biosocial week notes

This week I’m starting a PhD in biosocial research, in the department of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL, London.

I am 35, and this next step is a culmination of all the adventures of my adult years. From art school to being a promising young curator, to jumping ship blindfolded into healthcare. The incredibly hard years when I worked as a healthcare assistant with people dying of alcohol disease, while training as a physiotherapist – in the hope that rehabilitation could give me the authenticity that the art world had not. Later specialising in the rehabilitation of people with persistent pain – an issue that sits at the mind-body interface of such thing exists, and is still poorly understood. I could honestly not tell you how many hundreds or thousands of people’s stories I have listened too. All incredible and heartbreaking. As I listened, an individual’s story became a community’s story, and the weave of the medical system I inhabited did show some thinning in places. Like the difficulty of integrating a person’s biography and culture within the framework of diagnosis, and the difficulties of managing multiple intertwined problems when specialties are siloed. I tried frequenting different specialties, like neurorehab, to cross-pollinate. I moved into clinical research, to learn the ropes of enquiry. I finally went back to school, to study on a wonderful course in Biosocial Medical Anthropology – which I leave unfinished (with slight regret for not having done the ethnographic project I’d been planning) as the next thing starts.

In the past six months I’ve aged a decade. From orthopaedic research, I ended up delivering research in a field hospital during a global pandemic. The virus has many faces that we will only apprehend years from now: one is the devastating effects of social isolation on cognitive function in the elderly, like a family member of mine. Like many, I have had to watch from afar, helpless, while a loved one struggles with memory and injuries.

It is all more pressing that I do a good job, in the next four years. I am so, extremely privileged to be where I am, and I have a feeling that it’s been hard but I’m still floating. I am excited to work with a biosocial model, which tries to reconcile the dualism between nature and nurture and other misleading dichotomies. After all, we all know that we are masses of interconnected cells, poetic microbial communities, and that our boundaries are not as hard as they seem.

Inspired by Sonia and her wonderful week notes during her MA, I’m going to record here (weekly, prospectively) this discovery process, mostly to talk about readings and some thoughts – as a memory aid and to pick up again my writing practice. It’s a learning process and I’m sure and hopeful that my points of view will change and mature, so please don’t judge too harshly. It is a river.

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