Being Human: Medicine and the Human Sciences
The purpose of the research network ‘Being Human: Medicine and the Human Sciences’ is to bring together Warwick University researchers to share expertise with reference to the question, ‘What, if anything, is distinctive about being human? It aims at providing opportunities to think creatively across disciplines and faculties about the different ways in which knowledge of the human subject has been produced and disseminated in the past and present. The network members also want to consider how to enhance their research findings in this and related areas by translating them into policy and practice at local, national and international levels.
Co-operation to find new ways to think through and act upon the question of human existence is particularly urgent now. Due to the rapid advances in the bio-medical sciences and biotechnology human life is increasingly driven and mediated by technology and technological change with profound implications for human identity and behaviour. These developments require responses and critical investigations from more than one academic discipline or faculty. The network offers a forum for researchers from the humanities, social sciences, medicine and the natural sciences to debate how these developments shape contemporary moral and political economy and socio-cultural landscape in new and powerful ways. The network aims at identifying new collaborate research projects and methodologies to address these challenges. Central to the network’s working agenda is the understanding that answers to the overarching question ‘What is distinct, if anything, about being human? have to be sought not only in an interdisciplinary fashion but also in relation to historical knowledge, to what people in the past have thought and said about being human and how this past knowledge continues to shape contemporary debate on the subject.
Steering Comittee Members:
Claudia Stein (History / Centre for the History of Medicine)
Steve Fuller (Sociology)
Keith Ansell-Pearson (Philosophy)
Beat Kumin (History)
Nick Lee (Institute of Education)
Antje Lindenmeyer (Warwick Medical School)
Franklyn Lisk (Centre for Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation)
Julie Roberts (Warwick Medical School)
Sarah Stewart-Brown (Warwick Medical School)
Julian Webb (School of Law)
Andrew Williams (School of Law)
