Bridging the gap between science in laboratories and clinical application
Knowledge translation (KT) refers to a variety of scientific practices and research activities bound together by the common goal of ‘bridging the gap’ between science in laboratories and clinical application, and more generally, putting research-based knowledge into policy and practical care.
How to challenge knowledge translation
The aim of this seminar is to examine and challenge KT by working through and with the convergence and divergences between different translational epistemologies. As KT has had massive impact on practical healthcare, global health, and knowledge policy as well as governance relating to sustainability, a critical examination of KT is of huge academic and societal significance. The point of departure for the seminar is the observation that KT is based upon a reductive understanding of translation and knowledge transmission. Standard models of KT take translation and knowledge transmission as a phenomenon for granted, and accordingly downplays the complexity of translation as an entangled material, a textual and cultural process, which inevitably affects the ‘original scientific message’. By contrasting KT with historical, cultural, and epistemic differences from its scientific “prehistory”, and by analysing it with reference to broader views of translation from the human sciences, the project Bodies in Translation aims to develop concepts of medical translation able to cope with contemporary epistemic and cultural differences.
We will also discuss the relations between knowledge and the production of incommunicability. KT also produces ignorance for both practitioners and patients that are characterized by both a lack of knowledge and a rational/moral duty to find, absorb, and act on what happens on the other side of the KT— the production of discourse and its material artifacts that get identified as the stuff that will fill the gaps of knowledge identified as the occasion for KT.
Program
May 25, 2023, 10:00 AM–3:00 PM, Georg Sverdrups Hus, seminarrom 1
| 10.00-10.05 | Welcome by Prof. Eivind Engebretsen |
| 10.05-10.20 | Introduction: KT, incommunicability — and “culture” by John Ødemark |
| 10.20-11.00 | Diagnostic Incommunicability and Collective Knowledge Production: Forging Multiple Forms of Partial Translation in a Rabies Epidemic by Charles Briggs & Clara Mantini-Briggs |
| 11.00-11.15 | Discussion, moderator Marta Arnaldi |
| 11.15-11.30 | The negotiated medical fact and knowledge practices in cases of rape by Kari Nyheim Solbrække |
| 11.30-11.50 | Translating psychedelics: Between Rituals, Trips and Trials and Between Shamans, ‘Psychonauts’ and Patients" by Tony Sandset |
| 11.50-12.05 | Discussion, moderator Eivind Engebretsen |
| 12.15-13.30 | LUNCH, UNION Frederikke |
| 13.30-13.50 | Knowledge Translation and the Communicable Subject, Eivind Engebretsen |
| 13.50-14.10 |
Translating the Asylum: Alda Merini and the Making of Lyrical Psychiatry, Marta Arnaldi |
| 14.10-14.25 | Discussion, moderator John Ødemark |
| 14.25-14.30 | Short break |
| 14.30-15.00 |
Discussion and wrap up, moderator Eivind Engebretsen |
Participants
Professor Charles Briggs
Professor Clara Mantini-Briggs
Professor Kari Nyheim Solbrække
Professor Eivind Engebretsen
Postdoctoral Fellow Marta Arnaldi
Researcher Tony J. Sandset
Professor John Ødemark
This seminar is a cooperation between Bodies in Translation: Science, Knowledge and Sustainability in Cultural Translation - Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages and SHE.