhaps) to apprehend, frame and articulate the fugitive impressions and traces of what happens in the lived-performed-moment. Composer Suzanne Parry and I employed aleatoric approaches to create compositional spaces and situations that engage the performers in problem-solving activities. re-membering(s) emphasises a multi-layered exploration of time, attention, and memory, focusing on interfaces between music and dance, between performers and between performer and audience, engaging them all in "enactive performance". According to Eco, such an approach "installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art…Far from being fully accounted for and catalogued, it deploys and poses problems in several dimensions. In short, it is an "open" situation, in movement. A work in progress." (Eco, 1989, p.23).
References: Eco, U. (1989) (trans. A. Cancogni) The Open Work. UK: Hutchinson Radius

Biographical Note: Sue Hawksley is a dancer, choreographer, and artistic director of articulate animal. Currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at Edinburgh College of Art, her research engages questions of embodiment through choreographic practice, somatics, philosophy and technological mediation.

Peter Cudmore: Peirce's categories and the semiotics of abduction
Abstract: Abduction is pitched at the ambient end of the cognitive spectrum. It concerns what attracts attention in the first place, what germinates a thought process insofar as such a process is to be deemed 'rational'-that is, approximately, consisting in an array of mutually supporting components, however ill-defined the notion of 'component' might be at this point. The American logician Charles Sanders Peirce was firm in his view that abductive logic differs from induction, and that the abductive mode is the sole source of creativity and originality. However, he struggled to make a satisfactorily clear distinction between the two. The abductive shades into the inductive, he says, without any sharp line of demarcation between them. This paper attempts to clarify the distinction. Peirce's thinking on abduction is deeply entangled in other aspects of his work, so the first step is to review this context, giving specific attention to the place of vagueness in Peircean 'pragmaticism'. Following on from that, I compare musical composition to improvisation. This move enables us to focus on semiotic, rather than linguistic issues, notably the role of 'scaffolding' in defning and constraining the conceptual space of performance.

Biographical Note: Peter Cudmore is a musician and philosopher who has recently submitted a PhD, The Social Context of Creativity, in the English Literature and Philosophy departments at Edinburgh University. His interdisciplinary work centres on the social brain and the problems of conceptualizing its relationship with technology. Please email iash@ed.ac.uk if you plan to attend the seminar

CHAIR: Mirjam Schaub (Institut für Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin; Visiting Fellow, IASH)

Registration:

All are welcome. Please email iash@ed.ac.uk if you plan to attend

Workshop Series: Spring Semester 2010

Tuesdays at 4 p.m.
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square

19 January
Professor Desmond Bell (Film Studies, Queen's University Belfast) will introduce his film "Child of the Dead End", followed by a showing of the film
A documentary feature employing early film archive on the life of Patrick Mac Gill (1891 - 1963) navvy poet, novelist, dramatist and screen writer. `MacGill's books 'Children of the Dead End ' (1913) and 'The Rat Pit' (1914) provide a vivid account of life for the itinerant Irish labourer of the time. MacGill witnessed some of the great events of the twentieth century - the rise of the Labour Movement, the Great War, the Great Depression. His experience mirrored that of many Irish people during this period - grinding rural poverty, migratory labour, a shift to the English language, national and social awakening, and the ever present reality of emigration. MacGill's story is pieced together from elements of the author's letters, novels and stories. Oscar nominated Irish actor Stephen Rea plays MacGill as an old man marooned in the US and ruefully looking back on his life. Rea's nuanced narration draws us into MacGill's story and lifts the film beyond a conventional television arts documentary. Newcomer Cian Bell gives an affecting performance of the young MacGill capturing perfectly a young writer finding his creative voice. 'Child of the Dead End' employs a rich seam of archive photography and film, together with live action drama and striking cinematography of the landscape of Donegal and the Scottish Highlands. Director Desmond Bell unearthed a rich corpus of Irish, Scottish and American archive material to illuminate Mac Gill's story and stitch it into a broader narrative of migration, class, aspiration and social change.

