Call for four PhD students in the Medical Humanities Research Programme
2022-09-09
The call is now open for several of the PhD positions connected to the graduate programme in Medical Humanities starting in spring 2023. Below are project titles and links to more information about the projects and how to apply.
The Multifaceted Life of Digital Health Records: Between Official Documentation, Personal Information and Cultural Object
The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of ALM (Archival Studies, Information Studies and Museum- and Cultural Heritage Studies) and the Department of Women's and Children's Health.
Healthcare providers around the world have been making considerable efforts to give patients online access to their medical records since the late 1990s. The rationales of online accessible health records are many from effectivising and improving healthcare, empowering patients to transparency and freedom of information. As a result of digitising and opening access to previously closed professional medical documentation and assigning it with new personal, social and technical ramifications, medical records have changed shape both conceptually and in practical terms when they have been reframed as patient accessible online health records. A contemporary health record is not anymore only a doctor’s or nurse’s personal note to oneself. It is an information source used by both care providers and patients, potential research data and an embodiment and a carrier of evidence of deeply personal and emotional experiences and memories. So far historical and contemporary medical and health records have been studied to varying extents in the medical context and in humanities disciplines respectively but what is missing so far is research that brings together different understandings of the health records both as contemporary tools, information carriers, personal and cultural artefacts for their diverse user groups and as future historical and cultural records of our time. The proposed project addresses this specific gap. It inquires from a combined medical informatics and archival and heritage studies perspective into the nexus of different meanings assigned to (digital) health records by different actors in different parts of the lifetime of the records as medical and cultural artefacts to develop conceptual, cultural and technical means to bring the different conceptualisations into discussion with each other to facilitate mutual cross-domain understanding and practices with health records.
Deadline for applications: 7th of October.
The cells of the immune system: soldiers, carpenters or housekeepers? How to ask the right questions in the era of big data.
The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Department of Medical Cell Biology and Department of History of Science and Ideas.
The role of the immune system in host defense is well established scientifically as well as in popular culture. Accordingly, the cells of the immune system are often imagined as soldiers fighting wars against intruders in the form of viruses and bacteria, as well as against tumor cells. Societal challenges including the SARS-Cov2 pandemic reinforces the important role of the immune system to kill viruses, as well as to cause severe disease when overactivated. Indeed, novel treatments and potential cure of cancers not previously possible are today available due to recent ground-breaking scientific discoveries of how to unleash immunecell functions, a discovery that was awarded a Nobel prize in 2018. The notion of the immune cell soldiers is also closely aligned with the understanding of illness as specific entities invading the body, which has come to dominate modern medicine. However, even though the role of theimmune system as a defense mechanism is undisputed, this view is severely limited and obscures a multitude of ways in which immune cells function: their role in organic development, organ function and the maintenance of tissue homeostasis. This PhD project explores how the simplified narrative ignores other potentially important roles of immune cellsfor physiological processes, and how this has impacted the understanding of the immune system in health and disease by society, health care and research community, with specific focus on the analysis of single cell omics data.
Deadline for applications 28th of September.
Laboratories of the future? Complex buildings, flexible organizations and the research and education of life science
The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Economic History and the Department for Immunology, Genetics and Pathology.
Both research and education are investments for the future especially for a knowledge intensive welfare state such as Sweden, and within this welfare sector life science plays a prominent role. However, research and education have been compartmentalized and separated, they might still be conducted in the same buildings but are organized differently within the same organization.
The project combines three overlapping research fields. First, a focus on the performative aspects of university organizations and leadership. Second, an emphasis on the embeddedness of knowledge in the built environment and laboratories. Third, a focus on the radical transformation of medical research in the expansion of a “biomedical complex”.
By looking at one life science building, BMC, our aim is to understand what buildings do to handle this ambiguity, especially through the notion of flexibility, as it is practiced, as a solution on recurring and novel problems that appear. Paradoxically, it might seem, flexibility, is vended as a solution for upcoming obstacles – it remains remarkably stable. Flexibility and vulnerability seem to go hand in hand.
The expected effect is that the project will contribute towards a better understanding of making sites of research and education, in particular the dissolution of the traditional set of biomedical disciplines, the suspension of 20th century institutionalism and the emergence of the current format of biomedical fields of research. Life science and biomedical practice are central in the shift away from modernistic institutionalizations of knowledge into flexible fields of knowledge-networks.
Deadline for applications: 7th of October.
Soon, one PhD position for the following project will be announced:
Ethical dilemmas and ethical competence when providing dietary advice. Evaluation of an educational intervention
The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Department of Public Health and Caring Sciences and Department of Food Studies, Nutrition and Dietetics.
