Post Doctoral Research Assistant Wanted: Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University

Post Doctoral Research Assistant

Reference Number 1453
Location Durham City
Faculty/Division Social Sciences and Health
Department School of Medicine and Health
Grade Grade 7
Position Type Full Time
Contract Type Fixed Term
Salary (£) 30122 – 35938
Closing Date 23 March 2012

Job Description

Responsible to: CMH Directors
Responsible for: Development and administrative work relating to grant development within the CMH.
Job Summary and Purpose:

The PDRA will work with the four directors of CMH and possibly other members of staff, on collaborative grant proposals that are under development. Three discrete projects are currently in the early stages of development and the post holder will be expected to work on any two at one time. The post will involve finding, reviewing and summarising relevant literature, organising and minuting meetings of research teams, liaising with potential funders, writing grant proposals. The post holder is expected to be comfortable with interdisciplinary team working and able to deal with literature and methodologies spanning the humanities and social sciences. The post will involve at least 0.1 FTE per week for the PDRA to develop publications related to their own research.

Requirements

This post is for a year only.

Key Responsibilities

• To undertake and collate literature summaries and reviews;
• to assist with preparing research grant proposals;
• to organise and take minutes of research group meetings;
• to liaise between the research lead and academic office;
• to liaise between the research group and potential funders;
• to liaise between the research group and research partners and collaborators;
• to maintain a database of contacts;
• to ensure that tasks are undertaken within agreed timescales
• to undertake any other tasks as required by the co-directors of the Centre

Closing date: March 23. Further details and instructions on how to apply are available here.

The Smoking Interest Group in Uruguay: Visiting ‘Respira Uruguay’

Jane Macnaughton writes from Montevideo:When you enter the Respira Uruguay exhibition it is as if you have slipped into the wide thoracic cavity of a large mammal, ribs open to the air and readily able to expand and contract with each breath.  The inside of the rib cage is decorated with the picture of a young boy running joyfully in the open air, chasing a dandelion clock that has been scattered by the breeze – the image of the exhibition.

Inside the Ribs

Our group, comprising four members of Durham’s Smoking Interest Group, a group of five young people from W-West, a young people’s tobacco control advocacy group from Glasgow, two youth development leaders from the NHS and ASH-Scotland, are being shown round the exhibition by its creator and director of the Science Centre (Espacio Cientia) in Montevideo, Martha Cambre.  Martha explained to us that the exhibition was the result of a happy confluence of circumstances including the fact that the new President of Uruguay in 2005, President Vasquez, was an oncologist, deeply interested in preventing cancers and keen on public health.  His interest and enthusiasm enabled Martha and her contacts in CIET, the tobacco control organisation in Uruguay to gain funding to put together the exhibition.

The exhibit is thus informed both by clinical information and artistic inspiration.  Once inside the rib cage, you are presented incentives to start smoking written the outside of four doors.  These are: ‘all your friends smoke so why not?’, ‘you can easily stop again if you start’, ‘it makes you look cool’ and ‘you are old enough to decide for yourself’ – all known reasons why young people start to smoke.  If you succumb to an incentive and push open a door you enter a dark, low ceilinged space, very unlike the bright open space you have left and are confronted with a ticking clock informing you of the number of people who have died in Uruguay since the opening of the exhibition from a smoking-related disease: one every 90 minutes.  As Brian Pringle (from Ash-Scotland) noted, this is the same number as in Scotland.  Now, of course, you start to think again about the smoking life and try to leave it, but this is difficult.  Only one of the four doors to the open air will open to let you out.  As our youngest participant (Euan Russell, aged 9) commented, ‘I felt trapped.  I wanted to get out but couldn’t’.  As we watched Martha speaking to us in the smoking space, UV light played about her face greenly illuminating her sclera and teeth and aging her skin, reminding us of the effects of smoking on the body.

We did escape, eventually (much to Euan’s delight!), to have our senses further beset by the problems of smoking.  A rack of clothing emits the unpleasant smells of a night in a smoky atmosphere, compared with those out in the fresh air.  You can put you hand out to feel the strength of air being expelled from a non-smoker’s lung and compare it with that from a smoker’s lung.  The difference is accentuated by sticky tar over the smoker’s lung which gums up you fingers, just as it might the alveoli.  You can play a game of Russian roulette with you chances of getting a terminal illness as a smoker, and a chart reminds us of the costs of smoking a pack of 20 by day, week, month, year, decade, and what that might otherwise buy.  ‘Here’s a cheque’, Martha said to us, handing over some pre-written cheque books, ‘what would you rather spend your money on?’  You can step onto a treadmill and measure the power you need as a smoker or as a non-smoker to walk up a steep hill.  In the heat of Montevideo, I know which I would prefer!  A  tube depicting a cigarette illuminates in sections along its length showing 16 surprising elements contained in cigarettes, including poisons such as arsenic and cadmium.  More surprising still is the temperature recorded at the burning tip: 900 degrees centigrade!

