Durham Centre for Medical Humanities / Wolfson Post-Graduate & Early Career Research Network
“Dimensions of Pain”
Thursday 5th February 2015, 2 pm – 3:30 pm
IAS Seminar Room, Durham University
The next meeting of the CMH Postgraduate / Early Career Researcher Medical Humanities Network will take place on Thursday, 5th February 2015, 2-3:30pm. The meeting is a discussion/reading group and will explore Dimensions of Pain.
Pain is a universal human experience, part of the inevitable landscape of physical and embodied life. However, as with all aspects of embodiment, pain is also caught up in the net of social, cultural and political signifiers which give us the means to interpret and understand our lived experiences. In general, pain is cast as negative; it is pathologized and best dealt with and understood within the context of biomedicine. It signifies illness, dysfunction or injury, and a primary aim of contemporary biomedicine is to eradicate pain and its causes. However, when pain is considered primarily through medical models, the subjective experiences accompanying physical and emotional pain, and their lived significance, are often effaced or overlooked.
This meeting of the postgrad/ECR medical humanities discussion group will examine some of the various dimensions of pain within the medical humanities and related disciplines. Topics may include but are not limited to: pain, chronic pain, phantom pain, emotional pain, cultural variations of pain, articulating pain, pain in pathology and pain as transformation.
Indicative questions may include, but are by no means limited to:
– What are the difficulties of articulating or describing pain experiences?
– How is the experience of pain shaped by cultural, social and gendered factors?
– Is pain merely a symptom?
– Can pain be positive? Or transformative?
– Should the role of medicine be to eradicate pain?
– How should emotional or psychological pain be understood in relation to physical pain?
Once again, we are looking for one or two volunteers to provide an informal opening presentation on an aspect of their research which speaks to the theme of this session (5-8 minutes). Please reply to Luna Dolezal – [email protected] – if you are interested in presenting, and also to register your attendance for purposes of cake and tea. We look forward to seeing you in February – new members are always welcome!
Dr Luna Dolezal
Department of Philosophy,
Network convenor