研討會

According to the World Health Organization, cancer is expected to become the primary cause of death in the world by 2030. The increase is attributed to the ageing population across the globe, modified by improvements in surveillance and treatment. To understand cancer and the paradigm shift necessary to advance early detection and treatment, it is important to understand the history of cancer therapy, the reasons behind the successes and failures of using early detection to eliminate cancer, the clinical trials paradigms that we currently use to test new methods of treatment, and the current emphasis on research into the molecular basis of cancer. The goal of that research is the evolution of “personalized” cancer therapy in which the molecular “drivers” of an individual tumor will be identified and individually targeted by new therapies. The molecular basis of cancer is very heterogeneous and for any one type of cancer there may be thousands of combinations of targeted therapies to choose from for a single patient. Little attention has been given to how we will apply the information in a treatment context. Clinical research in the future will no longer be about whether this combination of drugs extends the life of a patient but does this algorithm for deciding which combination of drugs to use extend the lives of patients.

講座一︰2012年3月14日︰Hegel’s Spirit and the Opium War

講座二︰2012年3月28日︰A Decolonial Archeology of Hegel’s Spirit

講座三︰2012年4月11日︰The Spirit Crosses the Atlantic to the US

講座四︰2012年4月25日︰The Spirit Crosses the Pacific and Returns to the East Closing the Cycle of Western Imperial Expansion

The Ecologic Institute contributes to the ongoing European Union agenda to measure societal welfare and well-being in a more robust and inclusive way through two projects. The IN STREAM (http://www.in-stream.eu) project links economic indicators with measures of sustainability and well-being. The project seeks to assist policy makers by improving the EU’s ability to measure progress toward economic and sustainability goals. Second, OPEN:EU (http://www.oneplaneteconomynetwork.org) is a two-year collaborative research project exploring the question of how the EU can become a One Planet Economy by 2050.

To be sustainable we need to stop degrading the ecosystem. You cannot continuously remove organic material from a biological system without the system collapsing. This is as relevant to city landscapes as it is to forests, deserts or rivers. For cities, this can mean re-designing and retrofitting all the sewage to extract methane and to return the digestate to the soil in the ecological land. Another innovation would be infiltration and retention of rainfall. This would mean changing the surfaces of cities to allow water to pass through. This is a design issue and is actually easily achieved once ecosystem function is valued. Yet another issue that must be addressed is the current elevated temperature and evaporation rates. This is because of the removal of functional vegetation (canopy). This could be restored by designing vegetation into buildings - green roofs, terraced buildings with orchards, vegetation, forests.

The key to all this is to “Value Ecosystem Function higher than the Production of Goods and Services” because only this way will we have the ability to become sustainable. John will discuss the importance of urban ecology, city infrastructure, sustainable economics and urban planning to the future of our cities.

This paper analyses the reporting of China’s health reform between 2005 and 2009 in three mainland Chinese print publications. In contrast with previous studies―of reporting of international issues―it finds diversity in the positions taken over this domestic policy, with the dominant ‘pro-public’ (statist) views challenged by a vocal minority as a way of furthering greater marketisation. Despite a dominant discourse around the need to provide affordable health care for all ‘the people’, ordinary people are given little voice in the press. Governmental and social elites, mainly ministerial representatives, experts and medical professionals, dominate the debate, but their turn of the century consensus on the benefit of markets has broken down. In this context the Ministry of Health has sought to influence media reporting in ways more akin to those used in liberal democracies.

Climate and air pollution affect our heritage, but urban environments are changing rapidly. This talk will examine the impacts of both pollutants and weather on built heritage, considering the nature of the damage in physical, social and aesthetic terms. It will draw upon examples from around the world. We will consider the changing nature of air pollution and the characteristics which alter the modes of decay. Improvements in air pollution may to some extent be counterbalanced by a less familiar climate regime that poses enhanced risks. The propagation of damage indoors will also be considered.

The field of medical humanities has grown rapidly in the last decade, but it is timely and appropriate to address the increasing and broadening demand from professions other than medicine to become involved, promote advanced research pathways between the sciences, social sciences and humanities relevant to health and well-being and to accommodate the public who engage with or benefit from the arts and humanities. 

In this presentation, Professor Crawford argues that the time has come for an evolution of medical humanities into health humanities devoted to the full range of health and well-being issues, including environmental health, statutory health care, informal care, self-help activities and the newly discovered relationships and applications between these and the humanities.

Over the last two decades, the role assigned to narrative in representing, conceptualising, researching and even treating illness has widened in scope and significance. In the medical humanities – but also in medical anthropology, sociology, psychology and philosophy – nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in the growing interest in illness narratives. Scholars such as Arthur Kleinman, Arthur Frank, Tricia Greenhalgh, Brian Hurwitz and Rita Charon have argued persuasively that an enlightened medical practice must engage, profoundly, with patients’ stories of illness across a wide range of contexts, from clinical consultations to qualitative health research to literary autobiography.

This paper offers an introduction to the complex field of illness narratives, focussing on the issue of narrative identity. Dr Woods will consider why illness narratives began attracting such strong cross-disciplinary and popular attention in the late twentieth-century; examine the multiple forms, functions and typologies of illness narrative; and present a critique of current scholarly approaches to this topic.  In part two of this paper, she will explore the way the self is performed or constructed through different stories of illness by reflecting on four dimensions of the ‘I’ of illness narrative: narrative capacity, narrative propensity, textuality, and storytelling. Dr Woods will argue that only by recognising the limits of narrative can we truly value its role in understanding the subjective experience of illness.