2 February
Dr. Mark Dorrian (Architecture, University of Edinburgh): "Falling Upon Warsaw: the Shadow of Stalin's Palace of Culture and Science"
The Palace of Culture and Science that sits in the centre of Warsaw is – by turns – the city's most familiar, troubling and inescapable landmark. Constructed in the early 1950s, this high-rise building was bestowed as a gift from Stalin to Poland. The seminar will focus on the shadow cast by this building. It will examine images and projects in circulation today that dream of ‘taming’ the Palace by detaching, dissolving, exorcizing or executing its shadow, reading these in relation to the primal scene of socialist realism as pictured by the Russian artists Komar & Melamid. Referring back to the unbuilt scheme for the Palace of Soviets in Moscow, the definitive project for socialist realist architecture, and to the seven post-war high buildings that came to be built around its empty site, it will consider the indexical and metonymic implications of the Palace of Culture and Science, and the strange sense of immanence that this building – which became known as ‘Stalin’s finger’ – continues to convey. The material presented will give the opportunity to discuss various practices and theories in relation to representation, gift-giving, forgetting and exorcism.

16 February
Professor Timothy Collins (University College Falmouth): "Beyond-Autonomy: Theory in Practice as if Aesthetics Mattered"
I worked with my partner Reiko Goto and others on 3 Rivers 2nd Nature, from 2000-2005.Conducted at Carnegie Mellon University, this applied research initiative intended to re-imagine the aesthetic form, function and value that underpinned the meaning of nature in Allegheny County Pennsylvania. Our methods were qualitative, quantitative and at times demanded immersion in place and community. The primary method involved a range of theories tested through rigorous practice. In a series of reflective publications I have been working through ideas about this practice and its relationship to ideas of artistic autonomy, and various integrated social/environmental aesthetic theories and historic artistic practices. As a practicing artist and academic researcher, I have been primarily interested in how ideas reshape my perception and in turn how perception reshapes my ideas. I will provide an overview of the three areas that underpin the original work, as well as the evolution of my own understanding of aesthetics and its relationship to vision, catalysis, ethics and truth. I will then provide a brief overview of current practical methods used to test what I think, what I perceive and ultimately what I understand and value as a result of this interplay of methodologies.

2 March
Chris Fremantle (Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University): "Health, Nature and Art: The Grove Project at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde's New Stobhill Hospital"
This paper sets out the Art & Architecture collaboration resulting in the Grove project for NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde's New Stobhill Hospital. This project, based on a strong conceptual framework, uses artworks as part of the construction of a environment where the experience nature plays an important role in healthcare. The paper discusses the practical aspects of this major new public art work and looks at the theoretical ideas of the artists, architects and NHS Arts & Health team. The author, as part of NHSGGC's Arts & Health team, has worked closely with Thomas A Clark, lead artist-poet; Reiach & Hall Architects; four other artists, and NHSGGC's Capital and Commissioning Teams to deliver the project. The project was conceived and developed by Thomas A Clark and Reiach & Hall over a 6 year period prior to commissioning, and has been funded by Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Public Art Fund, NHSGGC Endowments, NHSGGC Staff Lottery, as well as a wide range of community groups. It forms one of a series of Arts & Health developments as part of NHSGGC's Modernisation programme.

16 March
Dr. Gabriela Switek (Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw): "Architecture in Art: A Contemporary 'Spatial Turn'?"
Over the past few years terms such as 'spatial turn', Raumtheorie, or Raumparadigma have become part of the vocabulary used by sociologists, anthropologists, or culture scholars. The paper examines some difficulties with the implementation of the new rhetoric of the 'spatial turn' into the discipline of art history. Artistic and architectural practices, similarly to research disciplines, are subject to the impacts of methodological 'turns', like the linguistic turn, interest in semiotics among conceptualists in the 1960's and 1970's, or in the philosophy of deconstruction among architects. If artistic practices are presently undergoing a 'spatial turn' then art history, which studies these practices, should be a discipline which accepts the task of being an intermediary between spatial experience, spatial designing, and reflection on space.

