Psychobook - om psykologiska test och frågeformulär

Wired tipsar om en nyutkommen bok som samlat olika psykologiska test, frågeformulär och instrument i vad som nästan verkar vara en blandning mellan en coffee table-bok och en konstsamling. Boken heter Psychobook: Games, Tests, Questionnaires, Histories och presenteras så här på Adlibris:
 

Who knew a trip to the therapist could be so much fun, even aesthetically rewarding? Beyond sharing feelings or complaining about your mother, Psychobook reveals the rich history of psychological testing in a fascinating sideways look at classic testing methods, from word-association games to inkblots to personality tests.
Psychobook includes never-before-seen content from long-hidden archives, as well as reimagined tests from contemporary artists and writers, to try out yourself, at home or at parties. A great gift for the therapist in your life and the therapist in you, for anyone interested in the history of psychology and psychological paraphernalia, or for anyone who enjoys games and quizzes. Psychobook will brighten your day and outlook.

Ny bok om intagnas erfarenheter och upplevelser

Om bara ett par veckor släpps en ny svensk antologi om intagnas upplevelser som låter intressant, "Inspärrad: Röster från intagna på sinnessjukhus, fängelser och andra anstalter 1850–1992". 

Att bli omhändertagen av samhället är ett djupt ingrepp i en människas liv. De individuella mötena med anstalten uppmärksammas sällan, men i Inspärrad får vi följa personer som varit intagna på sinnessjukhus, sanatorier, fängelser, uppfostrings- och alkoholistanstalter i Sverige någon gång mellan 1850 och 1992. Genom att ta del av de intagnas berättelser får vi kunskap om hur de förhållit sig till sin situation och sin omvärld, såväl innanför som utanför anstaltens väggar. Författarna är forskare i skilda discipliner och möts i sitt engagemang för den inspärrades röst. Genom att även höja blicken från de enskilda fallen fångar skribenterna också in övergripande drag och samhälleliga strukturer. I centrum för studierna står uttryck för makt och motstånd, förhandling, identiteter och strategier. Skribenterna belyser de intagnas erfarenheter och vill med dessa exempel utveckla ett forskningsfält som fått förnyad aktualitet.

Your brain is not a computer

Aeon har nyligen publicerat en spännande och läsvärd essä av psykologen Robert Epstein, med titeln "The empty brain". I korthet argumenterar han för att de datormetaforer som ofta används i samband med försök att förstå hjärnan inte passar och egentligen bara förvirrar oss ännu mer.

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.
Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer

...

[C]omputers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.

Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?

George Makaris "Notes From Psychiatry’s Battle Lines"

George Makari, psykiater samt psykatrihistoriker, har skriven en intressant (men i min mening lite väl tendentiös) essä om hur det är att arbeta kliniskt samtidigt som han också skriver historiskt om psykiatrin. Den är, trots sina brister, läsvärd eftersom den sätter fingret på en viktig punkt: om, och i så fall hur, hänger de två fälten samman? Artikel finns på NY Times.

The history of peer review

Den här artikeln faller lite utanför det jag vanligtvis brukar länka till, men den var för intressant för att inte nämnas. Peer review framställs ju ofta som själva essensen i forskning; det som garanterar att kunskapen som produceras är av hög kvalitet och av allmänt intresse. Men, som Aileen Fyfe skriver, så är peer review inte så utmärkande som vi kanske vill tro - och möjligen inte heller så viktigt som vi vill tro.

Peer review is often thought of as ancient and unchanging, but it is neither – and it shouldn’t be treated as a sacred cow

 Läs hela artikeln på Times High Education

Steven Shapin om autismens historia

Nyligen släpptes en ny bok om autismens historia, In a different key: The story of autism, skriven av två amerikanska journalister. I det senaste numret av The New Yorker har vetenskapshistorikern Steven Shapin, troligen mest känd för den inflytelsrika boken Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, recenserat boken och han skriver bland annat att:

“[A]utism,” “Asperger’s,” and “the spectrum” no longer belong solely to the psychiatric profession, and have drifted into lay usage. If we all have spectrum tendencies and Aspie moments, then the labels no longer have much use as medical categories. The spectrum has been stretched to the breaking point, and autism now sits astride a social fault line between what’s considered normal and what’s pathological, what’s an eccentricity and what’s in need of expert therapy. These matters belong to our moral life, and we can’t reasonably expect them to be settled by medical science or clinical evidence or even the law.   

