Two consecutive workshops bring together members of Goldsmiths Faculty —engaged in different disciplinary perspectives and different practice commitments, both theoretical and methodological— to consider the nature of problems. Bearing in mind concern within the field of Science and Technology Studies about how solutions are arrived at and may even be said to participate in how a problem is conceived in its framing and/or according to an accepted mode of evidence, the workshops will address the somewhat broader and hence different question of what is a problem and hence what might the experience of a problem prompt? What possibilities may be cultivated by attending to problems? How, if it all, might we understand problems as lures or provocations toward cultivating a future different to the present, a future that evades what is posed as the ‘intractable’ or ‘essence’ of a problem and in its expression forecloses on other possibles?

Professor Matt Fuller – ‘The problem in computing’
Professor William Gaver – ‘Problems made by Research through Design’
Dr Michael Guggenheim – ‘Making problems go round. How the social sciences can help re-define problems and be surprised by the re-problematisations of others.’
Professor Dan Neyland – ‘The Entangling of Problems, Solutions and Market (PDF download)’
Professor Evelyn Ruppert—‘Problems in Data’ Dr Martin Savransky – ‘What is a Problem?’
Dr Edgar Schmitz—‘indifferent and improper’
Professor Marsha Rosengarten—Facilitator/Chair

For further info please contact the organisers Professor Marsha Rosengarten and Dr Martin Savransky.

Discussant: Alex Wilkie
Chair: Marsha Rosengarten

Deleuze’s conception of ‘diagrammatics’ implicates a radicalised notion of play. This augments Schiller’s conception of play as the harmonic synthesis of the form impulse and the sensible impulse to reconceive play as the disjunctive synthesis of the sensible. I consider the philosophical sources for this inversion, and attend to its aesthetic implications through an appeal to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. In his revisioning of the ‘Theme and Variation’, Beethoven invests play as a strategy for aesthetic freedom from formal determination (the theme), and the construction of a ‘second nature’. Is a new possibility for ‘aesthetic education’ signalled by this shift? How might we understand the contemporary stakes of this diagrammatic practice of art?

Kamini Vellodi is an artist, academic and writer. She is lecturer on the MRes Theory and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins, School of Art and Design. She completed her PhD at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, with a thesis on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the diagram and the 16th century Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto. Her research interests include the critical interface between post-Kantian Continental Philosophy, the Visual Arts and Art History, the ‘modernity’ of 16th century Italian painting, and philosophical restagings of problems in art historical methodology. She has published articles in the journals Parrhesia, Art History and the Journal for Aesthetics and German Art History, and is currently working on a book monograph on Tintoretto.

Although the randomized control trial (RCT) is considered the gold standard for evidence-based research in medicine, its findings of biomedical ‘efficacy’ under isolated test conditions stand apart from what affects the successful implementation and take up of the intervention, that is, ‘effectiveness’ in real world conditions.

In this symposium we consider the challenges that emerge through this distinction and what an interdisciplinary approach might offer to redressing the challenges now posed in the translation of ‘efficacy’ to ‘effectiveness’. By discussing conceptual issues as well as recent findings of RCTs for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis biomedical prevention, the broad aim of the symposium is to facilitate an interdisciplinary exchange on the implications of efficacy testing by RCTs for ‘real world’ implementation, and to provide a forum in which to ‘test’ a concept of ‘situated efficacy and its potential as a basis for novel modes of interdisciplinary collaboration.

At the centre of the development of a concept of ‘situated efficacy’ is an attempt to rethink the effects of biomedical interventions such that any clear-cut distinction between the controlled environment of the RCT (which the testing of conventional ‘efficacy’ requires) and the ‘real world‘ (which concerns the question of ‘effectiveness’) is not presupposed but rather problematised. Bringing together participants from the natural and social sciences, speculative design, international policy and programming, non-government organization implementers, will discuss and attempt to think collectively the potentials and limitations of experimenting with alternative forms of interdisciplinary interventions in complex naturalcultural problems.

