Scottish Gut Project: Modernity and the Gut Symposium
Join The Scottish Gut Project for Modernity and the Gut, a medical humanities symposium held at Kelvinhall at the University of Glasgow, April 27-28.
School of Modern Languages & Cultures | College of Arts | Scottish Gut Project
Date: Thursday 27 April 2023 - Friday 28 April 2023
Time: 10:00 - 20:00
Venue: Kelvin Hall Lecture Theatre
Category: Conferences, Films and theatre, Public lectures, Academic events
The Scottish Gut Project is delighted to present Modernity and the Gut, a symposium held at Kelvinhall at the University of Glasgow, April 27-28.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Jean Walton, University of Rhode Island
Concerns about gastric disorders have been around for centuries, but anxiety surrounding the gut intensified with the development of modernity. The rise of sedentary living and industrialised food processes deepened the chasm between what was perceived as a healthy gut and the status of people’s digestive systems. Often viewed as out of time with the frantic pace of urban working life, the gut has been characterised as a victim of modernity and yet the processes associated with it —consumption, absorption, disassembly, and waste— were closely allied to the project of modernism. Today’s scientists also note that the lifestyle changes caused by the agricultural and industrial revolutions have profoundly altered the ecological relationships and disease patterns of populations, notably the diversity of our gut bacteria. In this conference we explore the relationship between the digestive system and modernity including dedicated sessions on the gut and literary modernism.
The Scottish Gut Project is the first research project to examine the links between gut disorders and patient wellbeing from an arts and humanities perspective.
The Scottish Gut Project is run by Dr Manon Mathias (University of Glasgow) and Dr Elsa Richardson (University of Strathclyde). Manon and Elsa are researchers who work on the cultural history of health and wellbeing. The Project has brought together people with practical expertise in gut disorders (patients dealing with conditions such as Colitis); historians and cultural scholars; and researchers from medicine and nutrition. The Scottish Gut Project is funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Twitter: @ScottishGut
SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME
Thursday April 27
Panel One
- Maya Hey, ‘Thread Through: reframing (gut) health as ongoing, collective negotiation’
- Megan MacGregor, ‘Modernity and the Microbiome: Dysbiosis and Biodiversity in Microbial ‘Omics’”
- Sofia Sandalli, ‘Helpful or harmful? Understanding and harnessing microbial species of the human gut’
- Sylvain Lallier ‘The Human Gut and Its Microbiomes: Investigate the Development of Research Infrastructures on Human, Animal and Plant Microbial Worlds in France’
- Respondent: Adam Bencard
Panel Two
- Genevieve Smart, ‘F. T. Marinetti and the Gutsy Act of Male Childbirth’
- Marita Vyrgioti, ‘Digestive processes in the psychoanalytic imagination’
- Naomi Wynter-Vincent, ‘Undigested Facts: The Intestinal Thinking of Wilfred Bion’
- Respondent: Hannah Proctor
Keynote: Professor Jean Walton, University of Rhode Island
Friday April 28
Panel Three
- Vanessa Höving ‘The Human Gut Condition. Contemporary Self-help Literature and Illness Narratives’
- Deren Pulley ‘Letters to a Phantom Colon: Surgical Life through the Melancholic Gut’
- Laura González, ‘Prana and the Gut’
- Adam Bencard, ‘The World is in You – engaging and displaying contemporary metabolic research at the intersection of art, science and history’
- Respondent: Ian Miller
Panel Four
- Derek Ryan: ‘Before the Gut: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Oesophageal Modernism’
- Christina Walter ‘Gut Modernism: Science, Food, Art’
- Bee Sachsse ‘The Black Box Gut and Modern Resistance to Knowledge in Marie Ndiaye’s Mon coeur à l'étroit’
- Respondent: Peter Adkins
Panel Five
- Kelly Adamson ‘Are they content to shovel it into its grave and forget about it?’ State reactions to infant diarrhoea and enteritis and the ‘sick’ urban area in wartime Dublin, Ireland (1939-48).
- Matthew Wolf-Meyer ‘The Origins of Unsympathetic Medicine’
- Louise Morgan ‘Clean Eating, Curative Food and the Gut in Twenty-First Century Britain’
- Respondent: Rhodri Hayward
Film Screening + Q&A
- Maria Fernandez Pello ‘Bodies and Places Are Contagious’ (2021)
- Lucy Beech ‘Warm Decembers’ (2022)
- Roz Mortimer ‘Wormcharmer’ (1998)
- Jenna Suelta ‘nimiia cétiï’ (2018)
- Kirsty Hendry ‘Navel Gazing’ (2020)
- Kirsty Hendry and A+E Collective: Q&A + discussion