 Läs hela recensionen på The New Yorkers hemsida.

Temanummer av Social Science & Medicine: The rise of developmental science: Debates on health and humanity

Alldeles nyligen kom Social Science & Medicine med ett temanummer på ämnet The rise of developmental science: Debates on health and humanity med en mängd spännande artiklar. Som redaktörerna skriver i sin introduktionsartikel:

This Special Issue aims to chart a pathway for the formation of a “critical” science of child development. Our “critical” starting-point builds on a genealogical approach: that is, the historical tracing of taken-for-granted concepts and theories of child development that arose in the post-Enlightenment era and that continue with us today

Det tar alldeles för stor plats att nämna alla relevanta artiklar men ett axplock är:

Gregory J.S. Hollin & Alison Pilnick - Infancy, autism, and the emergence of a socially disordered body

Twenty academic psychologists and neuroscientists, with an interest in autism and based within the United Kingdom, were interviewed between 2012 and 2013 on a variety of topics related to the condi- tion. Within these qualitative interviews researchers often argued that there had been a ‘turn to infancy’ since the beginning of the 21st century with focus moving away from the high functioning adolescent and towards the pre-diagnostic infant deemed to be ‘at risk’ of autism. The archetypal research of this type is the ‘infant sibs’ study whereby infants with an elder sibling already diagnosed with autism are subjected to a range of tests, the results of which are examined only once it becomes apparent whether that infant has autism. It is claimed in this paper that the turn to infancy has been facilitated by two phenomena; the autism epidemic of the 1990s and the emergence of various methodological techniques, largely although not exclusively based within neuroscience, which seek to examine social disorder in the absence of comprehension or engagement on the part of the participant: these are experiments done to participants rather than with them.

Ofra Koffman - Fertile bodies, immature brains?: A genealogical critique of
neuroscientific claims regarding the adolescent brain and of the global fight against adolescent motherhood

This article presents a critique of neuroscientific claims regarding the adolescent brain and the sug- gestion that adolescent motherhood disrupts the healthy development of the mother and her child. It does so by presenting a genealogical investigation of the conceptualisation of ‘adolescence’ in Western psychology and the emergence of the problematization of ‘adolescent motherhood’. This examination reveals that antecedents to neuroscientific claims regarding adolescent immaturity, impulsivity and instability were articulated by psychologists throughout the first half of the 20th century. However, up until the 1960s therewas no problematization of ‘adolescent motherhood’ per se and adolescent mothers were only discussed as part of the concern with ‘unwed mothers’. Exploring the continuities and shifts in assertions regarding adolescence, this article highlights the complex history of some of the notions currently found in neuroscience.

Dominique P. Béhague - Taking pills for developmental ails in Southern Brazil: The biologization of adolescence?

In the late 1990s researchers in Pelotas Southern Brazil began documenting what they considered to be unacceptably high rates of licensed psychotropic use among individuals of all ages, including youth. This came as a surprise, since the vast majority of psychiatrists in Pelotas draw on psychoanalytic theory and approach pharmaceutical use, especially for children and adolescents, in a consciously tempered way. Drawing from a longitudinal ethnographic sub-study, part of a larger 1982 birth cohort study, this paper follows the circuitous trajectories of emergent pharma-patterns among “shantytown” youth over a ten- year period, exploring the thickly layered and often moralized contingencies in which psychodynamic psychiatrists' intention to resist excessive pharmaceuticalization both succeed and crumble. I juxtapose these trajectories with the growing salience of an “anti-biologizing” explanatory framework that psy- chiatrists and researchers are using to pre-empt the kind of diagnostics-driven “biopsychiatrization” so prevalent in North America. My analysis suggests that psychiatrists' use of this framework ironically contributes to their failed attempts to “resist” pharmaceuticalization.

Jeremy Safran reflekterar över replikationens roll inom psykologin

För några veckor sedan skrev jag ett inlägg om den "replikationskris" som skakade (nåja, kanske en överdrift) psykologivärlden. Nu har psykoterapiforskaren Jeremy Safran skrivit ett tänkvärt svar till den diskussion som följt i krisens svallvågor.Väl värt att läsa.

Hur replikerbar är den psykologiska forskningen?