Speakers

Dr Vera Ehrenstein, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
Prof William Gaver, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
Prof Robert Grant, Gladstone Institute, UCSF, United States
Prof Ian Harper, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Dr Ann Kelly, Exeter University, United Kingdom
Ms Susie McLean, International HIV/AIDS Alliance, United Kingdom
Dr Catherine Montgomery, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dr Dean Murphy, Curtin University and UNSW, Australia
Prof Daniel Neyland, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
Associate Prof Kane Race, University of Sydney, Australia
Prof Marsha Rosengarten, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
Dr Martin Savransky, Goldsmiths, University of London and UCL, United Kingdom

Mel Chen in the Citizen Sense “Sensing Practices” seminar series co-hosted with the {???}

In this talk I consider a number of intersecting phenomena: the often feminized exceptionality of “brain fog” and other cognitive departures from expected temporalities, overlapping with more temporally durative (or unexcusable by other means) “chronic illness”; the narration of biochemical transactions in relation to bodies at various scales; and the affectively rich play in geopolitical adjudications between “toxicity” and “intoxication.” Underneath all of these considerations lies a series of investments that could be understood as racially “tuned,” an expression of my interest in the hidden intersections of race and disability.

BIO:

Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the Director of Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press, 2012, Alan Bray Memorial Award), explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life” and “nonlife.” Further writing appears in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Discourse, Women in Performance, Australian Feminist Studies, Amerasia, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Along with Jasbir K. Puar, Chen serves as series coeditor for a book series at Duke called “Anima.” Chen sits on the board of directors for the Society for Disability Studies.

Sensing Practices

The Citizen Sense research group is hosting a year-long seminar series on “Sensing Practices.” The series attends to questions about how sensing and practice emerge, take hold, and form attachments across environmental, material, political and aesthetic concerns. Rather than take “the senses” as a fixed starting point, this seminar series instead considers how sensing-as-practice is differently articulated in relation to technologies of environmental monitoring, data gathered for evidentiary claims, the formation of citizens, and more-than-human entanglements. How might these expanded approaches to sensing practices recast engagements with experience, and reconfigure explorations of practice-based research?

Since the identification of HIV, the virus has required extensive engagement between the social sciences and biomedicine. However, the relationship between the two has often been contentious: differences in language, frameworks for analysis, representation and understandings of what is at stake have provoked responses to the virus to categorise themselves as either biomedical or behavioural interventions.

Consequently, and in contrast to its entangled character, the problem of HIV is often articulated in dichotomous terms – social or physiological. In contrast, by bringing together speakers (and audience participants) from the social sciences, humanities and biomedical landscape this symposium seeks not to amplify mutual critique, but to expand modes of collaboration. Acordingly, we will explore the relations – both beneficial and problematic – between research on HIV conducted within the humanities and social sciences and biomedical development.

(Confirmed) Speakers:

Dr Marsha Rosengarten Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr des. Lukas Engelmann University of Cambridge
Ms Susie MacLean International HIV/AIDS Alliance
Dr Catherine Montgomery University of Amsterdam
Dr Catherine Dodds London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Prof Jane Anderson Homerton University Hospital
Dr Mitzy Gafos University College London
Dr Monica Greco Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Mike Youle Royal Free Hospital

Listen to the speaker presentations below:

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Bursaries are available, attendance is free and lunch and tea/coffee will be provided. However, places are limited so please be sure to register for the event by the 17th of June by e-mailing: admin (@hivproject.co.uk).

Please check The HIV Project website for further information (including the programme) in the lead up to the event

Convened by The HIV Project: Richard Boulton, Ulla Mcknight, Emily Nicholls, Agata Pacho, Annette-Carina van der Zaag with the support of Marsha Rosengarten.

In association with Association for Social Sciences and Humanities in HIV (ASSHH) and the Unit of Play (UoP, Goldsmiths)

Funded by Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness