Diagnostic Agents and Sensory Knowledge: Views from Ethnography and Immersive Technologies

Creative Language Technologies

This is episode #24 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 25th of August, 2022.

My invited speaker today is Dr. Anna Harris, an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Society Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Previously, she worked as a doctor in Australia and the UK. For the past 10 years she has been doing ethnographic studies of medicine.

Her approach to the social study of medicine is grounded in ethnographic studies of contemporary medical practices, to which she adds her clinical experience working in hospitals, as well as collaborations with historians, doctors, artists, museum specialists and craftspeople. Her research is focused on the anthropology and history of technological medical practices, especially concerning questions of sensorality, embodiment and learning. Dr. Harris also writes about hospital infrastructures in her blog and her twitterfeed. Currently, she is a member of the Maastricht Young Academy and the Global Young Academy, as well as a member of the Inner City Research Ethics Committee.

We started the discussion with the definition of health humanities (as compared with medical humanities), and its role in health professions education. Despite its increasing popularity, the field’s contribution to desired learning outcomes is still to be assessed and proven.
We then somewhat turned the dialogue toward diagnosis practices of care (within and outside clinics), where ‘sensory work’ seems to be very important. One problem for caregivers, like parents, for instances, is how to assign diagnostic meaning to potential childhood disease. Some important questions here are ‘How do caregivers know what warrants (usually immediate) medical care?’ and ‘How do they judge the severity of their child’s illness?’

The second part of the interview covered the future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence) as contributing to teaching sensory awareness in diagnosis and practices of care.

Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- health humanities (vs. medical humanities)
- diagnosis and practices of care (with their ‘sensory work’)
- caregivers making sense of symptoms and signs of possible disease
- Western medical practice (objective evidence-based judgments of health) vs. patient’s or caregiver’s experience
- the future of digital technologies (like MR and AI) for teaching sensory awareness

Relevant papers:
1) SE Carr, F Noya, B Phillips, A Harris, et al. Health Humanities curriculum and evaluation in health professions education: a scoping review. BMC medical Education 21 (1), 2021.
2) S Maslen, A Harris. Becoming a diagnostic agent: A collated ethnography of digital-sensory work in caregiving intra-actions. Social Science & Medicine 277, 2021.

Dr. Harris’ new books:
A Sensory Education (just out in paperback): https://www.routledge.com/A-Sensory-Education/Harris/p/book/9781350061651
Stethoscope: https://press.uchicago
Making Sense of Medicine: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed
Links to Dr. Harris’ website: www.makingclinicalsense.com