As we went round, it was noticeable how engaged our young group were, despite the challenges of language.  They got the message of the doors, were able to interact with the sensory exhibits and puffed and panted on the treadmill.  In discussions afterwards ideas on how to adapt the exhibition for a UK (Glasgow) audience came fast and furious from our inspired group.  They wanted an ‘age your face’ computer simulation to show the effects of smoking on appearance; they were keen to emphasise more the environmental effects of smoking; and they wanted to highlight the insidious effects of packaging in attracting young smokers.  They are all aware of the current proposals on plain packaging for cigarettes.  These are all good thoughts to take with us as we move into a series of meetings with CIET, the British Embassy, and to fuel our appearance on a Uruguayan TV show on Friday morning!

To read more about the Smoking Interest Group’s Uruguay research trip, click here.

The Recovery of Beauty – Kathleen Jamie Poetry Reading (Durham Castle, 27 Feb 2012)

As part of the IAS The Recovery of Beauty programme, CMH directors Jane Macnaughton and Corinne Saunders invite you to

A poetry reading by

Kathleen Jamie

Monday 27 February 2012
6.15
Senate Suite, Durham Castle
To be followed by drinks and nibbles

Kathleen Jamie is a writer and poet and currently holds the Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Stirling.  She was born in Renfrewshire, Scotland in 1962 and studied philosophy at Edinburgh University.  She has published several collections of poetry,  including: Black Spiders (1982) The Way We Live (1987), The Queen of Sheba (1994), and Jizzen (1999).  Her poetry collection, The Tree House (2004), won the 2004 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the 2005 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. A travel book about Northern Pakistan, The Golden Peak (1993), was updated and reissued as Among Muslims (2002).  Of her acclaimed 2005 book of essays Findings, Andrew Marr wrote ‘I love this book..Its sharpness of looking, and directness of thought, will stay with me for a long time.’  The critic John Berger also said of her writing: ‘It finds without disturbing the found.  And this takes courage and delicacy.’  Her much anticipated further collection of essays,  Sightlines, will be published in April this year by Sort of Books. As well as poetry, Kathleen Jamie writes for radio and is a regular contributor to the Guardian Review and the London Review of Books. She lives in Fife.

Society and policy without boundaries: Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities at Durham University, Public Meeting Wed 29 Feb 2012

The Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities invites all university staff and students and members of the community to participate in an ‘open forum’ for discussing the future activities of the centre.

Wednesday 29^th February 2012, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm,
Room 147, Elvet Riverside 1, 83 New Elvet, Durham, County Durham DH1 3JT
Tea and Coffee will be served from 12:30 pm

We would like you to tell us how you would like to participate in making the centre a hub for staff, students and members of the community who are working in or concerned with LGBQT issues, sex, sexuality and gender equality.  If you can’t come along, we’re still very keen to have your contribution. Share your thoughts, ideas, interests and dreams via this form and we will feed them into the discussion.

This event is following the successful inaugural lecture Equality, Diversity, Queer Theory and Children in the Modern Age in November 2011 which was delivered by Professor Katherine Bond Stockton, University of Utah.

For further information please contact: Mwenza Blell or the Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities

Cold hands, warm hearts in Canada

Mike White writes: Edmonton is a blue-collar prairie city.  Its suburbs are strewn with oilrigs and its CBD is mostly composed of underground shopping malls and corporate buildings whose smoked-glass facades reflect an immense sky.  At this time of year there are ice-bound ships in the frozen river, and the locals talk cheerily of a mild winter, but the night-time temperature of minus 15C persuades me otherwise.

I got a really warm reception, however, at the Alberta Health Services ‘Connecting For Kids’ event – and this annual conference attracts leading thinkers in child health and psychology, but this is the first time it has focused prominently on the arts in health.  The advance visits I made to some of the schools-based projects in the province’s child mental health programme, where I talked to some super-confident kids with tales of transformation and met an extraordinary array of agencies working in partnership, convinced me I had nothing to say to them that they weren’t already addressing – so I focused instead on how to make such programmes arts-driven, both theoretically and practically, rather than simply offering arts activities. This went down well, though habitual declarations of “awesome, just awesome” could have become meaningless were it not for the delegates’ ready enthusiasm to adapt our lantern-making and transition ceremonies into their projects. Round table conversations cropped up all over and if brains were dominoes, they were clearly ‘knocking’ on this one. There are thirty five schools clusters delivering this programme across the vast province, some working with indigenous and French-speaking  communities, and the track record of achievement in improved mental health for individuals and whole settlements is really impressive.

The other keynote presentation was a fascinating talk on the role of humour in reflective practice given by Warren Persowich, an educational psychologist and cancer survivor who moonlights as a stand-up comic on Canadian TV.

I came away envious at the intelligence, well-deployed resources, and relationship-based working that fuels the ‘Connecting For Kids’ programme.   Alberta has a story to be told to education and health services here in their crucial time of troubled transition.  But as my genial hostess and programme director Tracey Trudeau explained to me, Alberta Health Services are more inclined to bring in outsiders to speak to them than to export their own knowledge.  I still think there is a dialogue here to be pursued and CMH’s schools-based work could forge some great partnerships with the people who shape this Canadian programme.

