Imagining Bodies

Imagination is an important element of learning, yet how it is cultivated in higher education settings is rarely discussed, including in STS scholarship. Very often this is a topic left to philosophers, literary scholars and psychologists. In the public sphere, the perceived “demise” of imagination in education has increasingly become a matter of concern for some, especially in the context of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. In this talk Anna takes the audience into a particular learning setting where imagination is practiced in everyday lessons and in material ways: medical school. It will draw on research conducted on the precipice of the pandemic-led explosion in digital learning in schools and universities as part of the 6-year long ERC-funded team project called Making Clinical Sense.

In this talk Anna focuses on the materiality of learning, dissecting some of the practices, places and objects that teachers use when they go about crafting spatial imaginations, delving into what these materials do and what kinds of bodies are rendered in such encounters. She suggests that the physical, material, sensory learning that our research team encountered in medical schools in Ghana, Hungary and the Netherlands opens up a different kind of knowledge from that happening in virtual and online educational environments. She shares ethnographic vignettes from her own fieldwork, discusses the broader context of the ethnographic-historic project and their collaborative publications, and, if time, the methodological and writing experiments they have developed and are still exploring.

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