The project combines medical ethics andthe field of food studies, nutrition and dietetics. It concerns a subject that is very little investigated, namely ethical dilemmas and the need for ethical competence in providingdietary adviceas part of nutrition care. It is interdisciplinary and includes both empirical studies and theoretical/philosophical parts.The aim is to explore what ethical dilemmas health care professionals (primarily dietitians and nurses) providing dietary advice and nutrition care experience, how they handle them, and what kind of ethical competence they need in their work. A subsidiary aim is to investigate the effect ofan educational intervention aiming to strengthen the ethical competence of professionals providing dietary advice. A four-year PhD projectis planned, organized in four work packages (WPs). WP 1 is an observational study, observing the giving of dietary advice and nutrition care in a Swedish health care context. WP 2 is a qualitative focus group interview study with dietitians and nurses concerning ethical dilemmas they experience and how they handle them. WP 3 comprises an educational education as well as an evaluation of its effect. A study-specific questionnaire will be developed, based on the results from study 1 and 2, and used for base-line and follow-up measurements. The intervention consists of web-based lectures, literature and seminars. WP 4 is a theoretical study, analysing the empirical results concerning ethical concepts and arguments. The aim is to present a useful and well-balanced model of ethical competence for dietary advice giving as well as a method for developing it and keepit to a high standard. The project’s originality lays in its multi-disciplinary approach. The two research fields in the project will enrich each other, so that the results arenot only two additional perspectives, but rather a quite new understanding of the research problem.
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Anna Odell är artist in residence vid centrum för medicinsk humaniora
Erika Sigvardsdotter, koordinator vid institutionen för idé- och lärdomshistoria, Anna Odell, konstnär och nytillträdd på rollen som artist-in-residence, och Ylva Söderfeldt, föreståndare för Centrum för medicinsk humaniora. Foto: Uppsala universitet Under hösten 2023 inleder Centrum för medicinsk humaniora en Artist in residence-verksamhet. Första konstnären är Anna Odell. Hon kommer att vara en del av centrets forskningsmiljö och arbeta med ett eget konstprojekt med titeln ”Psyket”. Anna Odell har tidigare skapat flera konstprojekt som tematiserar den psykiatriska vården. Mest uppmärksammat av dessa är kanske ”Okänd kvinna 2009-349701”, från 2009.
– Psykisk hälsa och psykiatri är en av de medicinska grenar som ofta blir föremål för studier inom medicinsk humaniora, kanske särskilt för dess karaktär som randfenomen mellan kropp och själ, mellan medicin och själavård. Därför passar Anna Odells projekt mycket väl in i vår pågående verksamhet, säger Ylva Söderfeldt, föreståndare för Centrum för medicinsk humaniora.
Anna Odells projekt ”Psyket” är ett videoverk som utforskar dynamiken i en personalgrupp när komplexa sociala situationer uppstår mellan patienter och vårdare inom slutenpsykiatrin. Inom ramen för detta artist-in-residence kommer ett öppet symposium att anordnas på temat ”Konst i forskning – Forskning i konst” om hur konstnärer och forskare kan utveckla ny kunskap genom att närma sig varandras praktiker och kunskapstraditioner.
– Jag tror starkt på tvärdisiplinära samarbeten och blev så otroligt glad när jag fick möjligheten att göra ett konstnärligt arbete i dialog med forskare från flera olika områden, säger Anna Odell.
Med Artist in residence-satsningen vill Centrum för medicinsk humaniora främja konstnärliga perspektiv på medicin, farmaci och vård, samt de samhälleliga och kulturella frågor som relaterar till dem. Målsättningen med verksamheten är att undersöka och utveckla nya former för att utbyta erfarenhet och kunskap mellan konstnärer, forskare och studenter, för att på så sätt vidga de perspektiv med vilka vi undersöker och förstår fenomen och processer relaterade till medicinsk humaniora.
– Att bjuda in verksamma konstnärer genom ett Artist in residence-verksamhet är ett sätt för oss att föra in också konstnärliga perspektiv på medicin, vård och hälsa i detta redan tvärvetenskapliga fält, säger Ylva Söderfeldt.
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The Centre for Medical Humanities to launch artist-in-residence programme
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PhD level course announcement: Introduction to the Medical Humanities
Course credits: 4-6 HP | Language of instruction: English | Course to be held in the Spring Semester of 2023
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Open lecture and panel on breastfeeding
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Call for four PhD students in the Medical Humanities Research Programme
The call is now open for several of the PhD positions connected to the graduate programme in Medical Humanities starting in spring 2023. Below are project titles and links to more information about the projects and how to apply.
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Nu är det klart vilka som får Europeiska forskningsrådets (European Research Council) Starting Grant i 2021 års utlysning. En av forskarna är verksam vid Uppsala universitet: Ylva Söderfeldt, universitetslektor vid institutionen för idé- och lärdomshistoria.
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