The research group for English Language and Corpus Linguistics Research is pleased to welcome interested colleagues to this seminar.
Abstract:
Among scholars and practitioners of medicine, attention is increasingly being paid to the dynamics of power that operate in the field, including how liberal forms of power have come to dominate the global governance of health. As Engebretsen and Heggen (2015:115) have argued, however, power “does not only operate through knowledge and norms but through language and concepts, and often unconsciously”. Any attempt to redress some of the inequalities that operate in the field of health must therefore begin by questioning the global validity of key concepts that underpin global health policy today, including the concept of global health itself, as articulated in a range of languages. It also requires revisiting some of the foundational concepts of modern, evidence-based medicine, such as ‘evidence’, ‘knowledge translation’ and ‘health literacy’ (Buts et al. 2021). These and other concepts that inform various global health initiatives and practices have come to accommodate a range of different and often conflicting ideological messages, and their meanings inevitably change across time and cultural/linguistic communities.
Against this backdrop, SHE, the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education at the University of Oslo, has launched a programme of research, in collaboration with the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network (Baker et al. 2021; Buts et al. 2021), to support conceptual research in the field of modern medicine and global health. This strand of research draws on a large suite of freely available electronic corpora (the Oslo Medical Corpus), accompanied by a novel, open-source corpus analysis and visualization interface, to support a wide range of conceptual studies. Building on the methodology elaborated by the Genealogies of Knowledge research project (2016-2020), the OMC is a thematic corpus designed to provide access to the use of key concepts such as 'evidence', 'bias', 'risk', 'sustainable development', and 'degrowth' in a wide variety of discourses, from those of global health organisations such as the World Health Organisation and the Centre for Diseases Control to the interventions of community-based collectives situated outside (and at times in tension with) mainstream institutions (such as Health Poverty Action, Medical Justice, and Third World Network). Examples of current funded projects that draw on this resource and methodology will be briefly discussed.
References
Baker, M., J. Buts and H. Jones (2021) ‘Using Corpora to Trace the Cross-Cultural Mediation of Concepts through Time: An interview with the coordinators of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network’, Available at: https://genealogiesofknowledge.net/research-network/outputs-and-activities/using-corpora-to-trace-the-cross-cultural-mediation-of-concepts-through-time-an-interview-with-the-coordinators-of-the-genealogies-of-knowledge-research-network/. Chinese translation appeared in Foreign Language Teaching and Research 53(1): 135-146.
Buts, J., M. Baker, S. Luz and E. Engebretsen (2021) ‘Epistemologies of Evidence-based Medicine: A plea for corpus-based conceptual research in the medical humanities’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 24: 621-632. https://doi-org.ezproxy.uio.no/10.1007/s11019-021-10027-2.
Oslo Medical Corpus, Corpus Design Criteria: https://www.oslomedicalcorpus.net/corpus-design-selection-criteria/.