Clinical Dinner: A Virtual Citizen Surgery Training Session
Anna Harris, Maastricht University; Kaisu Koski, Sheffield Hallam University, Lab4Living; Noemie Soula, Lab4Living, Sheffield Hallam University; Anne van Veen van Veen, Radboud University
Toronto 2021: Performance
The operation room lights shine brightly in four surgical theatres. The team is connected remotely, streaming live for this Making and Doing session. This is a simultaneous surgical experiment being performed. The machines are beeping, and the atmosphere is tense. “Scalpel!”. Four multicoloured gloves in four different screens pick up sharp instruments – wait, are they kitchen knives? “Swabs!” Are they dishtowels? The surgery continues, virtually, synchronically, the screens focus on the body part being operated on. Until the bizarre last step, when the surgeons put down their instruments and pick up a knife and fork…and diagnose the edible bodies in front of them by taste.
These are no ordinary STS scholars nor ordinary surgeons. This is the work of the Citizen Surgery Collective, an interdisciplinary practice-based research group consisting of artists, critical posthumanists and anthropologists. Our work concerns surgical literacy, sensory skills acquisition, simulation, and the relationship between other-than-human bodies and food. In the spirit of the conference theme ‘good relations’ with its exploration of practices and methods for unequal worlds, our work aims to democratise and redistribute surgical skills, discuss asymmetric interspecies power relations at the dinner table, and develop methods for collaborative remote practices.
Please join and follow our latest simulator recipe development during the Making&Doing session! We are developing a recipe for DermaBread®.
