Abstract
Contemporary health challenges (e.g., diabetes, climate change, antimicrobial resistance) are underpinned by complex interrelationships between behavioural, cultural, social, environmental and biological processes. Current experimental systems are only partially relevant to the problems they investigate, but aspirations to embed interdisciplinary working and community engagement into life scientists’ work in response to this partiality have proven difficult in practice. This paper explores one UK university-based life sciences research initiative as it seeks to develop modes of working which respond to this complexity. Drawing on ‘liminal hotspots’ as a sensitising concept, we explore how participating academics articulate complex problems, knowledge-making, interdisciplinary working and community engagement. Our analysis shows they become recurrently ‘trapped’ (institutionally and epistemologically) between fixed/universalised cosmologies of biology/disease, and more contemporary cosmologies in which biology and disease are conceptualised as situated and evolving. Adopting approaches to community organising based on ‘process pragmatism’, we propose ways in which life scientists might radically reorganise their practice and move beyond current limiting enactments of interdisciplinary and community engaged working. In doing so, we claim that the relevance and ‘humanness’ of life science research will be increased.
Highlights
You know, we’re looking at a more holistic definition of life and we’re obviously talking about human life here
This paper explores one UK university-based life sciences research initiative as it seeks to develop modes of working which respond to this complexity
We speculate that by attending to liminal hotspots through practices inspired by process pragmatism it may be possible to unleash potential for new ways of working that can grapple more effectively with situated and evolving cosmologies of life and health, and ensure that humanness remains the center of life science activity
Summary
You know, we’re looking at a more holistic definition of life and we’re obviously talking about human life here. Importantly, making um, [an] explicit link between human life, our social lives, with the environment...Um, because the environment is increasingly going to impact both on the social context but, and the many ways in which the environment affects humans at the level of the organ and itself In this interview extract, a Senior Lecturer in Public Health presents ‘life science’ research activity as warranting ‘‘a more holistic definition of human life’’. We speculate that by attending to liminal hotspots through practices inspired by process pragmatism it may be possible to unleash potential for new ways of working that can grapple more effectively with situated and evolving cosmologies of life and health, and ensure that humanness remains the center of life science activity
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