The Medicine, Science and Culture (MeSC) Research Interest Group

The Medicine, Science and Culture (MeSC) research interest group is an open and flexible forum in which members can explore, debate, and critique emerging issues/contours in medical and scientific worlds.

The group brings together a number of different disciplines within the social sciences, acknowledging the important relation between medicine and science and debates over increasingly biomedicalised Western societies. The events organised by MeSC will be of interest to those whose research interests lie broadly across the fields of medicine and science. Such events will include presentations (guest and in-house speakers), public workshops, reading group discussion, distributing papers for comment, and/or formulating ideas for symposia and conferences.

MeSC is a branch of the Culture, Imagination and Practice (CIP) research group and meets once every two months.  Events are open to academic staff, researchers, postgraduate students, and professionals working within the fields of medical care, health, and science.

The group is particularly open to those who want to engage with the significance of medical and scientific discourses, materials and practices for the ideas, identities, subjectivities, meanings and values that underpin contemporary culture, including knowledge itself.

We envisage people participating who are engaged with a wide range of theoretical and methodological debates including medical sociology, social studies of knowledge, science and technology, anthropology of science, health and society, and medical anthropology.

Aims

The primary agenda of MeSC is to exchange ideas, build networks, broaden horizons by promoting trans-disciplinary knowledge, and contribute toward the ongoing concerns of the critical and substantive social study of medicine, health, illness, and science.