19 November 2024, 4pm
Simon Building, Room 2.57 [maps and travel]
Online access options to be confirmed.

Prof Hans Pols, University of Sydney

Establishing Trading Zones between Knowledge Traditions: Co-Production and Co-Design

Abstract: 

In this talk, I reflect on how various knowledge traditions have interacted in the past, and how they can be made to interact more fruitfully today according to the principles of co-production and co-design. I use several examples historians of science and medicine are familiar with.  

Historians of colonial science and medicine have defused the idea that the medical and botanical knowledge acquired by western physicians and explorers during the era of exploration and colonialism resulted exclusively from their own inquiries. Instead, they have emphasized the essential role of various local intermediaries. Even if their contribution remained unacknowledged, several local actors played a role in the production of knowledge.

Over the past twenty years, representatives of various Aboriginal communities in Australia have refused to merely serve as objects of knowledge and insist on becoming participants in the production of knowledge to address today’s pressing challenges. Similar arguments have been made by American Indians; Kim TallBear, known for her work in indigenous STS, has made similar claims.

Over the past five years I have facilitated a research project on the history of community mental health in Australia following the principles of co-production and co-design. The team consisted of two academic historians, a public historian, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and four consumers of mental health care. Inspired by claim “nothing about us without us” from the disability rights movement, mental health consumers refuse to figure exclusively as objects of knowledge but insist on becoming participants in the production of knowledge. Research projects on the development of new initiatives in mental health care have demonstrated that the outcomes lead to services that better meet the needs of consumers. In our own research project, we aimed to explore how the principles of co-production and co-design could be developed and implemented in research in the humanities, in particular the recent history of mental health.

Hans Pols is professor at the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

All welcome! Please come along if you are interested in the topic.

Seminar Convenors: Professor Carsten Timmermann and Dr Meng Zhang

Seminar Programme on the CHSTM Website

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