Professor Hélène Mialet in the Department of Science & Technology Studies, Faculty of Science, is currently in Oslo, Norway, where she received a residential fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science & Letters for the fall of 2019.
Mialet will join a program known as “The Body in Translation – Historicizing and Reinventing Medical Humanities and Knowledge Translations,” which will focus on the topic of translation in medicine. She will have the opportunity to work with doctors, biologists, linguists, and other scholars in the humanities and social sciences taking part in the project.
The Centre of Advanced Study provides its Fellows with uninterrupted time to further their research. Each year, the Centre hosts three research groups working on different projects in the fields of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
Each project receives a grant from the Norwegian Ministry of Education & Research. These resources will facilitate Mialet’s work on her current book project involving the management of Type 1 diabetes.
She is studying three different groups, which are working on different technologies, including: biohackers who are trying to produce a more affordable insulin and destabilize the current definition of what it means to do science; hackers who are producing an artificial pancreas; and a facility that trains therapeutic dogs capable of recognizing hypoglycemic episodes.
The notion of translation is at the core of her project, which she says moves between artificial, human and animal intelligence, counterculture movements and official science, bioengineering and natural evolution. “As such, it is at the intersection of disciplines such as animal studies, artificial intelligence, philosophy, anthropology, and science and technology studies,” said Mialet.
The “Body in Translation: Historicizing and Reinventing Medical Humanities and Knowledge Translations” program focuses on interdisciplinary research and collaboration among academics and professionals from different fields to explore ideas and practices of translation in medicine and the humanities, as does Mialet’s work.
As a philosopher and anthropologist of science, Mialet has written several books, including Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
“Collaborating with scholars in the humanities and social sciences and medical professionals around this notion will not only enrich my project,” said Mialet, “but also help me explore the possibilities of ‘translating’ this unusual collaboration to York.”