The Atlantic har skrivit en intressant artikel om de problem som verkar finnas inom psykologin när det gäller att kunna reproducera samma resultat som tidigare studier påvisat. En forskare i USA har tillsammans med en mängd kollegor replikerat 100 psykologistudier och slutsatsen är deprimerande:

Although 97 percent of the 100 studies originally reported statistically significant results, just 36 percent of the replications did. ... They also considered the effect sizes of the studies. These measure the strength of a phenomenon; if your experiment shows that red lights make people angry, the effect size tells you how much angrier they get. And again, the results were worrisome. On average, the effect sizes of the replications were half those of the originals.

Frågan blir hur detta kommer tas emot i forskarvärlden. Är det ändå godtagbara replikationsresultat? Är det viktigare - som en i artikeln skriver - att sträva efter innovativa resultat och då får man räkna med en del "false positives"? Är det ett tecken på krisen inom psykologin? Förhoppningsvis leder det åtminstone till en vettig diskussion kring forskningsprocessen och vilka normer och verifikationskriterier som bör råda.

Artikel: Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking

Bloggen Mindhacks tipsar om en spännande artikel i Nautilus om Julian Jaynes klassiska bok The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind från 1976. Jaynes drev den fascinerande (och spekulativa) tesen att människans självmedvetande först uppstod ca 3000 år sedan och att man innan dess upplevde det som att den inre röst som vi nu tänker är oss själva egentligen var gudarnas röst. Artikeln beskriver hur Jaynes kom att bli intresserad av självmedvetande som fenomen, hur hans bok kom till men också hur dagens neuroforskare och filosofer ser på Jaynes påståenden.

Hitta artikeln här: Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking

Artikel: Does Psychology Have a Gender?

Alexandra Rutherford, Kelli Vaughn-Johnson och Elissa Rodkey har skrivit en kort text om den "könade" psykologin och den "könade" psykologen i The Psychologist:

Gender historian Judith Zinsser has recently commented that, ‘Historians of every region of the world know that “learning” and the “learned” have not been fixed entities. All that has been fixed in the past is the sex and gender of those who defined the concept and enjoyed its prerogatives’ (Zinsser, 2014, p.5). So we pose the questions, Does psychology have a gender? What would a history that approached psychology as itself gendered look like? Why would it matter?

 Hitta den här!

Madness and Meaning: Depictions of insanity through history

Psykiatrihistorikern Andrew Scull har skrivit en lättläst och trevlig översiktsartikel om "galenskapens" historia samt illustrerat denna med fascinerande bilder. Artikeln, som finnes här, rekommenderas starkt som eftermiddagsläsning!

Avbildningen av den babyloniska kungen Nebuchadnezzar drabbad av galenskap

Temanummer av History of Psychiatry från 2011

Jag råkade nyligen stöta på ett intressant nummer av tidskriften History of Psychiatry med temat "Writing the history of psychiatry in the 20th century". Numret är ett par år gammalt och verkar ha gått ganska obemärkt förbi, åtminstone om man tittar på hur många citeringar som artiklarna fått, vilket är synd för många av dem är riktigt bra. Särskilt bra är den introduktionsartikel som ramar in numret och som lyfter fram behovet av att hitta nya narrativ gällande psykiatrin, istället för att återanvända de traditionella dito som dels har sina rötter i den antipsykiatriska rörelsen från 1960-talet, dels i stor del bygger på forskning gjord på psykiatrins historia på 1800-talet. Dessa, menar Volker Hess och Benoît Majerus, är inte adekvata för att beskriva psykiatrin efter Andra världskriget.

In recent decades we have seen innumerable different studies on psychiatry in the twentieth century published each year in which we learn much about the foundation and emergence of particular hospitals, the introduction and advance of new treatments and the development of classifications for psychiatric illnesses and their impact on medical practice. However, re- examining these studies – which is what we would like to do in this introductory article – raises the question of the way in which historiography is associated with a theoretical framework that helps us to understand the specific features of psychiatry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but not in the present one.

 Hess och Majerus pekar på tre tänkbara vägar framåt: frigöra sig ännu mer från sin antipsykiatriska genealogi; bli metodologiskt och teoretiskt inspirerad av Science Studies; samt bli bättre på att tänka nya former av periodisering. Tre tips som undertecknad tycker låter strålande och som alla kan leda till en mer intressant och nyanserad historieskrivning av psykiatrin och dess roll i samhället.

