‘The Wrong Project’

We are thrilled to report that the wonderful A.R. Hopwood, artist and Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow, will join Healthy Scepticism as an artist-in-residence through September 2020. Funded via a King’s Arts and Intelligence Project grant, Hopwood will create a new participatory archive and develop artworks that ruminate on the Healthy Scepticism project’s aim to offer new critical perspectives on the recent history and future of scepticism - from essential form of knowledge building to rhetorical cover for misinformation campaigns. Entitled ‘The Wrong Project,’ Hopwood’s foci will include explorations of what it means to be ‘wrong’ about something, how our minds can be ‘changed’ and what constitutes ‘critical thinking’ in our so-called misinformation age. 

‘The Health Film’

Healthy Scepticism collaborators Helmie Stil and project PI Caitjan Gainty have been successful in obtaining funding to make a film related to the healthy scepticism project. From their project proposal:

The film will ‘explore two historical quandaries at the same time: first, the project seeks to understand in greater depth what it was that drew clinicians to filmmaking and what their attraction to this device can tell us about medicine in the early 20th century. And second, the project explores filmmaking as itself a potential historical methodology. Following the insight of scholars who have noted that though we privilege language in academia, words are not the only or even sometimes the most important forms of expression employed by historical actors. Words cannot therefore be taken for granted as able to effectively convey the tacit knowledge and intuitions that guide historical acts, nor can they always adequately express the significance of their ‘doing.’ This is indeed what has led to my current quandary in understanding what filmmaking meant to medical practitioners: they don’t, by and large, tell us what film was meant to do, how it functioned, or why it was medically significant. They simply make more films. Re-creating, then, the experience of filmmaking offers a potential way in. In re-creating their process, in producing a film ourselves, we hope to present a historical exposition and analysis, able more faithfully to explain what film meant to early 20th century clinicians.’ The film will be featured in a film festival scheduled for Summer 2020, and a workshop called the ‘Making and Doing’ workshop will be held in the Department of History at King’s in Autumn 2020.

In the news

‘A Note on Universal Access’

‘More “health care” is not the right remedy for every problem.’

COVID-19

‘The Past and Future of Health Care’

‘It seems impossible not to adopt the language of war to explain our current circumstances.’ 

(Please find a full version here)

‘Offline: COVID-19 and the NHS: “A national tragedy”’

‘“When this is all over, the NHS England Board should resign in its entirety.”’

‘At the Epicenter of the Covid-19 Pandemic and Humanitarian Crises in Italy: Changing Perspectives on Preparation and Mitigation’

‘Western health care systems have been built around the concept of patient-centered care, but an epidemic requires a change of perspective toward a concept of community-centered care.’

‘Heroes’

“the medical establishment finds itself with the difficult duality of being both deserving of rights and selflessly heroic.”

(Please find a full version here)

“Reverence for Britain’s NHS Complicates Supply Shortages”

‘The NHS is regarded as a national treasure. Even if it semi-collapses under the weight of this, I think the national sentiment will be that it did a heroic job.’

“We’re fighting a 21st century crisis with 100 year old ideas”

‘Why are we fighting a 21st century public health crisis with such old techniques? In other areas of health care, this would be unacceptable.’