Charles Fernyhough Asks Does Neuroscience Change The Way We Understand Ourselves?

As his new novel A Box of Birds launches on Unbound, novelist and psychologist Charles Fernyhough argues that fiction is an ideal medium through which to explore how neuroscience is changing the way we understand ourselves:

“I am not being critical of cognitive neuroscience research, much of which is ingenious, elegant and deeply valuable. Rather, I am questioning how we consume and respond to this new kind of knowledge.

For me, the best way of exploring these reactions is through a medium that might seem to have little to do with the realities of neuroimaging head coils and 3-Tesla magnets. Writers of fiction have always been barometers of change in how humanity has understood itself. Ideas from Darwinism and Freudianism, to take two examples, quickly permeated literary fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. George Eliot’s plots are ever-conscious of Darwinian scepticism about the possibility of freewill, while Freud’s theory of the unconscious had a deliciously fertile influence on modernist writers such as Joyce and Woolf. Will neuroscience permeate fiction as rapidly and pervasively? Are the barometers already twitching?”

Continue reading on the School of Life web site.

A Box of Birds – Charles Fernyhough’s New Novel Launches on Unbound

A Box of Birds is the new novel by celebrated novelist, psychologist, and CMH affiliate Charles Fernyhough. A literary thriller set in the world of neuroscience, the novel is a clash between two of the predominant philosophical positions of our age. One is the materialist view that science has (or will have) all the answers and that ‘we’ are nothing more than bundles of nerves and chemical reactions. The other is the Freud-inspired position that underpins the culture of therapy: that the stories we tell about ourselves and our pasts have the capacity to change our future.

A Box of Birds is the story of a young neuroscientist, Yvonne Churcher, who has problems in the world beyond her lab. One of her students, James, is a dangerously attractive anti-science protestor who has set out to challenge her entire philosophy about how the brain works. His friend, Gareth, is a brilliant, unstable computer whiz who’s obsessed with the biochemical basis of memory. He tries to persuade Yvonne to get involved with a plan to stimulate memory artificially, which sets off a chain of events involving unscrupulous biotechs, stolen brain-mapping data and a strange brand of eco-terrorism.

You can support the publication of A Box of Birds – and participate in ongoing discussions about literature, neuroscience, and the ways we understand the self – by visiting the Unbound web site.

Can illness make me a better person?

Ian Kidd writes: There is a long and venerable precedent for the claim that certain experiences of illness can be morally improving. A diversity of religious and philosophical figures, ranging from the Cynics and Stoics of ancient Greece through Augustine and Boethius to contemporary writers like Arthur Kleinman and Oliver Sacks, have maintained that illness can afford a person opportunities for the cultivation and exercise of ethical virtues – like courage, fortitude, patience – and can therefore be edifying. One also finds similar sentiments in more idiomatic discourse, including the abundant body of pathographic literature, which often involves talk of a person ‘learning’ from their experiences of illness, such that they become ‘better people’ – kinder, more compassionate – as a result.

Although such edificationist sentiments are both familiar and enjoy precedent, care ought to be taken when one tries to articulate and explore them. Many problems present themselves, but the following strike me as the most important. First, not all ill persons find their illness edifying, with some persons passing through even sustained periods of illness without any significant change in their moral character, while other persons are – by their own accounts – in fact, made worse as a result of illness. As the cancer patient Christina Middlebook vividly puts it, if edificationist talk is accurate, it turns her ‘ugly as Medusa’. Second, it is unclear what sorts of processes – cognitive, psychological and social – are involved in edification. What does edification entail, how can it be encouraged, is it active or passive, individual or social, and should it involve the contributions of moral or medical practitioners, and so on? Third, what contributions can ill persons themselves make to the development of a mature edificationist conception of illness? I take it as axiomatic that one should incorporate the first-person lived-perspective into our understanding of illness – a point well made by Havi Carel – and there is, perhaps, truth in Nietzsche’s striking remark that the healthy cannot understood illness, ‘for they are an interested party’.

These three problems indicate some of the central questions which an edificationist account of illness must address, and they bear on moral, medical, psychological and existential issues, amongst many others. It should also be clear that those questions will invite, if not demand, the insights and expertise of a diversity of scholarly disciplines – from philosophy of medicine to medical humanities, psychology to the sociology of medicine – and the contributions of many communities, most obviously including ill persons and healthcare professionals. For the edificationist asks how a person’s experience of their illness can be located within a tenable conception of the good life, and so any sophisticated answer to that question must incorporate all aspects of that life – surely a worthy task, for, to recall Nietzsche’s remark, on matters of illness, we are all an interested party.

Ian Kidd will present his paper ‘Can Illness be Edifying?’ in the Philosophy Department Seminar Series, 11am on 23 February. All welcome; details are here.

Call for papers- reminder. Closing date 28th February

Reblogged from graphicmedicine:

Remember that our CFP for Toronto 2012 closes in just over a week. We have had a strong response so far, with more abstracts coming in each day, so make sure you send us your proposal if you want to take part.

Comics & Medicine: Navigating the Margins (Conference, Toronto, July 2012) – CFP closing Feb 28!