Book: The Empathy Exams & Michel Serres Institute

individual
INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
humanistic ------------------------------------------- mechanistic
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

group

	The Natural Sciences
Local, Society & Socio-	-Economic

As recent posts reveal I'm overwhelmed with reading at present. Material that is essential for the TEL course and reading more tangential and yet potentially enjoyable titles. It will be a busy summer as all this is brought together(!?). Especially as I've a literature search in mind as a module submission - progress permitting.

The publication of Jamison's book this (N) spring sits well after the findings last year about the benefits of reading fiction in increasing empathy.

Since 2008-2009 I've lost touch with the work of Michel Serres:

Jones, Peter, Exploring Serres’ Atlas, Hodges’ Knowledge Domains and the Fusion of Informatics and Cultural Horizons (Aug 15, 2007). SOCIAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CONNECTING SOCIETY AND CULTURAL ISSUES. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1842504 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1842504

- having only just found the Institute. I only scratched the surface of Serres' oeuvre in the above paper and must recharge my reflective capacity.

Book cover image: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20800427,00.html

My source: The Empathy Exams
FT Weekend, June 7-8, 2014.

Playing and working with words and music - étude : ctude

étude

An étude (/ ˈeɪtjuːd /; French pronunciation: ​[eˈtyd], a French word meaning study) is an instrumental musical composition, usually short, of considerable difficulty, and designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tude

ctude

A ctude is a care assessment and evaluation instrument, a composition that is usually short, in summary form comprised of key concepts, and yet capable of representing the complexity of health and social care contexts. The ctude is designed to provide practice material for developing expertise in care assessment, holistic and integrated care that is also person-centred. Coined from étude (/ ˈeɪtjuːd /; French pronunciation: ​[eˈtyd], a French word meaning study) it is a study in care and can be a snapshot, or a dynamic series.

Use and ab-use of knowledge

The effective ‘use’ of knowledge is constantly espoused in health care both informally with patients and formally in evidence based research. Knowledge is the key to improving patient safety and delivering efficient, high quality care interventions and effective outcomes. Things become complicated in health and social with the number of potential knowledge sources and the disciplines intent on seeing, gathering, recording and utilizing knowledge that is theirs. From that adopted vantage point they are bound to have a certain perspective.

There are still vestiges of C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (1959) when we view the use and ab-use of knowledge, particularly the way knowledge is sliced, diced, partitioned and housed into disciplines. In the Introduction to Michel Serres' Parasite, Cary Wolfe notes that:

... the Latin prefix ab- meaning, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, “off, or away from”: "abuse" value at a tangent to use and exchange value, at a distance from it: a different vector, a different type of value (Wolfe, 2007). p. xx.

Literally looking at the model we see that whilst there is increasing interdisciplinarity and collaboration between disciplines, practitioners and managers, academics and policy makers … there remains much ab-use between the domains of (care) knowledge.

If by definition abuse brings individuals, agencies and whoever falls in-between into disagreement, dispute and possibly much worse then clearly a tool that can help furnish a common understanding and insight should be welcomed.



For all that Hodges’s model can offer as a common foundation and bridge for the disciplines, we must ask where is the patient, the carer and the public? Is there a new discipline emerging?
 
What is needed to help gauge the potentials of use and ab-use in health and social care ...?

Additional links - for the image:
Coxeters Loxodromic Sequence of Tangent Circles
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CoxetersLoxodromicSequenceofTangentCircles.html

Donald Coexeter
http://www.geometry.net/detail/scientists/coxeter_donald.html

Snow, C.P. (2001 [1959]). The Two Cultures. London: Cambridge University Press.

Wolfe, C. (2007). Introduction to the New Edition. Bring the Noise: The Parasite and the Multiple Genealogies of Posthumanism. In Serres, M. (1980). The Parasite. University of Minnesota Press.

Image source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coxeter_circles.png