Museums might seem to be the enemy of metabolism: mausoleums that preserve collections and their knowledge-producing potential, out of time. We argue that museums are in fact intensely metabolic: in their attempts to manipulate the life course and temporalities of objects they proliferate metabolic processes, limits, and potentials. We suggest that looking at the museum in this way can help articulate pressing practical as well as theoretical issues: storage rooms are “constipated,” as traditional practices of disposal cannot keep pace with (...) rapidly growing collections from an over-productive present. The paper consists of three main sections. First, we follow imaginations of the museum as preserver, contrasting these with more recent descriptions of the museum as metabolism, and highlighting the intimate relationship between the two. We describe the material and metaphorical ways in which objects and their meanings are transformed within a “museum metabolism,” and suggest that cultivating such transformations might help to imagine new approaches to problems of proliferation and disposal. This leads us to The Living Room, a workshop and installation at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, where we encourage fringe objects destined for disposal to metabolize, entangled with living heritage eaters such as fungi and worms. Following Ian Bogost, this is a piece of “metabolic carpentry”; a thinking machine that explores ontology by practicing it. In the third main section, we reflect on this approach, and on how materially producing metabolic paradoxes might open new avenues for thinking about their concrete consequences, within an ethos of hospitality. We conclude by arguing for the creative potential of metabolism to link objects, organisms, and environments, emphasizing exchanges between transformation and stability at co-constituting interfaces. (shrink)

In recent decades, an increasing interest in the dynamics of collections has brought to view how objects circulate as parts of networks of knowledge and how collections can acquire new meanings. Introducing this special issue on Collections, Knowledge, and Time, we want to shift focus from geographical circulation towards the temporal dynamics of collections: the layering and interweaving of asynchronous temporalities as collections are preserved, frozen, reinterpreted, sampled, and destroyed over time, and how these temporalities constitute knowledge potentials. We treat (...) collections broadly across museums of history of medicine, history of science, and ethnography, and scientific institutions including biobanks, seed banks, and fly centres, to investigate the considerable overlap in collection practices, as well as how objects can move between cultural historical and scientific uses. We limit ourselves, however, to epistemic collections, mainly scientific ones, assembled with research as a main purpose. This introduction first explores apparently mundane collection practices such as preservation and care, as well as technologies such as freezers and boxes, to unravel them as temporal practices that make stored items transcend time. We then discuss historical practices across cultural and scientific collections to show how historical thinking plays a central part in scientific collection work and how new scientific methods shape investigations of the past. Finally, we outline the potentialities for future knowledge in collections. In conclusion, we sketch out a pluralist epistemology of collections focusing specifically on how the dynamics of time create multiple epistemic potentials for historical scholarship and scientific research in the present and future. (shrink)

Soft Logic is a fascinating study that links scientific and mathematical reasoning to literature and the arts. In this work, Joseph Grünfeld argues that justification by resemblance is more common in science than is generally recognized. That is, symbolic and metaphorical modes of thinking, which are largely analogical, often play a significant role in the interpretation of formal systems. Noting that twentieth century non-Aristotelian forms of reasoning have greatly expanded our understanding of what constitutes logic, Grünfeld explores a wide range (...) of relevant topics, including reasonableness, metaphor, deconstruction, postmodernism, aesthetics, art, and philosophy. In the process, he identifies the postmodernist implications of modern logic and develops how they may be applied to both science and art. Scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, and art will find this comprehensive and insightful work thought provoking. (shrink)

Recently, a beekeeper discovered the metabolic wizardry of wax worms, their ability to decompose polyethylene. While this organism has usually been perceived as a model organism in science or a pest to beekeepers, it acquired a new mode of being as potentially probiotic, inviting us to dream of a future without plastic waste. In this paper, I explore how wax worms are entangled with material practices of care and narratives that give meaning to these practices. These stories, however, are marked (...) by manipulation, exploitation, and extermination, and call for a questioning of our modes of caring. Consequently, I offer a counter-narrative that questions our anthropocentric practices of caring and the stories we attach to them. Borrowing Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of ecopoetics, I tell another story based on my participation in the making of an art installation hosting wax worms. The installation creates an opening of a world of curiosity and cultivates a sensibility for wax worms expanding their modes of being and our capabilities of appreciation. In the end, I argue that by mattering and storying differently, we have the opportunity to challenge anthropocentric interests and make a different world of caring and co-existence possible. (shrink)