Workshop Series: Autumn Semester 2009: "Thinking Animals"

Tuesdays at 4 p.m.
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square

6 October:
Mr John Llewelyn (former Reader in Philosophy, University of Edinburgh): On Derrida's alleged Dogmatism regarding the Human and the Animal
Matthew Calarco refers in Zoographies to Derrida's apparently dogmatic "insistence on maintaining the human-animal distinction". What would it mean to "overcome" this distinction? Can we simply let it go? Does the distinction between mention and use, despite Derrida's reservations about it, make possible a relocation of Derrida's apparent dogmatism? What does it mean to say that the human-animal distinction is abyssal?

20 October:
Dr Jane Goldman (Reader in English Literature, University of Glasgow): 'When dogs will become men': canine allegory, theriocephalous figuration, and the modernist melancholia of Virginia Woolf
My work in progress (Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog: The Companion Species Reads Modernism) offers ekphrastic readings in Woolf's signifying dogs, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Donna Haraway. This paper struggles with the latter's concept of 'contact zones' and of figures as 'material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another […] where the biological and literary or artistic come together with all the force of lived reality'; it chases Woolf's frequent theriocephalous and cynocephalous figurations, 'bristling and shivering', down the 'dark lanes', the 'zone[s] of silence', in her glittering modernist prose. Are these zones to be understood as cryptic scenes of apocalyptic mysticism, or archly satirical political allegories? How do we gauge the dogginess of Woolf's dogs?

3 November:
Dr. John Miller (Postdoctoral Fellow of IASH): Hygiene, Visuality and the Victorian Gorilla
Following the arrival of the French-American explorer Paul du Chaillu in London in 1861 with a cargo of stuffed gorillas and a stock of sensational anecdotes, there was an explosion of popular and scholarly interest in earth's largest primate. Early fictional representations of du Chaillu's contested narrative in the work of the Edinburgh novelist R. M. Ballantyne emphasised two aspects of the human/ape interaction: an uncanny visual encounter encompassing mutual recognition, terror, horror and finally flight, followed by the undignified descent of the dismayed adventurer into a bog, pit or quagmire. Such a connection between natural history's scopic focus on the gorilla body and anxieties regarding human bodily contamination is a surprisingly insistent component of Victorian primatology that invites speculation on the human/animal divide in the light of recent work in animal studies. Imagining the Victorian swamp as a materialisation of Jacques Derrida's 'abyssal limit' of the human, and remembering the seminally troubling gaze of the philosopher's 'little cat', this paper asks profound questions of colonial gorillas and of those who meet them in muddy forests.

17 November:
Dr Francoise Wemelsfelder (Reader in Qualitative Science and Animal Welfare, Scottish Agricultural College, University of Edinburgh): What is it like to be a pig in a cage? Assessing the quality of animal experience
The world in which we live is not just one of object-based knowledge and experimental control; we also communicate with other living beings as subjects, and wonder about their point of view. Thus we address others as whole individuals, and see their actions, not as a series of physical events, but as an integrated psychological expression, a 'body language' that speaks of their experience. Research at the Scottish Agricultural College with pigs and other farm animal species has demonstrated judgements of animal body language to be scientifically robust, and we are now developing this approach for the benefit of practical welfare assessment on farms. I will provide some philosophical context to this work, and review its most interesting and recent results.

1 December:
Dr Wendy Wheeler (Reader in English, London Metropolitan University): Captivation: Biosemiotics, Animal and Human Mind and the Question of Abduction
In this talk I will address the difference between human and animal mind via a discussion of the semiotics of abductive inference. This will involve a consideration of what we mean by 'information' and 'communication' in living things. Using the findings of research on the Homeobox DNA gene sequence PAX6, I shall suggest that a proper understanding of communication - both internal and external to organisms - consists in the understanding that all biological codes and information are, as similarly in culture, more accurately described as signs. Since signs are more accurately described as sign-relations, requiring 'interpretation' according to contexts, this has significant implications for AI and philosophy of mind. Adding to the arguments of Damasio, and drawing on Heidegger, the biosemiotic account of human mind I shall argue that human 'rational' mind is semiotically dependent upon human 'animal' mind, 'spellbound', as Heidegger says, by the richness of its umwelt. The magical quality of abduction derives, I shall suggest, from its recursive semiotic journey through the captivating experience of human 'animal' mind.

Thursday, 19th March
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square

Reading the Photographic Image: a symposium