Temanummer av Science in Context: Of Means and Ends: Mind and Brain Science in the Twentieth Century

Det nya numret av Science in Context är dedikerat till ämnet "Of Means and Ends: Mind and Brain Science in the Twentieth Century"; med redaktören Stephen Caspers ord:

This topical issue addresses how scientists, physicians, and psychologists came to see the ends of technology as important in-and-of themselves. In so doing, the authors of these essays offer an interpretation of historian Paul Forman's revisionist and highly contextualist chronology of the twentieth century, which presents the comparatively recent tendency to aggrandize the ends of technology as evidence of a major, epochal transformation in the epistemic culture of twentieth-century American science. This collection of papers suggests that it was in the vanguard of such fields as psychology, psychiatry, and neurophysiology in North America and Europe that the ends and applications of technology became important in-and-of themselves.

 Av särskilt intresse för den psykologiintresserade kan följande artiklar vara:

Jason Miller -  Dredging and Projecting the Depths of Personality: The Thematic Apperception Test and the Narratives of the Unconscious

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was a projective psychological test created by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray and his lover Christina Morgan in the 1930s. The test entered the nascent intelligence service of the United States (the OSS) during the Second World War due to its celebrated reputation for revealing the deepest aspects of an individual's unconscious. It subsequently spread as a scientifically objective research tool capable not only of dredging the unconscious depths, but also of determining the best candidate for a management position, the psychological complexes of human nature, and the unique characteristics of a culture. Two suppositions underlie the utility of the test. One is the power of narrative. The test entails a calculated abuse of the subjects tested, based on their inability to interpret their own narrative. The form of the test requires that a subject fail to decipher the coded, unconscious meaning their narrative reveals. Murray believed the interpretation of a subject's narrative and the projection contained therein depended exclusively on the psychologist. This view of interpretation stems from the seemingly more reasonable belief of nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers that a literary text serves as a proxy for an author's deepest self. The TAT also supposes that there is something beyond consciousness closely resembling a psychoanalytic unconscious, which also has clear precedents in nineteenth-century German thought. Murray's views on literary interpretation, his view of psychology as well as the continuing prevalence of the TAT, signals a nineteenth-century concept of self that insists “on relations of depth and surface, inner and outer life” . It is clear the hermeneutic practice of Freud's psychoanalysis, amplified in Jung, drew on literary conceptions of the unconscious wider than those of nineteenth-century psychology.

Jeremy Blatter - Screening the Psychological Laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotechnics, and the Cinema, 1892–1916

According to Hugo Münsterberg, the direct application of experimental psychology to the practical problems of education, law, industry, and art belonged by definition to the domain of psychotechnics. Whether in the form of pedagogical prescription, interrogation technique, hiring practice, or aesthetic principle, the psychotechnical method implied bringing the psychological laboratory to bear on everyday life. There were, however, significant pitfalls to leaving behind the putative purity of the early psychological laboratory in pursuit of technological utility. In the Vocation Bureau, for example, psychological instruments were often deemed too intimidating for a public unfamiliar with the inner workings of experimental science. Similarly, when psychotechnical means were employed by big business in screening job candidates, ethical red flags were raised about this new alliance between science and capital. This tension was particularly evident in Münsterberg's collaboration with the Paramount Pictures Corporation in 1916. In translating psychological tests into short experimental films, Münsterberg not only envisioned a new mass medium for the dissemination of psychotechnics, but a means by which to initiate the masses into the culture of experimental psychology.

Rebecca Schilling & Steven Casper - Of Psychometric Means: Starke R. Hathaway and the Popularization of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was developed at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in the 1930s and 1940s. It became a highly successful and highly controversial psychometric tool. In professional terms, psychometric tools such as the MMPI transformed psychology and psychiatry. Psychometric instruments thus readily fit into the developmental history of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology; they were a significant part of the narrative of those fields’ advances in understanding, intervening, and treating people with mental illnesses. At the same time, the advent of such tools also fits into a history of those disciplines that records the rise of obsessional observational and evaluative techniques and technologies in order to facilitate patterns of social control that became typical during the Progressive Era in the United States and after. It was those patterns that also nurtured the resistance to psychometrics that emerged during the Vietnam War and after.

Andrew Scull - Contending Professions: Sciences of the Brain and Mind in the United States, 1850–2013

This paper examines the intersecting histories of psychiatry and psychology (particularly in its clinical guise) in the United States from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. It suggests that there have been three major shifts in the ideological and intellectual orientation of the “psy complex.” The first period sees the dominance of the asylum in the provision of mental health care, with psychology, once it emerges in the early twentieth century, remaining a small enterprise largely operating outside the clinical arena, save for the development of psychometric technology. It is followed, between 1945 and 1980, by the rise of psychoanalytic psychiatry and the emergence of clinical psychology. Finally, the re-emergence of biological psychiatry is closely associated with two major developments: an emphasis that emerges in the late 1970s on rendering the diagnosis of psychiatric illnesses mechanical and predictable; and the long-term effects of the psychopharmacological revolution that began in the early 1950s. This third period has seen a shift the orientation of mainstream psychiatry away from psychotherapy, the end of traditional mental hospitals, and a transformed environment within which clinical psychologists ply their trade.

Michael Pettit om om psykologisk expertis, subjektifiering och historiografi

Michael Pettit, som bland annat skrivit The Science of Deception, har i det senaste numret av Social Studies of Science skrivit en utmärkt essärecension av fem böcker som alla berör psykologins historia, tesen om samhällets psykologisering, psykologisk expertis, den publik som psykologer riktar sig mot, med mera. Som han så klokt skriver i inledningen:

"Few have greater confidence in psychology’s ability to mold subjectivity than its critics. However, there is a tension in much of the historical and sociological literature on psychology and the psychological society between a commitment to a microphysics of power ... and the kinds of sources and voices that get included in such analyses. ‘Subjectification’ ... is all too often taken for granted, rather than made into a matter of inquiry involving contestation, multiplicity, and rejection. Relationships between scientists and publics are largely understood in terms of a hypodermic needle model of communication ... On this basis, critical psychologist-historians select their favored disorder or construct, offer a largely intellectual history of it, and then assert that everyday experience has been psychologized. Such an approach speaks more to scientists’ visions and pretensions than to the social life of psychological facts ... Moreover, this approach bolsters and inflates, rather than critically scrutinizes, the scientist’s authority. We need greater specificity about psychology’s impact, better evidence of the circuits between expert description and self-understanding, and appreciation of the complicated lives of scientific methods and theories." (Referenser borttagna)

 Precis som Pettit skriver så överdrivs psykologins inflytande i vissa kritiska artiklar och man lyckas inte "fånga in" det förhandlande som egentligen alla former av såväl subjektifiering som objektifiering innebär. Hans artikel kan starkt rekommenderas och hittas här.

Shoutout till Advances in the History of Psychology för tipset.

Ny bok av Roger Smith: Between Mind and Nature: a history of psychology

Psykologhistorikern Roger R. Smith har nyligen släppt sin nya bok Between Mind and Nature: a history of psychology.

We live in a psychological age. Psychologists are increasingly prominent and active in every sphere of life and we understand ourselves in psychological terms. It was not always so: psychology has a history. The word 'psychology' flags the idea that there is or, will be, a unified, true knowledge of the mind. Currently, the candidacy of evolutionary neuroscience holds sway. Yet, now and in the past, 'psychology' is a family name for a bewildering range of beliefs and

preoccupations about what psychologists know and do. There is an intrinsic interest in knowing how people think about themselves, how they see their spiritual or material nature. What people think psychology's relation is to religion, politics, the arts, social life, the natural sciences and technology is an integral part of our human story. Between Mind and Nature explores the big questions bound up in this history: What is human nature? Is natural science the only rational way of thought? Will psychology provide answers to human problems? Does the very notion of being an individual, of having a 'self', depend on social and historical conditions? Can the brain explain mind? Cogently written, this book will reveal much to those who wish to know more about the quest for knowledge of the mind, for historical study of brain and mind and for scientific and humanistic approaches to people. It concludes by posing important questions about the value and direction of psychology today.

 Den verkar överlag fått väldigt positiva recensioner, bland annat skriver Hendrikus Stam att "As a stand-alone work on the history of psychology, it is current and deserves a place among the very best of our general histories of the discipline" och Robert Harland anser att "[b]oth psychologists and psychiatrists should read this book". Med andra ord är det absolut en kandidat för årets julklapp!