For Shusterman, all experience is a form of understanding, but this makes it difficult for him to explain how we can be mistaken about our experience. His preference for rap remains idiosyncratic, as is his notion of the art of living. In spite of his postmodernist stance, he continues to generalize about what he takes to be the body and about the nature of art. But what “works” in art depends on a variety of subjective factors we come to know (...) only by hindsight. What he dismisses as intellectualist bias in modern art and linguistic philosophy has deep roots in our culture: a demand for precision and verifiability that make science and technology possible. This is not a mere puritanical prejudice. (shrink)

The research presented in this paper is the first wave of a longitudinal study of a Cambodian information and communication for development (ICT4D) project, iREACH, aimed at testing a framework for evaluating whether and how such initiatives can contribute to capabilities, empowerment and sustainability. The framework is informed by Amartya Sen’s capability approach (CA), uses a participatory methodology, considers the micro-, meso-, and macro- levels in understanding the role ICT can play in the development process, and adopts a forward-looking longitudinal (...) perspective. Key findings of this research are that the project had contributed to livelihoods and other aspects of well-being in diverse ways, primarily in education, health, and farming. Participants also valued the project because of its contribution to empowerment, particularly gender empowerment. Another way in which participants valued iREACH was of a more intrinsic nature, manifested in a general appreciation of just being part of the world and knowing about events in other parts of Cambodia and beyond. These findings are consistent with the CA’s emphasis on development being about more than economic growth and support the importance of considering external factors, conceptualised here as the meso- and macro- levels, in the conversion of commodities in the form of services provided at iREACH, to capabilities. (shrink)

The psychological cost on emotional well-being due to the collateral damage brought about by COVID-19 in accessing oncological services for breast cancer diagnosis and treatment has been documented by recent studies in the United Kingdom. The current study set out to examine the effect of delays to scheduled oncology services on emotional and cognitive vulnerability in women with a breast cancer diagnosis in Iran, one of the very first countries to be heavily impacted by COVID-19. One hundred thirty-nine women with (...) a diagnosis of primary breast cancer answered a series of online questionnaires to assess the current state of rumination, worry, and cognitive vulnerability as well as the emotional impact of COVID-19 on their mental health. Results indicated that delays in accessing oncology services significantly increased COVID related emotional vulnerability. Regression analyses revealed that after controlling for the effects of sociodemographic and clinical variables, women’s COVID related emotional vulnerability explained higher levels of ruminative response and chronic worry as well as poorer cognitive function. This study is the first in Iran to demonstrate that the effects of COVID-19 on emotional health amongst women affected by breast cancer can exaggerate anxiety and depressive related symptoms increasing risks for clinical levels of these disorders. Our findings call for an urgent need to address these risks using targeted interventions exercising resilience. (shrink)

Professor Grünfeld’s book puts forward the thesis that the hard and fast lines that have been drawn between philosophy and science, as well as between the hard and soft sciences, are inaccurate and possibly illusory. He contends that values, as a function of philosophy, are related to science in various complex ways. In a sense, his approach involves a collapsing of metascientific and scientific disciplines into one another. This thesis is applied to the analysis of historical method, language, and philosophy (...) of science. The author covers a wide range of topics in a thorough and well documented fashion. His examination of Popper’s approach to history and scientific method, though by no means elementary, serves as an excellent introduction to that particular area of philosophy of science. A considerable portion of the book is devoted to a linguistic analysis of interrelated problems of logic, methodological models, and metaphysics. On the basis of that discussion, the author presents two thoughtful chapters on the implications of his thesis for philosophy of science, one concerning the concept of "self-evidence" in science, the other examining the relation between observation and theory. (shrink)