Obligation and the “Gift of Life”: Code Status Discussions Amongst Potential Recipients in the Transplant Setting
Society for the Social Studies of Science, October 2021
The challenge of communicating the decision to withhold or provide cardiopulmonary resuscitation in seriously ill, hospitalized patients demands the attention of a wide range of health care professionals. In many areas of medicine, discussions about the goals of care must take an array of factors into consideration: how an initial code status question ought to be framed; who should be involved in these discussions and when; and even what the very meaning of “do not resuscitate” itself ought to be. Code status and goals of care discussions take on new meaning within the setting of solid organ transplant. Taking up a case study of end stage liver disease, we consider the question of code status in light of meeting the challenges of balancing justice, respect for persons, equity, and medical utility, unpacking the social norms and values that currently operate in the transplant setting.
Multimodal Imaginings and the Frictions of Cure in Transplant
Salon November 18, 2022
Afterlives of Transplantation
Salon August 18, 2023
Curating Critical Futurities in Transplant Medicine: Arts Practices in Sensory Ethnography as Counter-Logics
Society for the Social Studies of Science, November 2023
This Making and Doing session invites 4S participants to experientially engage with multisensory and multimodal arts-based research practices that our project team has been developing within a sensory ethnographic study of transplant medicine in Toronto, Canada, drawing STS scholars and activists into conversation and reflection on the ways that feminist/crip STS practices can know differently.
Entering the Transplant Assemblage: Crip/Feminist/Technoscience/Multisensory Articulations with Solid Organ Transplantation
Society for the Social Studies of Science, November 2023
In this presentation, we explore multisensory and multimodal artistic practices that have been central to our project. Considering graphic illustrations from our public art salons, collective visual field notes, poetic re-writings of patient manuals, and a soundscape of acute transplant care, we examine how these practices articulate layered, multiple, and simultaneously held meanings, experiences, and understandings rendered through both form and content, what is in versus out of frame, choices of text versus image, and the resonances of these with sonic engagements in the field. At the same time, we consider how these renderings–as artistic outputs in their own right–intervene materially in the field of transplant medicine, creating novel loops of sense-affect-knowledge.
November-December 2023
The Frictions team hosted a series of pop-up galleries in November and December 2023 showcasing artistic engagement with the complexities of transplantation, featuring work by artists with lived experience of transplantation as well as pieces created in dialogue. The pop-up art installations explore relationships between sensing-knowing-feeling in solid organ transplantation using visual, sonic, and multimedia artistic works.
Part of the “Frictions of Futurity” research-creation study, the pieces are in conversation with crip technoscience, feminist science and technology studies, and disability arts. Bringing these perspectives together is meant to generate speculative frames that challenge our common-place understandings of transplantation. Artist practices offer a way to engage with the diverse experiences of transplantation and understand these as knowledge-producing, even as much as the forms of knowledge offered through arts and lived experience are not always highly valued in medical spaces.
The pop-up installation persuades us to know differently, so as to materialize liveability and thriving in a transplantation lifeworld as political, creative acts.
Curating Critical Futurities in Transplant Medicine: Arts Practices as New Knowledge
Canadian Donation and Transplantation Research Program (CDTRP) 10th Annual Scientific Meeting , December 2023
Pop-up art installation showcasing visual, sonic, and multimedia artistic works that explore the complexities, unknowns, and lived experiences of solid organ transplant. By transporting art out of the gallery and into a national transplant conference, we invite a consideration of art as way to generate, reveal, name, and engage with the multiplicity of experiences within transplantation.
Art+Science Technologies: Curatorial Modes and Feminist/Crip Knowing through Making
Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics, and Science Studies (FEMMSS) 8th Annual Conference, June 2024
In this presentation, we look to some of the technologies that exist within an art+science exploration of transplantation and through these technologies we explore the impacts that knowing otherwise might have for the lived experience of transplantation. The labels of art and science order social worlds and knowledge communities. Here we unpack what happens when the expected domains, spaces, and materialities of these categories are transposed and consider what futures materialize when transplant medicine is brought into conversation with multimodal artistic practices and curation.
Frictions of Futurity: Curative Tensions & Artistic Re-imaginings of Transplantation
University of Toronto, June 2024
Mobilizing Knowledge Making: A Collective Field Notes Installation
Society for the Social Studies of Science, July 2024
In this Making and Doing session, we stage an installation of collective field notes crafted by individuals taking part in our sites of ethnographic research and public arts engagement including at art exhibitions, multidisciplinary salons, film screenings, and conference discussion lounges. Threaded and hung in the form of a stabile—a stationary abstract mobile that plays with motion and stasis—we engage 4S participants to making iterations of the stabiles, inviting them to think aloud with us as we consider and reconsider together the meaning and role collective field notes can play in ethnographic and arts-based research, and collective practices for knowledge-making.