Somatosphere: In the Journals…July

Med en beundransvärd regelbundenhet brukar bloggen Somatosphere ta sig an skörden av nya artiklar som berör medicinsk antropologi, med mera, och summera dem - en tjänst som jag är väldigt tacksam för då slipper jag rota igenom fullt lika många på egen hand. För några veckor sen släppte de juli-uppdateringen där det förekommer flertalet spännande artiklar, däribland Limits and Limitlessness: Exploring Time in Scientific Practice av Antonia Walford, publicerad i Social Analysis 57(1)

This article explores some of the ways that time figures in the scientific practices of instrumental micrometeorology and climatic and weather modeling. It draws on ethnographic work done with the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), an international scientific project that aims to assess the role of the Amazon forest in the global carbon cycle and to provide sustainable techniques for the future management of the region. An examination of the knowledge practices that have emerged from this ethnography (such as calibration and prediction) provides an opportunity to rethink the relation between 'natural time' and 'social time(s)'. This allows for a discussion of the roles that certainty, uncertainty, finiteness, and limitlessness play in both scientific and ethnographic practice.

 Blott ett smakprov från alla de som presenteras på deras blogg, så gå in och läs!

Sen så skulle jag bara vilja nämna att jag är medveten om att det blivit väldigt många rekommendationer och dylikt på sistone, och desto mindre eget material. Detta kommer (förhoppningsvis) att åtgärdas inom en snar framtid i och med att jag har flera inlägg som jag kontinuerligt skriver på. Men ursäktar mig ändå!

Bruno Latour släpper en ny bok!

Efter en upptagen men härlig sommar börjar jag äntligen få  lite tid över till att uppdatera mig om den facklitterära världen, och går det att få en bättre start än att se att Bruno Latour precis släppt en ny bok? (Troligtvis inte.)
Latours nya verk heter An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns och beskrivs så här:

The result of a twenty five years inquiry, it offers a positive version to the question raised, only negatively, with the publication, in 1991, of ''We have never been modern'': if ''we'' have never been modern, then what have ''we'' been? From what sort of values should ''we'' inherit? In order to answer this question, a research protocol has been developed that is very different from the actor-network theory. The question is no longer only to define ''associations'' and to follow networks in order to redefine the notion of ''society'' and ''social'' (as in ''Reassembling the Social'') but to follow the different types of connectors that provide those networks with their specific tonalities. Those modes of extension, or modes of existence, account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and so on. This systematic effort for building a new philosophical anthropology offers a completely different view of what the ''Moderns'' have been and thus a very different basis for opening a comparative anthropology with the other collectives - at the time when they all have to cope with ecological crisis.

För den som inte kan hålla sig utan direkt vill fördjupa sig går det att läsa första kapitlet samt innehållsförteckningen på Latours egna hemsida.

Videotips: Guest lecture by Professor Nikolas Rose, 'Mental Illness: Five Hard questions'

Det har kommit upp en timslång föreläsning av Nikolas Rose, som jag nämnt otaliga gånger här, kring mentala störningar som är väl värd att se.

Abstract:  In this talk I want to characterize the ‘territory’ of mental illness today by posing five hard questions that seem to me to represent genuine empirical, conceptual, professional and ethical dilemmas.   My questions are: Is there an‘epidemic’ of mental disorder?;  Does the path to understanding mental disorder lie through the brain?;  What is the role of diagnosis and of diagnostic manuals?;  Should we seek early identification of those at risk of future mental pathology? What is the place of patients, users, survivors, consumers in the mental health system?  On the basis of this discussion, I will conclude by trying to draw out some lessons for the politics of mental health today.

Se den här.

Artikeltips: Watching the watchers: lessons from the science of science advice

Brittiska The Guardian publicerade häromdagen en artikel av Sheila Jasanoff, professor i Vetenskaps- och teknologistudier, där hon reflekterar över betydelsen av att inkludera STS (Science and Technology Studies) i utvärderingen av hur vetenskap förstås och tillämpas. Särskilt skriver hon om när råd och instruktioner från den vetenskapliga världen implementeras inom de politiska och offentliga sfärerna utan att granskas eller problematiseras, en brist som verkligen bör rättas till.

It is time for science advisory systems to recognise that – to stay honest – they too need critics from the communities of research studying how knowledge and action are linked together. In democracies, no institutions of power should be beyond critique. If judges may not presume to stand above the law, still less should science advisers seek to insulate themselves from the critical gaze of the science of science advice.

För hela artikeln, se Watching the watchers.